Arcane Chess

Overview

Most browser chess is a flat 2D grid. Arcane Chess is a proper 3D duel staged inside a fairytale garden — pieces glide and hop across the board, captures shatter into particles, and the whole scene glows with cinematic lighting. There are two ways to play. Solo mode pits you against a chess bot with easy, medium, and hard difficulty, tuned to take a beat before it replies so it never feels robotic. Room mode lets you create a private link and duel a friend online, complete with built-in voice chat so you can talk trash while you play. Even the landing page is alive: the board plays itself, filmed by a camera that drifts and cuts between shots like a movie. And because it installs as an app and works offline, you can keep playing without a connection.

A Baked GLB, Reverse-Engineered

The pieces and board come from a single meshopt-compressed GLB (shrunk from ~8.9MB to 1.2MB) with no semantic node names — every piece is `Circle.001`, `Circle.002`, and so on, each a group of two meshes for the body and its metal accent. Because there are no textures and no labels, pieces are identified by reverse-engineering their world-space position and height in the standard starting layout: file from the X axis, rank from Z, corroborated by measured model-unit heights (king ≈ 8698 down to knight ≈ 4654). The renderer picks one representative node per colour-and-type, clones it, recenters its geometry, and places clones from the live board array. Square size isn't hard-coded either — it self-calibrates at runtime from the distance between two adjacent starting pieces, so swapping in a different model only means rewriting one mapping table.

Authoritative Rooms & P2P Voice

One Cloudflare Worker plus Durable Object instance equals one game. Connection order decides your role — first in is white, second is black, the next fifteen are spectators, capped at seventeen. The Durable Object holds the only real chess.js position: clients send a move, the server validates and applies it, then broadcasts the new state to everyone, so cheating a client does nothing. A new game requires both players to vote yes. Voice is a separate concern — the server relays only WebRTC signaling, and audio travels pure peer-to-peer through a mesh of RTCPeerConnections using the perfect-negotiation pattern so either side can re-offer without glare. Speaking detection runs entirely client-side off a single AudioContext analyser loop, driving live speaking dots and a join/leave activity feed.

Motion, Sound & Cinematics

Moves aren't teleports. Each piece has its own tween — knights hop, everything else glides — and captures animate a sinking, fading clone of the taken piece plus an instanced-mesh particle shatter. New games trigger a staggered materialize where pieces drop and grow in wave by wave across the board. The camera opens on a raised three-quarter framing and, when the board-follow lock is on, spins so your side always faces you. On the landing page a director camera hard-cuts between low glides, close push-ins, a slow orbit, and a pull-back reveal. Most sound effects are synthesized live with the Web Audio API; only the looping background music and the four cycled wooden move-taps are real samples.

Runs Everywhere, Adapts To Everything

Weak hardware is a first-class citizen. A hidden in-Canvas sampler measures real rendered frames per second during a short warmup and picks a High or Low graphics quality automatically the first time you visit — Low drops post-processing and shadows and caps the device pixel ratio — then persists the choice so it never re-measures or flashes on later visits. Player preferences (name, hints, move history, board-follow lock, volume, last colour, graphics quality) live in localStorage behind SSR-safe getters. Every non-trivial pure module — the piece mapping, easing helpers, voice-activity detection, debug FEN scenarios, room role assignment — ships with a runnable Node self-check, and the GLB itself is validated by a script that confirms the mapped nodes still exist and sit at sane heights.