• 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!

• Creating games
• Joining and leaving games
• Creating and moving pieces on the board
• Extensive move validation (bounds checking, path checking, engagement checking etc)
• A customisable turn/phase system (this has been an absolute pain in the arse to implement – but it appears to be working as intended now)
• Full JSON messaging system (you talk to the server in JSON and it talks back to you in JSON, there’re no sockets, special protocols or proprietary formats)

The Google Code wiki is somewhat out of date (already!) as things slot into place during development, and I’ll update it as things become more solid. I’m currently using a private SVN, though as the project nears a working first version (and if there’s any interest) I’ll be happy to give access to the SVN – there’s a lot of experience and expertise out there, and I’d greatly appreciate a second opinion on aspects of the code!

It’s dawned on me that I’ve been very secretive even about the name of the project, so I think at the very least I owe you guys that – so here it is!

I think this is slightly more pleasing than ‘Chaos Enhanced Enhanced’!

I’d also like to talk about the plans regarding its launch and features, because I’m taking quite a different approach to the norm. Early on in the planning I wanted to make sure Archaos could be playable by as many people on as many different formats as possible. The general idea I had was that I’d write the game in haXe and then generate the various sets of code for servers and clients from that one source, and ‘et voila’ I’d have a cross-platform game. Since then, I’ve spent a lot of time at work playing with various web-based JSON APIs, and I’ve watched some fantastic projects appear (such as node.js, Persevere and CouchDB) and realised that, in fact, Archaos’s core could live on the web as a data-based API.

It makes a lot of sense when you think about it – you have a scalable server with a scalable database, written in Javascript (a language which I simply adore), using JSON as its end-to-end data format, accessible by anything with a web connection. Being turn-based, it doesn’t need to rely on any complicated comet solutions, and (and here’s the really exciting part) you can make your own client in whatever language, format or platform you like!

I’m really big on open source and open web, and so it’s really exciting for me to think that, although I will still be creating clients in Flash and (with Flash CS4’s leave) for iPhone, there’ll also be a well documented API out there that can be used by anyone. You can easily have pure HTML/Javascript clients, text-based clients to run in terminal windows and so on – and no matter which client you use, you’ll be able to play Archaos with anyone else.

As I said before, I’ll also be making the server and client source available (though the server source will likely need a closed development phase after launch so I can work out bugs, security issues and exploits before I make it available to all) so anyone with a Linux box can host their own server – though I’m not quite sure why anyone would want to do this at the moment, as a server will handle many hundreds, or possibly thousands of concurrent games with ease, and take care of matchmaking, login and so on. In fact this area of development will probably result in the separation of the login/matchmaking master server from the core gameplay servers.

So, to summarise:

• My current work focus has shifted away from a unified client/server architecture, and my time is now being devoted to creating a robust HTTP-based server for Archaos.
• In tandem to the server work I’ll have to develop a client for testing purposes, and so the first client may be a simple HTML/JS or Flash visual interface.
• Once these are at a satisfactory level, I will announce a beta period to work out bugs, and then shortly after that I will release full API documentation for the Archaos server (which will have its own snappy name, already got a few ideas) and allow interested parties to get the ball rolling on their own clients.
• Finally, I’ll finish and release my own client for Flash, and hopefully soon after for iPhone.

As you can probably tell, I’m fantastically excited by this whole project; indeed I can’t see why this hasn’t been done before – though no doubt it has, and I’ve just not looked hard enough… I’d love to hear your opinions on all of this – and I’d also love to find out if other people have attempted something similar!

Edit: Looks like someone has thought of this – in fact pretty much verbatim! http://web.archive.org/web/20031129175919/http://www.openchaos.org/