I've often liked year-end reviews like from quanta magazine. So here's another for ChessCraft like last year and the year before that.

Metrics

It's been 7 years since I started working on ChessCraft on 2017-12-30. We're now at 920,000 installs with 260,000 this year. I thought I might narrowly break the 1 million mark in 2024 but I guess the celebration will wait until 2025!

After some reseach, as far as I know this project is now the world's largest chess variant database - depending on definitions. I think a more business-minded person would have long ago used this fact in marketing. So I brazenly added it to the website frontpage with live stats. Here's today's:

The internet truth police have yet to prove me wrong.

Daily active users has been hanging around 3000-4000 since the end of 2022 with an unexplained peak of 7000 March 2023.

If you zoom in, you can see spikes every weekend which is amusing.

In 2024 I closed 233 tickets (individual tasks describing a bug or feature) in my project tracker on GitLab.

Jobs

My jobs page produced a handful of applicants and I hired a community manager - the first hire. After a few hours of paid training and minimal work they lost interest. I can't be sure why but I suspect this university student hasn't had many jobs so they expected something fun. Instead I assigned actual work tasks. They found something else with more structure, regular hours, and less pay per hour. Curious.

Development

In 2024 I released 1.16 with custom piece images! This was by far the most requested feature and not easy. There's already over 1000 custom images uploaded and shared. Some are excellent, especially the all time most popular ones.

Unfortunately, I think a large percent of players are having problems selecting images from their device. This has been exceptionally hard to track down since the feature works on all my devices. I even published special versions with extra diagnostic code on all public clients and uploaded the results to my server, then visualized the many combinations of device info with datasette but found no significant patterns. Hmmm!

Apple

In December I bought some Apple hardware just for ChessCraft publishing and paid the Apple developer fees. An iPhone / iOS release on the App Store is nearly here! I have an open beta version available now.

I have long resisted publishing to iOS mostly because:

• I don't like Apple's closed ecosystem business model.
• Expensive (buy hardware or cloud, buy developer license)
• No experience with Apple's ecosystem, OS, or UI.
• Vague fears that getting my game approved on the app store is difficult.

However so far I'm really happy I made the decision to dive in. There have been a lot of steps but it hasn't been as time consuming or painful as I feared.

Admin Dashboard

A lot of work goes into ChessCraft that nobody except me ever sees. Here's my chance to show it off a bit.

This year I added a lot of great admin backend tools, like this menu:

Now whenever any ChessCraft app encounters an error or exception, tons of information is automatically uploaded to my server (dozens of device stats, traceback, user action history, etc). I can easily search and filter these reports, click details to view the full info dump, or copy it all as a JSON to clipboard:

I can view and moderate the latest community uploads all from my phone:

Or view community reports like this one and take action if I need to:

These reports are consolidated and sortable in various intelligent ways, with lots of shortcuts and important information shown prominently.

The first night that I saw a live stream of error logs from all over the world, I think I fixed maybe 20 bugs! Rapid fire. I'm not shy to say that this was extremely gratifying. However, with the low hanging fruit out of the way, the remaining bugs are especially elusive. That's natural selection of bugs for you.

Gaming

I don't play videogames nearly as much as I did as a teenager (more hours than you would believe). However in 2024 I really enjoyed Baldur's Gate 3, Vampire Survivors, and Death Must Die. I've also started Path of Exile 2 and Valheim.

Relaxing by playing videogames brings me back to my teenage years. Once I learn all game mechanics in a game I naturally try to min-max it which leads me to imagining how the game is likely built. Then I start to dream how I could make the game better for myself. In some strange way I think playing videogames from time to time is one way I've kept myself motivated to keep building ChessCraft on and off for 7 years.

Bus Factor

A project with a bus factor of "1" means if just one person gets hit by a bus, the project is doomed. That's ChessCraft. At least, until 2024.

If something nasty happens to me, I've written down some ideas and instructions for my family on what to do with ChessCraft. If a new maintainer is not feasible, at a minimum it should be released under a free and open source license.

Analysis

Wow, the world's largest chess variant database... do you have any ideas for statistics, AI, or other analysis we could do on all this data? Something for a cool blog post, generative AI, or academic research? If so let me know!

Future

As stated in the FAQ I don't often talk specifics about future planned work. However I will say there's a number of bugs and small quality of life improvements I plan to focus on for the immediate future. There's also a major feature I'm considering working on that far outscales any community suggestion. We'll see, stay tuned!

Goodbye, 2024

I hope 2024 was at least okay for you. I got a better job in government (full remote AI lead at Industry Canada), had a great 3 months of time off this summer, and later went to Greece with my wife. Thanks for your support and being such a great chess variant community! I wish you all the best in 2025.