Spells, Decks and Hands

In the original Chaos you had a random selection of spells and the first thing you had to do was plan your spell strategy. Do you try to push towards Chaos or Law? Do you start with defensive spells, or go for an early attack? Maybe start with easier spells, or perhaps a big illusionary creature? The random selection made decisions different and interesting with each battle.
For Chaos Reborn there will be a Classic Chaos mode which retains this random spell selection, but in the single-player kingdom mode things work a little differently. As you explore realms you will find Spell Books, either as a reward for winning battles or available for purchase in towns and citadels. If you  reach a wizard tower you can learn the spell contained in the Spell Book and it is added to your Spell Library. One of your wizard's most important attributes is Spell Memory, which determines the number of spells you can take into battle. Before a battle begins you can select spells from your Spell Library up to the limit of your Spell Memory, and take them into battle. This is all well and good, but it does remove the interesting combinations that may arise from random spell selection. Perhaps it will result in players sticking to a preferred set of spells and a preferred sequence of casting, which may make the game less interesting from the point of view of variety of game play.
One possible solution is to have another attribute - Ready Spells - which is a small random selection of spells from your Spell Memory. This could be an attribute of the wizard's staff. When you cast a spell from your Ready Spells, another one from your Spell Memory is randomly selected to replace it. This would mean that your carefully planned Spell Memory is not so predictable, and could make things a bit more interesting. It would also make spell casting choice a bit more manageable, especially if the Spell Memory is large. Basically, this makes the spell system analogous to Magic the Gathering and other CCGs:

• Spell Library = card collection
• Spell Memory = deck
• Ready Spells = hand

As your wizard gains levels the Spell Memory can be increased. It is possible that it will get quite large, in which case having a limited 'hand' of spells during battle might well be a good idea. If the Ready Spells size is a function of a wizard's staff, then the player can experiment with different staffs with various bonuses and attributes, including the Ready Spells value.

Original X-Com concept art

Here are some of the screenfuls of sprites that John Reitze created in the very early stages of development for UFO/X-Com in 1991. Thanks John for keeping these for so many years!

Some thoughts on GDC

This years Game Developers Conference in San Francisco was absolutely fantastic for me. I got to talk about X-Com nearly 20 years after making it, thanks mainly to the success of Firaxis Games reboot released last year. The first time I attended GDC was back in 1995 in Santa Clara. The big thing that year was the launch of DirectX. Microsoft hired out the whole of the Great America theme park for a conference and party to woo all the skeptical DOS diehards to Windows 95, and I went every year after that until 2000.
The interesting thing about GDC was that you always felt at the leading edge of things to come. The 'next big thing' dominated the proceedings, with attendance at certain lectures overflowing if the topic was in tune with the zeitgeist. Some things didn't work out though. In 1996, the next big thing was CD-ROM, and rather amusingly Hollywood tried to muscle in on the industry claiming that the new era of CD-ROM meant that people would only be interested in interactive movies, and only Hollywood new how to make them. Hollywood failed, of course, and nothing was heard of this the next year. In 1997 it was RTS games with packed lectures on pathfinding. In 1999 it was MMOs, with a significant number of attendees working on, or planning to work on, an MMO.
This year, however, there was no readily apparent next big thing. Indie games and indie developers were bigger than ever, but I think this was only a continuation of last year. The Oculus VR headset was incredibly popular, but otherwise there wasn't much interesting on the hardware side. There was not much sense of excitement about the impending new consoles either. If I could nail anything down as the next big thing it would probably be the future total domination of the 'free-to-play' business model, or F2P, to use the trendy abbreviation. I have generally been skeptical about this approach, because most games using this model are truly awful. However, I did enjoy play League of Legends and did not find its approach exploitative or unfair, so it is possible to implement it well. There was an F2P summit at the start of GDC which included some very useful and thought provoking lectures. I am coming to the conclusion that Chaos Reborn will need to implement an F2P design, but if it does there will be a 'Classic Chaos' mode based on the original game which will be entirely free with no strings attached.
One other encouraging trend is the rise of so-called 'midcore' games. I am not sure whether anyone has a clear definition of what a midcore game is, except that it lies somewhere between 'casual' and 'hardcore.' Perhaps is an indication that the flood of casual games players in the last 10 years is maturing in some way, or perhaps it is just a side-effect of the rise of F2P. I am not sure, but I think Chaos Reborn, with its simple, accessible game play coupled with depth and variety, would probably appeal to the 'midcore' audience.
Perhaps the only defining thing about this year's GDC was its diversity. Apparently, one of the most interesting sessions was '1ReasonToBe' - a panel discussion with women involved in the games industry. Unfortunately I missed it, but it concluded with a standing ovation following Brenda Romero's closing remarks. She subsequently resigned as co-chair of the IGDA women in games SIG following the employment of scantily clad women for the IGDA party. Brenda wasn't the only person to complain about this. It is probably a sign that the games industry is maturing slowly, with its traditionally sexist practices being challenged for once.

You can watch the X-Com postmortem here, and an interview with me and Jake Solomon, the designer of the new X-COM.

Some terrain concepting

Here are some pictures, taken from the engine, of two different directions I've tried with the terrain.

The first one has detailed grass and rock textures, all painted and stylized, and bright outlines for the hexes, with a fairly dark and toned down look all around (the creatures are very highly saturated, and colorful, and they need to be the main attraction). The tile geometry here was the simplest hexagonal shape possible. I've also made a simple rock with a rune, cause that's cool.

And here's another way, more amorphous tiles, more detailed geometry, dark outlines for the hexes formed by the unevenness and gaps between them, and geometric looking texturing. Here I put some giants in the engine too, two of them are locked in fierce battle, another one is climbing up one level.

Both ways are preliminary looking, and there's very little trees, rocks, and other detailing objects done yet, so they look a bit barren. I'm still thinking about which direction to push more forward, keeping them open for the time being.

3D Spider with color variations

Some color variations on the spider, these are also already from the engine in Unity. What colour should the spider be?

3D dwarf

Here's another model from Felix, quickly put into pose. Some little texturing was used also, and as you can see, it's pretty close to the original concept.

New Member of the Art Team

I would like to introduce you to a new member of the team. He has written a few words of introduction.

"My name is Felix Romosan, a fan of Julian Gollop’s games for the past 2 decades, and it’s my privilege to contribute to the Chaos Reborn project as a 3D modeler. I have worked on various open source projects, remakes of classic games, 2D & 3D modding, and for the past 5 years I have been a part of Newerth, the team developing Savage XR, an innovative RTS+FPS hybrid."

Welcome Felix! Here is his first effort - the Giant. It is rendered with our special shader in the Unity engine, so this is fairly close to how it will appear in the game. Texturing has still got to be added, though.