I've often liked year-end reviews like from Wendover Productions. So here's another for ChessCraft. See also:

• 2024
• 2023
• 2022

Metrics

This year ChessCraft passed one million installs. Curiously, the page on Google Play still reports just 500,000 several months later! I guess Google doesn't care about my vanity metrics.

Team

This year I decided to put more work into finding people to help with ChessCraft and good news! I found two people to join the team.

1. Community Manager: started in the fall to free up some of my time for technical work that only I can do. They're a busy civil engineering student in Montreal. So far so good!
2. C# Developer: started very recently to modernize and cleanup the project which should help me with long term maintainability and bug fixes. They're a team lead in the UK. I feel I need help of some kind but concretely I'm not sure what this will look like and we're figuring it out. I should see their first deliverables soon and we can take it from there.

I've hired people for small contracts before but this is the first time I've got two at once and with recurring work monthly.

Nextcloud

Nextcloud is a private and open source alternative to Google Drive, Google Docs, and video chat. This year I've installed it on my Mac M2 which otherwise is doing nothing aside from the occasional ChessCraft iOS build. So far, it's worked well and been mostly fun!

Non-technical explanation: usually video chat or file sharing sends everything to computers in America like Iowa, Virginia, etc. With Nextcloud, everything happens on my computer in my apartment instead. No monthly subscription because there's no business to pay. And it's still an internet accessible service to anyone in the world. Cool!

So far my Nextcloud has done:

• video interviews for ChessCraft contractors
• sharing ChessCraft contracts, invoices, and deliverables
• collecting wedding photos from many guests

Neat! Fingers crossed my power goes out less often in 2026.

Development

The biggest work done this year was a major project cleanup. There's a ton of automation in the ChessCraft project but it has grown organically over years and it shows. This year I:

• moved a lot of scattered scripts into a central organized flattened folder structure tools/
• centralized and deduplicated the logic, variable declarations, and logging of those scripts
• clearly separated major components of the project into src/ (unity, web, cli, shared)
• removed old code
• modernized the compilation scripts (naturally simplifying it too)
• use one test framework instead of three (!)

Just like how a guest coming over to your home may encourage you to clean up, onboarding a developer inspired me to do all this. In that sense, the money is already worth it. I feel really good about this cleanup!

I'm pretty sure 2025 is the first year since release that I didn't put out a major version update with new features. While I am working on something big, it's less than half done. Oh well. Stay tuned.

Goodbye, 2025

I hope 2025 was okay for you.

Thanks for your support and being such a great chess variant community! I wish you all the best in 2026.