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I’d love to share this little stroke of absolute genius from one of Archaos’s longest serving (and thus longest suffering) fans – and incidentally a very talented programmer in his own right and major Chaos buff:

Click the image to view the huge (7680 px wide) original

@andy_herbert has painstakingly put this ‘cheat sheet’ of all of the original game’s units together showing graphics, stats, movement and combat ranges for each one, and grouping them together into this attractive infographic. I think it’s wonderful, and I’m going to print a large version of it out for my wall to use during testing!

Alpha is now under way with a small number of testers. So far we’ve played a few furtive ‘games’ (in the loosest sense – no casting, no ranged combat yet!) and apart from a few silly bugs, all seems to be well. I’m putting the finishing touches onto the standard movement/combat model in the next day or two (including finally adding ranged attacks) and then I’m going to implement casting.

Casting brings with it the somewhat-more-complex-than-it-seems matter of the user interface – which of course is critical to any game and which if not implemented correctly can really hinder this game. The interface in Archaos has to be intuitive, compact, and it has to get out of the way when you’re trying to play the game itself. As a cross platform mobile and desktop game, the way a player will interact with the game will differ slightly amongst platforms, however I want to ensure that the differences aren’t too jarring, and that each platform plays to its own strengths.

One of the methods to improve the experience is the use of gestures, so a player can pan and zoom the map intuitively, like they’re used to – and it may also through testing lead to methods of reducing the chance of accidentally performing an action, such as by having a user tap and hold on a unit or tile and then drag outside of a circle in order to perform the action (to ensure that the unit or tile tapped is the intended target, and that the user hasn’t just accidentally tapped the screen somewhere).

As I realise people like to see screenshots of progress as well as words, here’s a view of a typical alpha testing game session (with debug data above the units) showing the newly added window bezel to the mini-map, which is the basis of the UI, as well as the new ‘volumetric’ cursors and the big ‘cancel’ button.

My horse prepares for its gallop towards the hopelessly outnumbered cyan wizard

Over the last 6 months, I’ve been putting together plans to do something pretty radical, and as of a few weeks ago, those plans reached a head. I have now left my previous employer, the wonderful Cool Blue, and I’ve set out to work on Archaos and other projects full time, as an independent game developer.

It’s a big and somewhat scary step for anyone to abandon a guaranteed monthly income in pursuit of something which may likely end up falling flat on its face, but on the other hand games have been pretty much my whole life for a long time.

Earlier this year I held a LAN party at my house for a few of my long time mates, all of whom I met through games (most via Quake 2) and it happened to be just after this year’s E3. On the Sunday morning I was up before most people, and I sat watching trailers and coverage of games like WatchDogs, The Last of Us and X-Com: Enemy Unknown and started to yearn to be a part of this industry. Gaming is what I’ve always done, and what I want to do.

I’m now in the early stages of setting up my own business and I’m both refactoring and redesigning what I’ve now spent what amounts to many years of time, effort and planning on, with a cross-platform (desktop and mobile) release of a fully working, multiplayer Archaos as my primary goal.

The plan is still to allow players on all platforms to play together, and to switch from one platform to another (so a game can begin on your desktop, then you can continue to play turns on the train to work via your phone for instance) and to make use of the features afforded by devices (e.g. push notifications when it’s your turn) and I think in that respect, there’s not much else out there that I can find that offers that kind of seamless strategy gaming experience.

Anyway, just to give a bit of a taste of what I’ve been working on…

Note that these are still early concepts and some things are likely to change, but I’m much happier with the look of Archaos now that I feel I have a consistent style.

Stay tuned for more news, as well as a big update to this site coming soon!

Oooh look, a new theme! Same colour changing gubbins as before, but a fresh new non-Flash look, with some spooky negative-percentage background trickery going on in the header!

More updates soon – exciting news this way comes!

I actually just did a \o/ in the middle of the office.

http://mashable.com/2010/09/10/adobe-responds-to-apples-new-rules/

Yes. Very much yes.

Well well well, I guess I haven’t posted here in… ohhh, ages? I owe you all an apology to be perfectly honest, as I’ve neglected to work on Archaos (or indeed any personal projects) in the time since my last update.

Life has panned out for me – work became extremely busy in the last few months, and my ever expanding role has ever expanded – and indeed shifted towards a more theoretical and management-style thang. I’ve been working directly with clients and producing a lot of exciting stuff for a lot of exciting projects which, if I get off my lazy arse and update this blog more often, you will no doubt hear about!

Another significant development is that I’m no longer a lonely geek sat in his room listening to chip music and writing Javascript – I’m a very much not lonely geek sat in his room listening to chip music and writing Javascript. I have indeed found a (dare I say it) lady geek – though to her credit, not even close to the caliber of my pure unadulterated nerdiness – whom I spend as much time with as my work and her sanity allows. I won’t allow myself to become soppy and embarrass her (and myself) but… well, I absolutely love you, and you make me a very, very happy boy. Oh bugger, I don’t think I succeeded there. Never mind!

This has meant of course (yes, you all knew it!) that my personal projects have taken a back burner in all of this. Well, I say a back burner, but I actually mean ‘have been placed in tupperware tubs and frozen’. I must say now that my passion for Archaos in particular has not waned one bit – however after such a hiatus, I’d like to start a lot of it again rather than try and work my way back into the existing code base. A problem with learning as you create is that everything you did a month previous is a bit crap – so stuff I started last year is gonna be pretty goddamn terrible now.

I will return to Archaos. I absolutely promise I will, and I have been reading Gooey Blob and other Chaos related stuff. The end of the year always proves to be a better time to get on with personal projects, and I hope to have something playable in December.

To those of you who still read this, still follow me on my similarly neglected Twitter account, I salute you – and I’ll be around more often!

P.S. Check this out. WOW!

I’ve been exceptionally busy with work, and only had the energy left to play Global Agenda on an evening – I’ve not made any progress with Archaos since the last update but once I’ve gotten this swathe of hard labour out of the way, I’ll be finishing the server, building a basic client and inviting people to begin beta testing. Sorry to those few of you who are still checking the site every day (I love you all!), I will have goodies for you soon – promise!

The Archaos server now validates, processes and outputs a full turn of human interactions. This is a pretty major milestone in the development process, and I’m very happy with the results so far:

{
  "turn" : 1,
  "phase" : "move",
  "interaction" : "sequence",
  "finished" : true,
  "actions" : [
    {
      "type" : "move",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1263682234,
      "data" : {
        "piece" : "p0",
        "path" : [
          {
            "x" : 1,
            "y" : 7
          }
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "end_turn",
      "player" : "lewster32",
      "time" : 1263682234
    },
    {
      "type" : "move",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1263682234,
      "data" : {
        "piece" : "p1",
        "path" : [
          {
            "x" : 13,
            "y" : 5
          }
        ]
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "move",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1263682234,
      "data" : {
        "piece" : "p3",
        "path" : {
          "x" : 11,
          "y" : 4
        },
        "flying" : true
      }
    },
    {
      "type" : "end_turn",
      "player" : "bobster16",
      "time" : 1263682234
    }
  ]
}

I’d like to mention the huge amount of support, encouragement and fantastic resources provided by certain people of late. @andy_herbert has been a fantastic vocal advocate and provider of much inspiration and technical knowhow (he’s an utterly brilliant multi-talented programmer in his own right) and I owe an awful lot to his ‘cheery’ tone on Twitter! 😉

Secondly, I’d like to shout out a big hello to the Slashdot horde, who accosted the site a few days back. I got a hell of a lot of visits from these guys and I’m sure it’s helped spread the word about Archaos (even if that wasn’t actually my intention) and more importantly the Chaos scene in general!

Finally, a big thanks to @Zolyx for mentioning the project on his blog along with the other fantastic Chaos projects out there – muchos appreciated!

I’ve been playing with various Twitter widgets for WordPress, none of which have been quite ‘right’, so I’ll be creating my own. This has also spurred me to update ColorShift, as the fail is now showing in the code, and it needs a more robust way of applying colours to all elements, including ones added after page load.

Look out for a new version of ColorShift in the next few days, along with possibly a new mini-project in the form of my own Twitter widget for WordPress – jQuery driven (of course), semantic, configurable, and with optional caching and API limit safety features.