So I thought it'd be cool to show it off here too- it can be played around with at mchess.io/donut - you can also set up an AI or online game on the site.
This is all indie dev work from a couple friends and myself.
Bonus points if you hit upon the other 2D projection that is useful (I didn't)
Rotating the torus eventually hits singularities and I cannot continue the rotation. Maybe use a different mechanism for rotations that do not suffer from "gimbal lock"?
Would also be nice to rotate the torus along the circular axis. That is, rotate pieces/rows from inside the doughnut hole to the outside.
Maybe when the page loads the torus should rotate around a bit
Likewise, if someone thought the pieces couldn't be moved, you could idly wiggle the king pawn as a hint to pick it up.
Now, how anybody could look at a chess board and think the pieces were immovable, or look at a 3D torus render and think it was unrotatable, is beyond me. But if it's a real problem, I think idle animation is a good fix.