Dev Blog

In Game Themes, UI Fixes, Persistent Settings

Public Beta 0.7.6

Background images

There are now 6 background images, each has a light mode and a dark mode variant. The background image is randomly chosen on page load, so if you refresh the page you may get a new background image.

Accessibility Tweaks

Some of the navigation buttons and labels were out of spec with WCAG 2.2 Level AA, updates were made to fix this.

In game UI updates

Big changes were made to the in game UI.

  • There are three themes: Walnut & Brass (default), Gunmetal & Nickel, and Imperial Violet & Pale Gold. Each theme has light mode and dark mode versions.
  • These items are all now contained within a decorative border: round tracker, game clock, roll dispatcher, turn order indicator, game manual button, settings button.
  • The piece interaction buttons are now inside their own decorative border as well.
  • On mobile / portrait screens, the borders will sit above and below the game board. On desktop / landscape screens, the borders will sit on the left and right sides of the game board.

Persistent settings

"Appearance," "Theme," and "Animation Speed" can be changed while in game. "Appearance" (light or dark mode) can be changed out of game as well, as it always has been. All these settings are now saved in your browsers local storage. Meaning your settings will be saved for that browser, if you change browsers or clear your browser data, you will lose those saved setting and reset to the default.

Premium for Free

  • The current goal is to get more players. I want to implement multiplayer, because multiplayer is more fun than playing against bots, in my opinion. However, we first need enough players to support multiplayer, otherwise its a waste of development time if there is not enough players online to support multiplayer.
  • Therefore, as a tool to get more people interested in the game, I have made it so all new accounts are defaulted to "premium" status.
  • You can still play for free, no account required, and play against the free bots. If you want more bot options, make an account for free, and you can play against the premium bots.
  • Premium for free is active as of the day I wrote this post (August 23 2026), this will be disabled in the future, there is no specific date as of today.

Addition of the Animation Speed Button

For people who like faster gameplay!

Public Beta 0.7.5

Change the animation speed in game

As part of my pursuit to make Pachisi Reimagined more customizable and give the players more options, I have created a way to increase the animation speeds.
The options are: 1x (default), 2x, 3.5x, and 5x

How to do this:

  • While in game, click on the settings button (the gear icon).
  • Click on the "Animation Speed" option.
  • From there you will be able to make your selection.
  • The changes apply at the start of the next turn. This is safer / less bug prone vs. applying the animation speed changes immediately.

I hope you enjoy!

Introducing Pachisi Reimagined by Scrimtera

Greetings!
Thank you for visiting scrimtera.com!
Thank you for playing Pachisi Reimagined, I hope that you enjoy it!
Player feedback is very important to me, I want to make Pachisi Reimagined as good as possible. If you have any bugs, issues, suggestions, comments, please let me know via https://scrimtera.com/contact.

Some General Information

  • My name is Justin.
  • Gistyr LLC d/b/a Scrimtera is a single member LLC. Meaning I am the sole member of the company.
  • I started working on Pachisi Reimagined in October 2024. So it took about 1 year and 9 months to get from nothing to public beta.
  • I am the solo developer, manager, and any other title, at least for now, I have full control over everything.

Some Personal Information

  • Gistyr LLC has not made a profit yet, I work full time elsewhere.
  • My full time job is in the tech sector somewhat.
  • I knew how to program and other tech related stuff before I started this project.
  • My biggest struggle will probably be marketing. I literally have zero personal social media accounts (I made accounts for Scrimtera).

Some Technical Information:

  • scrimtera.com is a Next.js application hosted by Vercel.
  • By code quantity, most of scrimtera.com is written in Rust and compiled to WASM. When it comes to the actual Pachisi Reimagined game, all of the game logic and state is written in Rust, Rust emits events to TypeScript to update the UI.
  • Backend services are done with Cloudflare workers.
  • The primary database is managed by Supabase.
  • That is pretty much it for the core components of the tech stack, I like to keep things as simple as possible.

Timeline for new Features:

Since I am a solo developer, it is very hard for me to give concrete timelines. I have a full time job and have responsibilities IRL. I work on Scrimtera as often as possible, and I really enjoy working on it. But ultimately all development of Scrimtera is bound to myself and my free time.

The Largest Future Project

Multiplayer

I would love to have players playing players, and a ranked ladder, instead of just bots. But in order for this to work, there needs to be more users. This is why I launched with just single player against bots. If this game gets a following and I have real users, then I will start implementing multiplayer.

Large Project Currently in Development

Monetization of game pieces

  • Currently players get and are able to use the six standard game pieces, you may notice that the bots are able to also use the chess pawn and cat game pieces.
  • The six standard game pieces will continue to be free and will be default for all players.
  • I would like to monetize the chess pawn and cat game pieces. I will sell them for $2.99 or $3.99 depending on rarity.
  • This is a large project because since this is the initial implementation of monetization, I have to set up all the commerce infrastructure. This means integrating Stripe, creating new database schema, creating new backend services to process the transactions, and creating a shop UI.

Some More Projects

  • Better way to end the game early.
  • Integrate the "speed button" which will increase or decrease the speed of the game.
  • Add reduced motion setting in game.
  • Roll store higher contrast.
  • Better indication in regard to what roll is attached to what piece.
  • When a game piece is selected, it should have a "shine" applied to it. And the color of the shine should contrast the game piece color.
  • Graphic applied when pieces are on a Castle. Since pieces block the castle star icon so it's easy to forget that it is a Castle tile.

In Conclusion

There are even more projects than I listed, and I'm sure bugs and issues will come up as more people start to play. I am also now going to start spending more time on social media / marketing. All of the social media links are at: https://scrimtera.com/support. Thank you!