che55.online | Devpost

Main Menu - Create or join a game
The user interface for playing games
Win detection in action

Inspiration

Modern chess websites require account signups and keep track of your relative playing ability, often bombarding you with ads and premium subscription offers. Che55 changes all of that - just open the website and start a game instantly.

What it does

Upon opening the website, you can either create a new game or join a game someone else has created. Creating a game will generate a code, which you send to another player so they can join. A game of chess then begins online, powered by socket.io.

How we built it

We used React to power the single-page frontend that updates based on user input. The backend is powered by socket.io and node, which creates 'rooms' for players to pair up, connection routed through the cloud. chessboardjsx was used to power the UI and chess.js to validate moves.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to go further and add more features to our chess website. However, as this is a 24-hour hackathon, we focused on the player-vs-player feature. As we developed the software we had issues with move validation not working, moves not routing properly, etc. Fortunately the issues were all minor (like using === instead of ==) and were relatively simple to fix.

We had some issues with deployment along the way, so unfortunately we weren't able to get the website fully online, at least before the submission deadline. We may fix this in the future!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're happy to have created a fully-functional great-looking chess website. Players can quickly and easily connect with each other and play full chess games. The interface is clean like that of lichess.org, with a game-room website style that makes che55 unique. The website is also fairly robust - there are almost no bugs for players to worry about.

What we learned

We learned how to create peer-to-peer online games using socket.io, a tool which integrated nicely with ReactJS. We also improved our existing skills in React and Node as we refined our website.

What's next for che55

che55 has a lot of potential. Chess is a very popular online game, and most of the community resides in chess.com, lichess.org, and others. Our website could be a major competitor in the industry. We would refine the peer-to-peer feature to include accounts and rating tracking, and either integrate an existing chess engine (like Stockfish or Komodo) or build one from the ground up for the website. We could refine the UI, add UI customization, time controls, chess variants (like Chess960 or King of the Hill), forums, news, APIs for user-made bots, and many more features. Che55 could become a new niche for chess enthusiasts.