The inventor of Laser Squad and XCOM wants your help with a Kickstarter campaign to create a remake of 8-bit strategy classic Chaos.
Thanks to the recent reboot of the classic XCOM the idea of a turn-based strategy game being successful in the modern games world is not as impossible as it once seemed. But the original creator of XCOM, and spiritual predecessors such as Laser Squad, was not involved in the making of the new games. For years Britsoft legend Julian Gollop has been working for Ubisoft in Bulgaria, but now he’s striking out on his own again with Kickstarter project Chaos Reborn.
Originally released in 1985, Chaos: The Battle Of Wizards remains one of the classic strategy games of the era – and thanks to the timeless nature of turn-based games is still as playable today as it ever was. But Gollop is looking to expand and refine the game for a modern audience, and we caught up with him to talk about his new plans, his old victories, and the inherent dangers of using Kickstarter.
Chaos Reborn will be released on PC, Mac, and Linux. If it reaches its stretch goals Android and iOS versions will also be created. If you want to contribute to the Kickstarter campaign then the official web page is here. At time of writing it’s still got a fair way to go until it reaches its £180,000 goal – despite over 2,700 backers so far – so every pledge will count.
GC: A point I’ve made on the site before is that there are two very consistent problems with almost all Kickstarter projects: they’re very obviously rushed – presumably in order to try and reassure backers – and they’re invariably very short. In fact apart from FTL I don’t think any of them have been entirely satisfying as an end product.
JG: There is a tendency for developers to over-promise and be a bit too ambitious, and to underestimate the true cost. Game development is just extremely tough, there’s no two ways about it. If you back something on Kickstarter then yes, you are taking a risk. What you need to look for really is what’s the track record of the people involved making the project? What’s their experience? Have they developed games before? Does it seem like they know what they’re doing? Does it seem like they’re asking for a realistic amount of money, given the ambition of their project?
But a lot of Kickstarter backers are aware of the situation and they can spot things that are wrong with the project. So you’ll see that most projects are not backed – they don’t succeed in getting the funds. So it’s tough to even have a successful Kickstarter campaign. you need to be pretty convincing and compelling with what you’re offering and it’s not just the idea, it’s the whole package.
GC: You’re also planning to be on Steam Early Access, but that’s another concept I’m very wary about.
JG: Why’s that?
GC: Well, it’s fine for projects like DayZ, but I worry very much that it just gives major publishers another excuse to release unfinished games and charge people for them. And also… I’m very dubious about developers that don’t have a clear idea of the game they want to make before they start.
JG: Okay, that’s true. Developers should have a very good idea what their game’s going to be. And even if you’re delivering on Steam Early Access what you deliver should be high quality and should be fun to play. You need to be able to find the fun quickly. It shouldn’t feel like something that is so rough that it’s not going to be pleasurable for the people to play it. What it can do though is allow the developer to add to their initial version, and they can add features and scope to the game while maintaining a highly playable and fun version of the game with each release. That’s the way it should be done.
Of course it doesn’t always work out that way and one of the highest profile problem projects, which has gone through Kickstarter and Steam Early Access, is Peter Molyneux’s Godus. Probably the mistake they made is that they didn’t have a very good idea of exactly what the game design was going to be like from their Kickstarter, and their Steam Early Access version really wasn’t suitable to be released. They hadn’t found… the fun. Where’s the entertainment value in what they released?
GC: He demonstrated the game for me and at the time all he was going on about was how enjoyable clicking and tapping to change the landscape was. And then that’s the first thing they change…
JG: Yeah, ’cause he’s now had to deal with the feedback from the people that have actually played the Early Access version.
GC: You shouldn’t need for someone else to essentially buy your game in advance to discover it’s no fun.
JG: Well, it probably wasn’t so good for the players that had to play through the early version. [laughs] But you could argue it might still succeed in putting the game on track before they go too far in the wrong direction. He said recently that he’s trying to correct it and he’s trying to improve it, so let’s see if he manages to do it. So there is a risk on the developer’s part, where if you lose the goodwill of your supporters then you are in serious trouble.
GC: And as a result of that I worry that being beholden to fans is potentially an even more poisonous relationship than the traditional one with publishers.
JG: Well, it does all depend on the relationship with the backers. Take another example… the Double Fine adventure. Now Double Fine are very good at keeping their backers up-to-date with very regular updates, they explain what’s happening… Of course they had the problem where they ran out of money and they said to their backers that they’re going to split it into two. Now that could’ve gone really badly wrong for them but it didn’t because they had a good relationship with their backers and their backers were happy with what they got to start with.
GC: Then again Broken Age was good… but I wouldn’t say it was great. And those twin problems, of being rushed and very short, were very much evident. Are these things that you’re specifically trying to guard against?
JG: From our point of view we try to mitigate against some of these risks. In our game we have a lot of procedurally-generated content, so we don’t have to hire a small army of level designers. This is one of the interesting things you can do with strategy games, is that you can have algorithms that generate arenas, and generate adventures, and generate NPC; to give players that variety of experience and value for money, even though we’re not spending huge amounts of money employing people to create this content.
GC: OK, well judging by your Wikipedia entry, which I know I shouldn’t do, your first game was Time Lords in 1983?
JB: Yes, that’s right.
GC: So how old where you when you made that? I’m guessing it was on the Spectrum?
JB: No, that was actually on the BBC Model B microcomputer! So how old was I then? [Thinks for a bit] I was 18-years-old.
GC: I’m always a bit confused in terms of your brother’s input with each game. He seemed to be quite heavily involved in the late ’80s and early ’90s?
JB: Yeah, he was the main programmer basically. I originally brought him on board as a programmer at Mythos Games and the first thing he worked on was a conversion of what I already had done on the Spectrum, so he did the Commodore 64 version of Laser Squad. And on XCOM he was the main programmer, and he did the difficult stuff like the Geoscape, which for the time was quite an innovative piece of programming – an entire 3D-rendered world view which you could rotate and spin round with the sun rotating around the Earth. So he did the most tricky bits of the programming…. I did a lot of the programming as well but I was more focused on the game design.
GC: Is he not involved in the games industry any more?
JB: No, he’s not.
GC: So back to the very earliest days, I’m guessing maybe table-top games were a big influence?
JB: Oh yeah! Board games, table-top miniatures games, these were things I was pretty obsessed with when I was a teenager. Interestingly, Chaos Reborn is based on a game I made in 1984 which in turn was based on a board game I made in 1982. I made a game with cards and stuff, which was actually inspired by a Games Workshop game called Warlock. And Warlock was played in a games club at school, and a bunch of boys were playing it but they never let me play and they never let me join in.
So I watched them playing and thought, ‘What the heck, I can make my own wizard game. Screw them!’ [laughs] Which is precisely what I did, and the game I made was a great hit with friends and family – and that was kind of the main inspiration to make a computer version in 1984, which was then released in 1985 as the original Chaos by… Games Workshop!
So I was very much inspired by board games. I still play them and I still love them. I still think they’re the best gaming experience, to have a group of friends around a board game for an evening. It’s just fantastic.
GC: It seems that much of what you’ve worked on in your career has not really been limited by technology, because it’s turn-based. But you have had some experience with real-time games, haven’t you?
JB: XCOM: Apocalypse had a real-time system, which I think was OK. It was interesting. And also we made a game called Magic & Mayhem, which was a real-time game. I do enjoy working on other styles, I do enjoy other games, but I do still kind of come back to turn-based games… I find them more like pure gameplay. You don’t need any arcade skills with the mouse, you don’t need dexterity, you don’t need to fight with the interface just to be an effective player.
But with Chaos Reborn I’m trying to overcome some of the reputation for turn-based games for being rather dull and slow; and this is something that worked very well with the original Chaos. is that you could have a multiplayer game with three or four players and it would be over relatively quickly and it would be great fun. So I want to retain that feeling with the new game.
GC: Just before we get into that, how did you end up at Ubisoft? And why did you leave?
JG: After Laser Squad Nemesis in 2002 I got married and decided to move to Bulgaria and take a break from game design and development, because it can be very intense. But I really missed working with a team of people. I like to work with creative people, I like to work in a team, I like to bounce ideas off people, I like to get feedback. So when I heard that Ubisoft was opening a studio I immediately applied to be a game designer there.
When I joined Ubisoft in Sofia in 2006 the studio wasn’t very big, about 30 – 35 people, and the first project I worked on was ChessMaster for Nintendo DS and PSP. And again I had this hankering, this desire, I guess this underlying passion, to make turn-based games. So I did a pitch to the Ubisoft editorial board which was ‘Ghost Recon meets XCOM for Nintendo DS‘. They went for it, which was great, and eventually this became a 3DS launch total and it was the second-highest rated 3DS launch title out of about 18 titles.
And I realised at that point that there’s still a way to go in this genre to make turn-based games that are really appealing. And the reaction that we got to Shadow Wars, from the people that bought it, was almost universally favourable. Apart from the storyline and characters, but we didn’t have much control over that!
I was actually greatly inspired by the Advance Wars series on the Game Boy Advance and DS. I don’t know if you’re familiar with those?
GC: Oh god, yes. Those are amongst my very favourite games ever.
JG: [laughs[ And so I began to think that handheld is now the refuge, if you like, of the turn-based strategy game. Because the PC had long been taken over by RTS games. That's why we did Rebelstar for the GBA and why I wanted to do a good turn-based game with Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars. I still have an enduring affection for Nintendo's handheld consoles, mainly because of the games I was playing on them.
So, after Shadow Wars I worked on Assassin's Creed III: Liberation for the PS Vita, as the creative director for the year. Which was a very interesting project. But after that I took some maternity leave, as although my children were approaching a year old my wife was becoming a bit exhausted trying to cope with them on her own. So I decided to take break and think about things, and help with children.
And that's when I decided that I really wanted to go back to working on turn-based games, because it looked like I wouldn't have another opportunity at Ubisoft to do that. And so I picked as my next project a remake of a game I hold in great affection, which is my original Chaos.
GC: I have to admit, of all your best-known games I’m least familiar with Chaos. Purely because it wasn’t on the Commodore 64 and I didn’t have a Spectrum.
JG: The thing about Chaos is you’ve got this random selection of spells and these spells really define the contents of the arena. Because you start with a completely empty arena, but it soon fills up with trees, and goo blob, and magic fire, and all kinds of creatures. And every game is different, every game has got some kind of unique thing going on, which is partly because of these random selections of spells and the fun stuff that you can try and do with them.
So while Laser Squad is more of a measured, calculated game Chaos is one of changes of fortune, some wild risk-taking – if you don’t play it well that is – and just plain honest-to-goodness fun really.
And at some point in the late ’90s I started getting requests from people to ask if they could have permission to remake the original Chaos, and these requests started building up. By the early 2000s I was getting between five and 10 requests per year. And to date there is around 35 remakes that have been made publicly available, many hundreds more that have been attempted. Some that I’ve never heard about – I talked to a guy from Pelit magazine in Finland and he says, ‘Well, actually there’s a Finnish version of Chaos’ but I’d never seen that one.
So obviously the game still has some appeal, and it’s endured over time. In part because there’s nothing else quite like it. And this is one of the things that made me think maybe there is something to this game that I can bring back for the modern age. Whereas in the original you had eight people huddling around one ZX Spectrum you’ve now of course got the Internet for multiplayer, and you’ve got modern graphics systems which can make the game look quite interesting and nice.
And the other thing I’m going to do is add an interesting single-player element while maintaining the original fast-playing and quick battle system. The single-player game will expand it with a whole exploration meta game and role-playing game.
GC: It’s interesting you should mention Advance Wars, because the problem with that of course is that there’s nowhere else to go with the sequels. The game is already perfect and you’re in more danger of spoiling it than improving it with a new game. Do you worry you have a similar problem with Chaos?
JG: [laughs] Well, I’m not up to the fourth version of Chaos yet. But the first thing I did was go back and play Chaos, and try and identify what in the core mechanics is fun and makes it really work. And then to preserve the core mechanics of the game and then add elements that add some more tactical interest and variety, without taking away from the simplicity and fun that were in the original mechanics. So that was my objective.
So, for example, in Chaos Reborn the magic system is basically the same but we’ve added some terrain so you’ve got different layouts of arenas – which will be procedurally-generated. And you’ve got different levels of elevation in the terrain, so you’ve got forests and hill, caves, ruin, citadels, and so on. So this will add a bit of the variety to the tactics because some arenas might be quite confined, some more open. Some might have lots of high elevation, which might be suitable for flying creatures or ranged combat creatures.
So that’s one thing I decided to add, but the other thing is more spell types as well. And that builds on the intricacies of the spells and synergies and relationships between them. Then to add to some multiplayer game modes that will add some interest and variety to the gameplay. And then the single-player I wanted to use a lot of procedural generation as well. You start as a lowly wizard with a small selection of spells, but then each day you have the opportunity to explore one or more of these realms.
You enter this realm, which is populated with different environments and towns, and you have to explore this realm and defeat the wizard king. And at the same time you’ve got things that can help you on your way. You’ve got your artefacts and equipment; you can acquire more spells, you can use experience points to level up your wizard and your equipment – so it has a RPG system there which gives players the opportunity to explore lots of different things in the game.
And players can also help each other with co-op play. Co-op is something I’ve always enjoyed, especially co-op play against a powerful AI opponent. So what you can do in this single-player mode is you can invite friends to join you in battles, to help you defeat particularly difficult enemy wizards, or enemy kings. And you can co-operate with each other by exchanging spell books and equipment and artefacts.
And then there are some interesting social aspects to the game. There’s a sort of feudal hierarchy in the Realms of Chaos. Although you start as a lowly apprentice you can earn your way up to becoming a Wizard Lord, which means he can act as a defender of a region in a realm for other players to encounter. And your wizard will be controlled by AI but you can give him some basic tactics. And so you have a sort of offline mode where your wizard will be encountered by other players and you’ll see how many battles he’s won – and if you do well it can help you qualify for the next stage, which is to become a king.
Now, if you’re a king you can actually design your own realms and populate them with some interesting challenges and enemy wizards and artefacts and stuff – and you can design the layout of the land. And the idea here is you want to create an interesting experience for the players, because the players will rate your realm on how much fun they had on it. So it’s not a question of making something extremely difficult but instead something that is interesting and enjoyable.
So you’ve got an element of user-generated content there, and if you do quite well at that this can help you qualify for the next stage – which is to become a demi-god. And that qualifies you to run a guild – we might call it something else but that will do to start with – but a guild is like a cult that is dedicated to one of the gods of the realms. So you dedicate your guild to a god and try and recruit members.
And within a guild you can assist each other by trading equipment and items, and you have guild rankings. Now as a demi-god you want your guild ranking to go up, and that will in turn help you to become a god. And if you become a god then you what you have is you have the power to bi stow blessings and favours on your followers. And that power itself comes from the number and quality of the followers that you’ve got.
GC: That sounds very interesting, but ironically it also reminds me of Godus.
JG: Yes, except in this case we might be able to implement it! [laughs] But that’s because none of this stuff is amazingly complicated. One of the principles I have in game design is that if you can find ways for different parts of the game to interact with each other without them in themselves being too complicated you actually have a kind of emergent complexity in the system which the player eventually comes to appreciate.
It’s the same in XCOM, the original XCOM. None of the elements in XCOM were that complicated, it’s just the interaction between the battles, the research, the management of the bases, and dealing with the funding. That interrelation made the game what it is.
GC: Your games have always been perfectly accessible, in terms of controls and basic ideas, but they do take quite a while to become competent at. Is that a worry for you in the modern games market?
JG: It is, but we’re doing something interesting in Chaos Reborn to mitigate that. One of the reasons that the original Chaos was so popular is that the random factors in the game made it generally always possible for someone to win even if they weren’t that good at the game. Although of course a skilled player will win in the long term, over many games, with any particular game or situation there’s always a possibility a less able player might win the game. And I’m convinced that’s one of the reasons why the game was so popular.
GC: That’s interesting, because randomness has become quite unfashionable in recent years, with even Japanese developers increasingly moving away from it.
JG: That’s true. Because a lot of players who aspire to expert levels, they don’t like randomness because they want to control the situation. They don’t like anything that is outside of their control. So something that is completely non-random is probably only going to appeal to that small selection of players who just happen to be good at the game. Everybody else will be denied having so much fun.
For me this is the holy grail of game design, to get this balance between randomness and skill right. You’ll notice that some of the popularity of CCGs is down to this balance, so for example with Hearthstone the random factor is you don’t know what order your cards are coming out in. But as you say it has become more common to demand more skill and less randomness, which is perhaps due to the rise of eSports and playing games like StarCraft and online shooters.
GC: There’s also a desperation from certain mainstream titles not to make the player feel that they’re in anyway inadequate. They lower the requirement for skill and nothing is unfair and nothing is too hard.
JG: [laughs] But then another of the balancing factors with Chaos is that no battle takes that long, so even if you lose you’ve not wasted hours and hours of your time by playing something that was un-winnable.
GC: I also like the art in Chaos Reborn, it’s very striking and surprisingly reminiscent of the original without being too retro.
JG: I think that was done by one of our concept artists in Hungary, he’s called Robert. So, he’s done a lot of the original concept art. I’ve got an artist in Romania who’s helped on the project. They contacted me a long time ago when I was discussing how I could make the game, and I know a lot of people in the game development community here in Sofia and Bulgaria, so I’ve got some guys helping me here in Sofia as well . And they’ll become the core of my new studio if and when I manage to get it set-up.
GC: So if that works out, and Chaos Reborn gets funded, will you concentrate solely on making turn-based games?
JG: Yes, I would still like to work in that genre. I think there’s still a way to go to improve on what’s gone before.
GC: Is there a chance you’ll ever work on the new XCOM games?
JG: Probably not, no.
GC: You did have some contact with them though didn’t you?
JG: Yeah, near the end of their development.
GC: What did you think of the reboot in the end, as an impartial observer?
JG: I thought it was very well done. They made a game that works for a console audience , as well as a PC audience – which I think was very important. They had some great presentation. Fairly streamlined but still quite tactically deep combat system, nice character progressions, so overall I thought they did a very good job.
GC: Would you have done anything differently?
JG: Probably, yes! [laughs] I’m not saying I would’ve done it better but I probably would’ve done it different, yes. I still would’ve liked to have seen the algorithmically-generated tactical battles, because they have completely fixed maps.
GC: Yes, that was a shame. But Chaos Reborn sounds great, good luck with it all.
JG: Thank you!
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