As you may have noticed on Friday, Julian Gollop has announced that he’s working on a remake/sequel to the rather excellent ZX Spectrum title Chaos (from all the way back in 1985). That twitter-centric reveal didn’t contain much information, aside from the news in the sentence above, which is probably why Mr. Gollop has now launched a developer blog.
An early post describes why he’s chosen now to work on a new Chaos (“the game was very popular with its players”) and speculates that so many people have played the original because it was featured twice on Your Sinclair cover cassettes (that’s right, magazines used to carry cassettes sellotaped to the front). He’s certainly correct about that; my version of Chaos was courtesy of YS.
Today’s entry deals with the features Gollop hopes to implement in the new version. There’s detail of his plans for multiplayer (network play, different game modes, 1-8 players and possible co-op) as well as a summary of how he sees a single player campaign shaping up. Essentially, that would be a turn-based campaign map in which you journey from region to region battling enemy wizards.
The “big idea” with the campaign is that it will be “randomly, algorithmically generated”.
You can read more about the features in the full post, here. Forthcoming pieces will be dealing with creatures, combat, spell casting (lawful/chaotic) and terrain. Oddly enough, I have a fond affection for the simplicity of the original graphics, so I hope they don’t change too much.
