Alright, let's get to the boring scrobble updates first, I'll try to keep this short as there's a lot of them.
There's a new author rail now for different routes. In the past people posting about certain movies had their posts neatly land under the movies /watch pages, but the same wasn't happening for some of the other kinds. This was a big update as it needed a lot of testing back and forth and still probably needs some more, so do let me know if you find some odd things here and there. This basically means that you're able to search for music (artist/song/album) to direct your post towards that if you're writing about that, same goes for TV Show episodes if you're writing about a specific episode.
Similar to long form posts, snaps now also land there and get indexed on the site for longer than 30 days, in the past we had this limit to attempt to keep the server storage usage low but let's figure that out later with more use. We may revert back to a bit of a longer timescale and if people wanna check out older snaps they may have to wait a bit so we can fetch them which may take longer since snaps are posted in individual post containers.
We also noticed there was no translate button for subscribers on /quicktakes, that's been now been added.
There was a lot of work to do when it came to some of the rewards we give out, the biggest changes occurred to consumer rewards and a little bit on compilation post rewards. While we can't be too open about this to prevent abuse, we attempted to mitigate the existing "abuse" that was happening where some readers where just browsing through many pages pretending to be reading them in order to collect consumer rewards. This has now been enforced in different ways with more parameters and checks to protect it so the right users get rewarded. The last payout that occurred earlier today was the updated one. The compilation post rewards were also updated so they depend on the vote that ocd ends up giving a post, meaning if you often nominate shorter/lower effort/etc posts you may get them rewarded but your own rewards are going to be lower compared to those nominating the bigger posts.
Fixed an error that prevented some rewards from going out from a previous comp post, those have gone out now.
Fixed another error that caused guest account pending rewards not to count properly and had previously gone to consumer rewards, those will now count properly and remain pending for when guests wanna upgrade to a hive account. That feature isn't available yet however so we refrain from advertising the pending rewards to guest accounts until that option is available.
Live word count added to the editor after a few requests for it Added option to remove specific songs from created user playlists, it had existed in the past but there was a bug that prevented it from being visible and wouldn't have called the function either way
Some issues still open:
- keyboard suddenly dissappearing from mobile, unclear which pages are affected - awaiting more info from reporter
- artist matching is still a bit flaky, need to take a deeper look how it can be enforced, may have to start using tokens for better matchmaking which costs
- specific tv show episode sits behind two toggles currently which isn't so UX friendly, will have to see how it can be highlighted if there's posts behind certain episodes so they don't look absent
Now onto the game!
New game on scrobble.life and this time it has nothing to do with music/media but a little bit to do with @holozing!
https://scrobble.life/holo-chess
After 6 music related games, we thought it'd be nice to take a break from it and do something different, something people know with a little twist to it, Holo Chess. Although you can play it while listening to music from our own in-house player (although only on a second window for now)!
The individual Chess pieces:
A pawn is Miu of course, the creature I've been using as a profile pic from @holozing. Wrackoo works as a Knight in this game. The obvious choice was to make a female healer as queen and a male healer as King, but we don't go for the obvious options, so female healer is the Bishop. Waller as a Rook fits perfectly however and Drazing is the Queen due to the way it can evolve while Zinguini stands tall as the King!
Once you get used to what's what it may be less confusing, though note that you may forget the bishop is a bishop. :P
Other than attempting to keep their heights similar to the regular chess pieces, they also differ in terms of contrast/coloring based on if they're white or black pieces.
The sculpting work was done using Blender through the Claude MCP. They're quite detailed but we managed to make the game work quite smoothly and not require too much resources. The nice thing about this is that we can experiment with pieces in different ways over time, for instance different skins/colors/shines/glows/effects/etc if you reach certain ratings/play a certain amount of games/win tournaments/are a subscriber/your holozing collection/zing holdings/etc. It also brings the two projects a bit closer together because why not!
Play!
Currently you can play it against others, you create an invite link to send your friend or share on snaps to invite anyone willing to take you on. They don't even need an account to play against you as things stand!
If both are logged in however it'll count as a rated match currently, we may add friendly games specifically later for logged in accounts.
You can also play it against bots in three difficulties.
Replays and sharing
Every finished game is saved and can be played back on the 3d board - not just a flat diagram. You can step through it move by move or hit play to watch it run along with animations and disintegrations!
You can also link to a single move, if you're happy about how you defeated someone you can share the exact moment for others to replay by clicking the link. Like me getting rekt by @strawhat during testing earlier:
https://scrobble.life/holo-chess/game/ifFATg33?ply=10
Timed links shared should also include an embed showing a 2d version of the board at the time like this one for the finisher above:
For the technical aspect, here's what Claude had to say about how it's built and what it runs on:
It's a website, not a download. The whole thing runs in your browser with no install, no plugin and no app store — which is most of why it's worth building this way at all.
- The 3D is three.js (https://threejs.org/) driven through React Three Fiber (https://r3f.docs.pmnd.rs/), rendering with WebGL. The board isn't a texture — the neon grid, the square highlights and the disintegration effect are all shaders, which is why it stays sharp however far you zoom in.
- The site is Next.js 16 and React, in TypeScript.
- The pieces were modelled, posed and baked in Blender, then exported as glTF for the browser to load.
- The rules come from chess.js (https://github.com/jhlywa/chess.js), which is the same battle-tested library a lot of chess sites use. No point writing your own en passant bug when someone has already fixed theirs.
- Multiplayer is a small Node WebSocket server. It keeps its own copy of the game and decides every move, so your browser is only ever a view of it — a rated game can't be tampered with from the client side.
- Ratings and finished games live in SQLite, kept completely separate from the scrobble database. A chess bug can't touch your listening history.
- The bot is our own engine — alpha-beta search with a few of the usual tricks — running in a Web Worker so thinking doesn't freeze the board. The obvious choice would have been Stockfish, and we deliberately didn't: it's GPLv3, and linking it would drag copyleft onto the rest of the site. Ours is weaker, and it's ours.
Come test it, send your friends an invite and let us know if something feels off. This was just a quick side project as a break from other features and I'm already working on the next one-off side game for scrobble.life :P
Mobile should also work but not a lot of testing happened there yet, let us know!
Feedback and testing much appreciated, thank you!
