• 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.

I’ve of course been playing with Persevere and absolutely loving it. Part of the big delay with ‘the Chaos remake’ has been the complexity of creating a robust way to get data from the clients to the server, and for the server to remember that data and be able to process it in the same way. Well now, thanks to this fantastic piece of kit, I can do all of that. Each server instance is a live JavaScript interpreter, with its own persistent object storage database – i.e. objects created are both accessible at any time, and saved.

What does this mean? Well, with the help of haXe (another brilliant tool) I can now write the code for the remake in one language, and ‘compile’ various parts of it to different platforms. I can write most of the game logic and other critical stuff and then have it work the same on the server as it does if it was just running on your own machine – and Persevere will make sure that it acts in that same ‘in-memory’ persistent way.

There are other projects on the go which I’m going to use as testbeds for Persevere – it’s not without possible issues, scalability being the big one at the moment, as one of my projects may end up being quite heavily used (one hopes anyway) and Java (the underlying tech behind Persevere) may not be up to that kind of task.

I can see Persevere being just the beginning of a whole paradigm shift for many parts of the internet into persistent object-based servers – it certainly doesn’t make sense with rich web apps to have to jump through all the current hoops and endure the inefficiences that go with the current ‘single shot’ model of web languages. Bring it on!

Oh and you may have noticed I’ve started twittering on a bit more. I’ve grown quite fond of Twitter now – so basically, follow me if you want to keep more up-to-date with stuff I’m doing.

Not much new information yet on my new version in development, but what I can say is that the first release will definitely include online multiplayer ‘out of the box’. Exciting times!