CCS2025 (Part 1) and a Shift in Direction

Hey all, it's been a while. Hope you've all be doing well and taking care.

CCS2025

Before we start, we'd like to announce our attendance at the Capital Creative Showcase 2025 in Sacramento, California on June 14th! This is our home showcase, the one where our game essentially came to life years ago from a small game jam game to the evolving beast it's become today.

The game design pipeline is an arduous one, and we've had many changes internally over the last year from development slowdown, gaining new core members, as well as losing ones, but we're still continuing on as best we can, albeit slowly. Since then, we've attended GDC2025 and pitched at the Game Pitch Day there! While we were unsuccessfully in securing a reward from that event, we did have the pleasure to see many games from many developers from many different places, which always opens our perspective and gives the entire indie game development scene a much brighter future.

However, other than the showcase announcements, let's talk about why we're here and what we'll be aiming for come CCS2025 in just 5 weeks.

Shift in Direction

We've had a lot of issues pushing our game forward as of late-- whether it be from availability to ideas, but something that we've landed on was simply that, despite numerous decisions to scale back, our scope was still too large. After some executive decisions, some discussions about our future, and some carefully pitched ideas, we've decided that we'll be dropping the large-scale RPG campaign as our main focus, at least for the time being.

While we would love to continue along this way, we've realized that continuing the game this way would just be impossible to complete in the timespan we wanted. While our team is expanding, we're still very limited in the time and resources we can give, and we're trying to be realistic in what's achievable with our current manpower. We also examined things realistically from an outside perspective. While everyone here and everyone following us wants our game to succeed, pitching and marketing for an epic-level fantasy RPG from a group of unknowns is very difficult, so we'll be focusing on things that we can accomplish for now.

With all that being said, we're redoubling our efforts and focusing into transforming our game into more of a Roguelike, like our current Tournament mode provides. This decision was made after realizing our ideas and concepts don't have to change by doing this-- we can still tell a narratively driven story with all the mechanics we had promised of unique pieces, leveling up, and permadeath. In fact, we might be able to do a lot of these even better than we could've before. Given Chess's identity, we never wanted to compromise on keeping the spirit of Chess alive, but in a genre where progression is very important, it felt hard on how to exactly make things engaging over a course of 20 hours.

However, in a roguelike, we can be much more flexible with balance and allow players to drive their own strategies home, make pieces feel much more expendable, and make resource management and character progression a much stronger focus.

We've taken ideas from many popular Roguelike games and took our own spin of them. For our narrative, since we still want to have a story to be told in some capacity, we've decided to pursue a system similar to Supergiant's Hades, where the game's narrative will continue to evolve through numerous runs of the game, as well as offer player's a way to get stronger outside of the run, rather than doing a pure Roguelike mode in the form of something like Slay the Spire, where your power level is almost always determined during your run.

This allows for us to improve pacing as well as maintain the quirky and silly tone our game is striving for.

Over the next few weeks we'll try and highlight some of our major, upcoming changes and how we'll be implementing them. All the core pieces are there for this mode, but we've yet to show them off properly or even implement them properly, so we'll be working extra hard in these next 5 weeks.

As always, thank you for supporting us.

Go Team Checkmate!