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A new major release has just dropped. This contains many fixes, QoL improvements and such, but the highlights are:

• 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!

It’s been a while has it not?

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.

With the aid of @andy_herbert, Pentacom’s online bitmap font maker and CR8 Software’s Type Light, I’ve managed to create a crisp OpenType version of the font from the original Chaos, with a few tweaks and the addition of a (nearly) full latin and eastern European character set.

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

As another little aside, I’ve hacked in some configuration for Chaos Enhanced. Use the form below to launch a game with your desired settings – though please note that this is an abandoned demo with missing features and bugs!

Forgive the awful form and jQuery... it was quick!

Hot on the heels of 0.6, now you can set offsets on a per-selector basis. This means you can alter multi-coloured websites in a relative way! Yay! Download it here.

Note the ‘styles’ item is now (correctly) called ‘attributes’.

Update: 0.71 quick bugfix release! Fixed not working in IE7 (boo!)

Sooner rather than later it seems, you can now download Rotates ColorShift 0.6 and bask in its amazingness.

The main change is how you set your selectors; instead of writing your own jQuery to target the elements you want to change, you feed rotColShiftOpts.cssTransforms with an array of objects. This is what Rotates.org uses:

[
	{
		selector: "a, h2, h3, h4, h5",
		styles: [
			"color"
		]
	},
	{
		selector: "#header, #searchsubmit",
		styles: [
			"background-color"
		]
	}
]

Actually it was a bit of a struggle, as I wanted to abandon the DOM-based approach to changing the CSS of every individual element, and go for a global stylesheet change. Easy you say? Just .append/.text a style element. Well, yes, in all decent browsers. Sadly, the IE family seems unwilling to let you tamper with the style element so easily, and jQuery (at the moment) has no elegant way around it. So out came the ‘Lew hacking pants’ with the following solution:

ieStyle = document.createStyleSheet();

$.each(rotColShiftOpts.cssTransforms, function(i, ttrans) {
	newColor = getColorWithOffsets(hue, saturation, brightness, ttrans.offsets);
	var tstyles = "";
	$.each(ttrans.attributes, function(i, ts) {
		tstyles += ts + ": " + newColor + ";";
	});
	tmpTransforms += ttrans.selector + "{ " + tstyles + " } ";
});

if ($.browser.msie) { // *sigh*
	ieStyle.cssText = tmpTransforms;
}
else {
	$("style[title='colshift']").text(tmpTransforms);
}

Anyway the result is that you a) get a better, easier to use syntax for applying the changes to page elements, and b) can be safe in the knowledge the styles will be applied to all elements on the page (even generated ones)  just like CSS should be. Enjoy!

I’m now officially on the war path with my Chaos remake; I’m chasing Julian Gollop, and I’m spending a lot of time planning the details of the server. It’s proving to be easily the largest and most complex project I’ve ever tackled by a huge margin, and so I want to get things right from the beginning, rather than turn the codebase into hacks supporting hacks.

As a result of the work I’ve been doing lately, I think it’s now safe to ‘release’ the unfinished, somewhat buggy original Flash version that I did a while back. It’s no indication on the way the new rewrite is going to look (the interface is as temporary as it gets, for instance) but it shows some of the ideas I’ve had – not least being the move to an isometric viewpoint.

Two turns in and it's already going nuts - ah I love Chaos!

Anyway, without further ado, here’s the link. There’s no real configuration, no multiplayer, and gooey blobs, magic fire and mounts can act decidedly strangely at times, and these bugs were the reason I abandoned this codebase – the main class alone had turned into a thousand lines of semi-procedural hacks!

As promised, I’ve added the slightly fettled version of ColorShift (as it’s now known – yes I’m English, no I won’t spell it ‘colour’ because I’m a webdev) to the site. Currently it’s in a pretty sorry state and only just works via the crutches of pure hackery that keep it standing…

… okay a bit melodramatic but you get the gist. Go get it!