I remember working on a project like that in my Digital Design II class. We built a VGA driver to display a chessboard but the real challenge was that we couldn't use a framebuffer, that would have been too easy. We had to build a logic circuit to display the chessboard, a piece on the board (a bitmap), and then use inputs to move the chess piece around. We also used the ARM processor onboard the Cyclone FPGA to run Linux where we wrote a program in C to send board positions to that chessboard logic circuit.

It was kinda hard and I struggled a bit but got it working in the end.