| Submitted by , posted on 04 November 2004 |

Image Description, by Chaos Funk is a faithful remake of the classic spectrum game 'Chaos' by Julian Gollop. Chaos is a multi player, turn based, fantasy war game. Each player takes on the role of a wizard and attempts to kill the other wizards by casting spells or summoning creatures to attack them. Featuring up to 8 human or computer players Chaos is still a lot of fun to play with friends and each game is unique! Julian Gollop went on to create the X-Com series of games and also Laser Squad: Nemesis.
Chaos was placed into the Public Domain by Julian Gollop, and when this project was started there were no faithful and complete remakes available for the PC. Apart from a few bugs Chaos Funk is complete and very faithful. It features all the original spells and creatures from the spectrum version, as well as adding the extra spells from the Atari ST remake by Martin Brownlow. To ensure that the internal logic was accurate, relevant z80 code was analyzed by Chaos fans and equivalent C code was used to make routines such as spell casting, combat and the spread of growths faithful to the original game. The AI system was however built from scratch and plays a good game with a few quirks.
In developing Chaos Funk I wanted to be faithful to the original graphic style rather than having textured backgrounds or detailed creature graphic. However I also wanted to make things a bit more interesting, and so I used some neat scaling routines I had developed which were ideal for the graphic style of this game.
Every graphic in the game is either a recoloured 16 x 16 sprite from the original game, or a new 16 x 16 image I created. These images are then smoothly scaled in real time to create the display without pixelation or blurring. The bottom part of the image shows the standard view in which every graphic you can see is being stretched to 32 x 32 so the game runs nicely in a 640 x 480 screen mode (fullscreen or windowed). By clicking on a creature with the right mouse button you can literally zoom in on the sprite and see the relevant statistics for that creature (see the top part of the image for an example of this). The image scaling is very fast, enough that on a 300mhz PC the frame rate only starts to drop when most of the board is filled with sprites.
Chaos Funk also features a very flexible sound system so that players can implement different sound sets which can be made up of hundreds of different weighted sound samples.
The game is free and can be found at http://www.reflectedgames.com under the free games section. If you like the game, why not try my first shareware game Storm or some of the other shareware games on my site? Your support will help me develop cool new freeware and shareware games. :)

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