Chess Rancher Beta

Chess Rancher, currently in a fully playable Beta state, is where cosy farm management meets strategic chess gameplay.
Customise and build your farm, take care of your animals, and harvest crops to make recipes to give you animals powers.
Take your farm animals to chess battles and use them to battle other farmers through chess-based combat. But if you lose an animal here, they're gone from your farm for good.

Chess Rancher started as a group project for a module in my Masters, but it grew and became a full game. We secured a grant from the UK Games Fund to continue development and have showcased our game across England and Scotland, winning several awards on the way.

My role was all 3D art, custom material shaders, and VFX. Utilising Unity URP, as well as shader graph, and VFX graph I managed and optimised our projects gameplay, keeping it running smoothly on PC, and soon mobile. I also dabbled with some programming, creating a customisation menu for the players farmer which they can change and build upon over time

The environment is built up through modular assets, and scriptable objects to create controllable randomised scenes for players to experience.

Due for release Spring 2026