In December 2011 I started work on Chaos Rematch (working title). It was and still is intended to be an unofficial hybrid of the turn-based strategy game Chaos: The Battle of Wizards. At the time I was playing a remake of the original by Richard Quirk on Android. I loved it and decided I’d like to have a go myself. Now, while his version was very faithful to the original I wanted to do something quite different. I intended to borrow from the original concepts – enough to be recognizably a descendent of Chaos but very much modernized the user interface for touchscreen devices. So, I started to write some skeletal code for Chaos Rematch and some supporting libraries. Progress can in small bursts until lately. What changed? Julian Gollop announced he had started work on a remake of Chaos: The Battle of Wizards. See his dev blog here.

I should state something here: Julian Gollop is my hero. His games are my biggest inspiration. I found the Rebelstar games fascinating. I played Chaos until the tape was destroyed by a pet, possibly in a fit of jealously. I thought Laser Squad was the pinnacle of great gaming when it was released and then there was Lords of Chaos! Hah. Lords of Chaos was my favourite game on the Atari ST bar none. I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing it again and again. Really. It totally captured my imagination. I ended up writing many tools to compliment the game, including an editor to hack the saved games so I could extend the powers of the player wizard, creatures, enemy wizards and some map elements. The tools I had to work with weren’t great either. Ugh. AND THEN…UFO: Enemy Unknown! Oh my god. It blew my mind. I still play it today. AND all the others, like Magic and Mayhem and Laser Squad Nemesis, etc.

Anyway, so yes, I’m a big fan of Julian Gollop. Because of that I was excited when I heard he had started working on a Chaos sequel. It was also a shock. I imagined my own game being thoroughly eclipsed by his. Also, this kind of underlined it for me. He is thinking of calling it Chaos Reborn. . Because of this I’m now trying to get my game out quickly. I’m also considering different things to name it so that it won’t be confused with Chaos Reborn (any suggestions?)

A brief summary of what I’m aiming to achieve and how far I’ve got will follow soon. My current coding schedule takes me up to the new year, when I should have most things in place to start working on the core game itself.