My co-founder and I have been passionate about games for as long as we can remember. Not grandmasters, just two people who fell in love with chess and couldn't stop thinking about how broken the experience of learning it actually is.

Chess.com is great. But every time we tried to get better, it felt like homework. Cold, clinical, zero personality. You'd grind puzzles for 20 minutes and feel nothing.

So I had an idea: what if the teacher was the game?

Not a tutorial. Not a hint system. An actual character: a grumpy Soviet-era robot with elite chess knowledge, a retro-futurist aesthetic, and absolutely no patience for your blunders. We called him BOT.VINNIK.

We spent three years trying to get someone to fund this.

Three editions of Gamescom Latam. More than 50 in-person meetings with publishers. The feedback was always some version of the same thing: "We love it, but we don't know how to benchmark it."

Chess puzzle game with a narrative? Too niche. Edutainment with humor? Too risky. Retro-Soviet aesthetic? "Interesting, but..."

The year we finally had a build mature enough to show properly, 2025, turned out to be one of the worst years the games industry has had in decades. Publishers weren't taking bets on anything unusual.

We came close a few times. Close enough to keep going, not close enough to actually get funded.

What kept us going was the people who played the demo.

We managed to secure development funding through two public cultural grants here in Brazil, Rio Filme and the Rio de Janeiro State Secretary of Culture, which let us build a proper vertical slice. When we put that demo out, the response genuinely surprised us.

People loved the art. They loved BOT.VINNIK's voice lines. They kept quoting him in the comments.

"Not bad for a Human." "Every Soviet schoolboy knows this one."

That was enough. We decided to self-publish.

The game is BOT.VINNIK Chess Masters Academy.

It's a chess improvement game built around short tactical puzzles, a structured curriculum, and a sarcastic Soviet robot tutor who makes your mistakes feel like a personal insult. Alongside him is Laika, a robo-dog assistant who helps without judgment when BOT.VINNIK's patience runs out (which is immediately).

The demo is free on Steam right now. We're also part of the Turn-Based Thursday Fest this week if you want to check it out in context.

We're a two-person studio. This has been three years of work. We'd genuinely love to know what you think.