• Much more competent computer wizards. They now act much smarter with regards to their spell choices, unit movement and so on. The general intelligence they display can also be modified with a new difficulty slider in the (also new) player configuration menu. As the difficulty increases, so too does their aggression, sneakiness and attention span.
• Mobile support. While the game has long been ‘sorta’ playable on mobile, it now has proper support for things like panning around the board, auto-focusing on the next player and more. The UI has also been tweaked to fit better at mobile viewport sizes.
• Enhanced spells and units. A small but growing selection of new spells are available (they can also be turned off if you want a more classic experience). They include some powerful new dragons, a unique immobile ranged-attack unit and a few more. I have several more spells and units planned – see this document for more info.
• Better UI. The UI elements I created many moons ago were partially implemented, but some of the UI was still just placeholder stuff. Now all of the menus, inputs, checkboxes etc. have the correct styling.
• Many bugs fixed. Yep. There were a lot. Notable ones include being unable to fly-attack enemies in some cases, and computer wizards raising dead units right under the feet of a non-dead unit. You can view more info on Github’s bugs page: https://github.com/lewster32/archaos/issues?q=is%3Aissue%20label%3Abug
• Tests, tests and more tests. Under the hood, there’s now a huge suite of over 1,000 tests that run before every deployment. This has proven invaluable in fixing and adding features while being confident I’ve not broken anything.

With all that though, we’re not done yet! Here are some of the things I have planned still:

• Remote multiplayer. It’s the most requested feature, and something I’ve experimented with a lot in the past. I now have many of the building blocks in place to get this right, so this is still definitely on the cards.
• Tutorials. For Chaos die-hards, it should be very easy to pick up and play Archaos, but I’m acutely aware it’s a game with a learning curve, despite all of the effort I’ve made to have it explain itself and try not to overwhelm the player. That said, a nice set of tutorial scenarios to introduce new players to the mechanics would be a very nice thing indeed.
• Standalone client. While it’s very convenient to play Archaos on the web, and it was indeed built to be a web-based game, I’d like to look at distribution of the game as a standalone thing. I’ve already got a pretty good working prototype of a slimline desktop client powered by Tauri, so having this able to be distributed via something like Steam is now a definite goer. Watch this space!
• More spells and units. As mentioned above, I don’t want to stop at the few new spells and units I’ve added. Eventually I’d like to get them all in there! This would also come with a way for each game to select the available set of spells wizards have access to.
• More interesting board terrain. Right now, everything happens in the rectangular void, as it did in the original. I’ve always been interested in having a bit more variation in the scenery though. Trees, walls, ruins, visual variety to the floor types and more are all things I’d like to add to spice up the look and feel of the board, as well as potentially add some obstacles and dangers. All optional of course!

Anyway, enough gassing. Go play it here: https://www.archaos.co.uk/

If you’re interesting in the nerdy stuff, visit the Github repository here: https://github.com/lewster32/archaos/ – you can also post any bugs, suggestions or comments in the issues board.

Have fun!

What’s new? Why, I thought you’d never ask!

• Up to 8 players can now duke it out for wizardy supremacy.
• Numerous bugs have been fixed, especially around mounted wizards.
• Computer controlled wizards are now available, and can be mixed and matched with human players just like the original. They’re currently not the smartest tools in the shed, but they’re able to cast all spells and use all units reasonably effectively.
• The code has had lots of inline documentation added, and the dependencies are almost entirely up to current versions (with the exception of Phaser, which introduced some breaking changes in recent versions that I need to catch up with).

You can follow along with the updates, check out the source code, raise issues or even contribute on the Github page here: https://github.com/lewster32/archaos

The game has also now been listed on Open Source Game Clones, so thanks to ju5 for doing that! It also has a listing on https://chaosremakes.fandom.com/wiki/Archaos which I’ve dutifully updated a bit.

Well, here we are near the end of 2021 and what do I have but… a beta release of Archaos! Yes, that’s right, the game I’ve been working on most of my adult life finally gets a public, playable release!

This iteration has taken just over a month from start to beta, and I’m pretty happy with where it is right now. There are of course bugs, inconsistencies, and annoyances, as well as some big missing features (computer opponents and multiplayer being the ones I feel most will point out) but I hope to address these in time.

If you want to play it now, you can do so here: https://www.rotates.org/archaos/2021/

It currently has no network multiplayer or computer opponents (things I plan on addressing in due time) and has some bugs and inconsistencies, but I’ve managed to have a decent amount of relatively ‘vanilla’ experiences now playing the game on my own.

The source code is also public, available at my Github: https://github.com/lewster32/archaos – please do feel free to report any bugs or requests features etc. on here, and I’ll do my best to get around to them.

Thanks for holding on there, it’s been a journey.

More soon…

As it stands, I need to do a partial rewrite on the client, as some aspects of it (mainly legacy stuff from last year) have become unmaintainable. Sounds drastic but I assure you this is only a minor setback; lots of Archaos is done and working to my satisfaction (the server for example is in a pretty good state at the moment, and the implemented features are working very efficiently) however the rigours of dealing with stateful asynchronous stuff all over the place (via the network, player inputs, waiting for animations and so on) combined with the lack of any kind of pattern have led to a game which as it stands is becoming near impossible to debug. Action must be taken, and that will begin with the application of a proper MVC pattern to the client game code.

In order to continue to be able to work on Archaos, I’ve taken on some web jobs (which bizarrely appeared totally out of nowhere from friends right as my savings were about to dry up) but this is a temporary thing and as soon as they’re done, I’ll be back onto Archaos and aiming for a beta release.

I can only apologise for the seemingly endless false starts and broken deadlines for those of you who’re following this project – it’s embarrassing to keep having to explain myself. My focus is however still solidly on getting Archaos finished and released, and then getting to the bit I’ve been really looking forward to; extending the game through new modes, features, spells and units!

Stay tuned!

I’ve spent a fair bit of time testing the system and comparing movement ranges with the infographic posted previously. Due to some discrepancies with the way the original game handled non-flying movement, calculation of a non-flying unit’s range isn’t trivial – and when you throw in obstacles and danger of your unit getting engaged, the efficiency and accuracy of the pathfinding system becomes vital. I may still need to tweak it a little further but at the moment I’m very happy with the results.

Ease of interaction is one of the top priorities of the game; if the game’s controls aren’t implemented correctly, it could quickly get very annoying – for instance, if it was easy to accidentally move a unit to the wrong position. This is especially important when dealing with mobile devices, which offer less feedback and less accurate interaction methods.

With this in mind, all actions carried out in the game must be confirmed, either by tapping twice in the same spot, or by tapping the ‘confirm’ button which will appear once you’ve tapped to express your intent. This method seamlessly works between mobile and desktop, with intent on the desktop being indicated as you hover your mouse over the board.

The database server, client and game server respectively.

The second addition is a solid database-driven server. Until now, as a temporary solution I’d been storing all of the game data in a single file. When the server opened, it read all of the users and games from this file, and then stored all of the data in memory. If the data changed, the server would periodically save the entire file back to disk. The server would only write the data to disk if it had changed, and only once every so often – this kept writes to a minimum. The solution was fine for small scale testing, but it would not have scaled up well – quickly consuming all of the memory in the server machine, as well as being difficult to manage.

Now all of the data is stored on a mongoDB server in essentially the same format. The game server is then only responsible for the manipulation of the data, and not the storage and management of it. The game server itself is relatively simple in its approach; when a user sends an action, it loads the game, determines if the action can be performed, and if so what the outcomes are. It then saves the changed game back to the database and sends the actions to all of the connected players (which it does via TCP). The game server never keeps games, users, units or anything else in memory for longer than it needs to check or manipulate it. There are no special objects or instances; every function works only on the raw data. I may introduce some caching to reduce database operations later but at this stage the setup is fairly efficient.

So, I have what I feel is a solid base now, I’ve got some of the actions in and working (such as creating, joining and leaving games, unit movement and engagement) and now it’s just a case of writing the client-side stuff for the remaining actions, adding in the spell system and then getting it out there for public beta testing!

Look out soon for another post on the spell system and how I intend to tweak it to provide a more balanced start to each game.

I won’t lie, Feathers has been difficult to get my head around – it seems to be an excellent library once you’ve sussed it out, but it’s not well documented (relying mainly on examples rather than proper documentation, and leaving you to even look at the library’s code itself to figure some things out) and took me a long time to get comfortable with. The upshot is I now have a very nice, fast, flexible native-feeling interface to Archaos which will work the same on all platforms.

You can see a short video of me demonstrating it on my desktop below – and you’ll just have to take my word for it that it works just as well on a mobile device

None of what you see here is mocked up – the games you’ve joined or created are being retrieved from the server, and their details are being displayed. The isometric mini-map shows a real-time view of the game, and will update even while you view it from the lobby.

More features will need to be added to make the lobby fully featured, such as an interface that allows you to add friends (and so see their newly created games and join them), the ability to sort and filter the games by various criteria and of course the ‘create new game’ screen itself, where you’ll be able to set things such as the board size, maximum number of players, round/turn lengths and so on.

One last thing – I had a discussion with one of my friends about Archaos and realised that the words I was using to describe various things didn’t make sense. Because of this conversation I’ve settled on the following:

• Board: The rectangular grid upon which the game is played.
• Unit: A piece on the board, be it a wizard, wall, creature or corpse.
• Turn: An individual player’s ‘go’ – i.e. selecting a spell, casting a spell or moving his/her units.
• Phase: The three distinct gameplay segments, consisting of spell selection, spell casting and unit movement. Technically a fourth non-playable phase happens after spell casting and before unit movement, in which gooey blobs and magic fire spread, magic wood and castles/citadels may disappear and so on. Other phases may be introduced with new game modes.
• Round: One set of phases, beginning in Classic mode with spell selection, and ending after the last player’s turn in the unit movement phase.

This means that each round has several phases, and within each phase each active player has a turn. Not all phases force the players to take turns one after the other – the spell selection phase will allow all players to select their spells together, and the phase will only end when either all of the players have selected a spell (or cancelled) or the time runs out for that phase. The spell casting and movement phases that follow will work as normal, with every player taking their turn one after another in the correct order. Timers here will work on an individual’s turn, so each player will have (for instance) five minutes to cast their spell, before the game cancels their turn and moves on to the next player. The same goes for the movement phase’s turns. All of this will of course be configurable upon creation of a new game.

Pardon my Polish…

I’m not sure yet whether or not this font will go into Archaos however I’m happy to provide the font free for all to use as they wish – though giving Julian Gollop credit for the design of the original font would be encouraged, naturally.

Anyway, you may download the font below.

Chaos Sans v1.0

Question is, can you name them all?

Above are 51 spell icons rendered in glorious colour, and in no particular order. The borders are colour coded to help identify their type and use, though when implemented into the game, they will also come with a name, description and stats where necessary.

The alpha now has (nearly) full combat and movement, so the next step will be adding the spell phase. With a bit of luck this should happen in the next day or two, after which a very nearly full game can be played.