Chaos Funk

Chaos Funk (2003, Reflected Games) is a straight remake for Windows developed by Richard Phipps. The graphics are based on the original Chaos sprites, but interpolated for higher resolution and with a dash more colour.

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, Phipps wanted to be faithful to the original graphic style rather than having textured backgrounds or detailed creature graphic. However he also wanted to make things a bit more interesting, and so he used some neat scaling routines he 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 Phipps 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.