Years ago when I was attempting a degree myself and a few friends decided we should try and make a game of chess.

This never happened for however many reasons.

But I’ve recently been watching Green Lemon Games on YouTube who has a fantastic series when he is making chess engines based on audience reactions and this got me interested again.

I have always been the kind of person who can code his way out of a backend situation but who hasn’t been able to make overly beautiful UI’s from scratch.

This is largely because I can think through “my backend has predictable inputs and outputs, how many weird things can a human due to however many ways the mouse can move” and just generally getting in a rabbit hole of self doubt.

The hope is that by implementing chess including a UI I am forced to think about both the UI of the project as well as the non-finite states of the problem space that I’m used to working within.

So the goal here from a technical level

• No component libraries
• Tailwind is allowed if I’m feeling fancy
• 2 browsers can play against each other in real time with no reloads
• Test for all logic, no promises about UI testing yet, but we shall see.

What is not in scope, at least for now

• Persistent storage of game history
• PGN support
  • PGN would be super nice to prevent me from making mistakes when building the initial rule set, part of this is to force me to make those mistakes and learn.

What’s down the line?

• PGN export for analysis in other places
• Super basic chess bot you can play against

The next few days posts will probably just be fleshing out ideas around what this looks like and potentially getting started!