Why Should I Use the Visual Kit?
Engagement Boost: Visual elements capture attention and keep viewers engaged, potentially increasing your watch time and return visits.
Accessibility: Visual cues help viewers quickly grasp complex ideas, making your content more accessible to non-expert players.
Retention: Pairing verbal explanations with visual icons reinforces learning, helping your audience remember critical concepts long after the stream or the video ends.
Professionalism: Consistent use of high-quality icons adds a polished look to your streams.
Is It Really Free?
Yes. You can use the Visual Kit for any video creation that you publish online and keep freely accessible to all audiences. You may also include the icons in the thumbnails or posts directly linking to that video content. If you want to use the Kit or the Icons for anything else, get in touch with us, and let's find a way forward together. For more information, read the Terms of Service for the Visual Kit.
How Do I Link the Visual Kit To OBS?
Note: you don't have to use OBS; any streaming or recording tool will do.
1. Open the Visual Kit. Open the Kit in a new browser window (preferably Google Chrome) and set up your preferred layout.
2. Bookmark the URL. The Kit dynamically stores all of your layout choices in the URL. Just create a bookmark to save everything for the next time.
3. Open OBS. In OBS's Sources panel, select one of your existing scenes and add a new source of type "Window Capture." Select the window with the Kit. Use the crop marks to keep only the View you need. Resize the resulting frame and place it where you prefer on your Scene. You may also save the URL with your choices in the Scene, so that when you open OBS next time, you're ready to go (as OBS does not currently support hyperlinks, we suggest storing the URL in the Scene's name).
4. That's it! Whatever you do in the Kit Views will appear in your content.
In My Scenes, Where Do I Place the Icons?
Here are some suggestions.
If you wish to analyze a position for your audience, you may want to show the advantages for White compared to the ones for Black. Place the first set of icons at the bottom of the chessboard and the second one at the top (or on the left and the right).
If you wish to stream one of your live games, it might be fun just to let the icons follow your thoughts. Stack the icons one on top of the other, either as simple icons or as cards. Tip: if you wish to emphasize a great find of yours, you can click the scroll button on the mouse to add the icon with a little more "pizzazz" while you shout "Ah ah!" "Take this!" or something similar.
If you wish to explore a specific chess concept in depth, you may want to give great visual relevance to it. Use the "Quantity: One" setting in the Kit and place the big icon front and center in your Scene. Tip: you can prepare the icons in advance in a hidden View "B" and then move them one by one to View "A" at the right moment.
If your scene's background is very busy, you can use transparency around the icons and overlay them on top of other scene elements. To do this, choose the "Chroma Key" background in the Kit and create the proper filter in your editing or streaming tool (in OBS try Key Colour Type: Magenta, Similarity:300, Smoothness: 1, Key Colour Spill Reduction: 1).
I Can't Find the Icon for the [xyz] Chess Concept
There might be several reasons why you can't find it.
The icons are small. In the Visual Kit, the icons are organized in what we call The Grand Table Of Evaluation. On the right side of the Table you will find icons mostly about Positional Patterns. On the left side (accessible by clicking on the big white cube), you will see icons about specific Tactics and Techniques. To make everything accessible at one or two clicks distance, we had to "shrink" the Grand Table and the icons a little bit. Just hover on an icon with the mouse, and you'll see a bigger version on the top right of the screen.
Some chess concepts have several different names. When creating the Grand Table, we tried to include the most common concepts. As you may imagine, we had to make some choices. To get a better understanding of what we mean by any given concept, click on the little gray cards at the top left of the frame. Now, hovering over the pattern icons will reveal their full explanation as they appear on the cards of our Chess With Cards game.
The Openings and the Endgames are represented by VERY general categories. We know that this representation may not be the best, but we think this was a good compromise for this first release of the Visual Kit. We might expand these categories in richness and complexity in the future.
If you still can't find the concept you were looking for, maybe it's because we really didn't include it. Please get in touch with us through the Contact Form or the Visual Kit Chat and let us know what you wish we included in the next update.
Where Do the Icons Come From?
To create our soon-to-be-released Chess With Cards game, we designed from scratch a complete set of "chess concepts" icons. We tried our best to keep them consistent with each other, both in terms of visual coherence and in terms of underlying chess meanings. Here are some examples of what we tried to achieve: All passed pawns are represented with a big arrow that "pushes" them towards promotion. All checkmate patterns are surrounded by a frame that recalls the checkmate symbol used in standard chess notation. All sacrifices are represented by a piece being thrown down a pit to be walked over by its companions. Etc. With all of that work done, we thought that one of the best ways to put it to good use was to share it with other chess enthusiasts.
Do My Viewers Need to Be Familiar with the 'Chess With Cards' Game for the Icons to Make Sense?
No. The Kit is completely independent of the Chess With Cards game. You don’t need to acknowledge or mention the game at any point. All the icons in the Kit represent well-known chess concepts that are meaningful on their own.
Sometimes the Images Are Slow to Appear
The Visual Kit utilizes a highly efficient, state-of-the-art Content Delivery Network to provide you with all the necessary graphics. However, depending on the time of day or week, some icons may load more slowly than others. To address this, simply activate the preview feature by clicking on the little gray cards at the top left of the frame. Now, when you hover over a pattern icon, the corresponding images will be pre-downloaded into your browser's cache, ready for when you need them.
What If I Find a Bug or an Error?
Since the Visual Kit is in beta, you might run into some glitches or mistakes. If you do, we'd love to hear about it! Please report them through the Contact Form or the Visual Kit Chat. Your feedback helps us make the Kit better and more reliable. Thanks for helping us make this tool awesome for the whole chess community!
