Chaos Reborn, the new game by X-COM creator Julian Gollop, is now available for purchase on Steam Early Access for Windows/Mac/Linux, so of course I had to give it a mention.

For those not familiar, Chaos Reborn is a follow-up to one of Gollop’s first games, Chaos, made back in 1985 for the ZX Spectrum. It’s a turn-based strategy game where wizards duel by summoning various creatures and spells in a randomly-generated map, trying to become the last one standing.

Chaos Reborn is still under development, so of course it’s not feature complete, but what’s there is fully playable and pretty damn fun. The game currently features online multiplayer battles for up to 4 human players, both live and asynchronous, with free-for-all or 2v2 co-op. AI opponents and singleplayer is planned and will be coming in a later update (update: AI opponents and hotseat mode are now available).

Despite its “alpha” status, the game is already pretty damn polished. The art style is gorgeous, the UI very simple and intuitive, and you can easily pick up the game mechanics and get into a battle in a few minutes and it all runs without a hitch. I heartily recommend you give it a try.

Sorry for the news spam, I’ve combined all the posts into one to clean it up. Anyways here are the final results of the Extra Life weekend stream, for those that missed it.

Total stream time: ~20 hours
Total donations: $200

Day 1 recordings, featuring various DOS games and X-COM: Terror From The Deep nightmares:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

Day 2 recordings, featuring various DOS games and the less popular X-COM games – Alliance, Interceptor, Enforcer:

• Part 1
• Part 2

Highlights:

• When psi strikes back
• Alien closets
• The very large clusterfuck
• Stealth base run
• X-Com Alliance Prototype Screenshots

Extra Life is a video game marathon where gamers all around the world play games for 24h in order to raise money to support children’s hospitals. Last year we played a bunch of OpenXcom and raised a bunch of money and it was pretty cool, so I figured we’ll do it again this year!

However I am still terrible at planning things out, so take all of this with a grain of salt:

• I’ll be streaming this weekend (25th-26th October), starting at around 3-4PM GMT each day, taking breaks for sleeping/eating/etc.
• I’ll be playing DOS games, whatever takes people’s fancy, though it’ll probably end up being an X-COM game marathon since that’s what you guys expect from me. 😛
• I’ll have various online friends commentating with me, Warboy will show up as well when he’s available, so feel free to ask us about OpenXcom or whatever.

Here’s my Extra Life page where you can read more and donate at any time, and here’s my Twitch.tv page where I’ll be streaming. I recommend registering to Twitch so you can subscribe to be notified when I go live, and hang out in chat with all the cool kids (if you have trouble with the website, you can use their IRC).

Yes, we know the Mod Portal is down. No, it’s not just you, it’s down for everyone. You can stop telling us about it. There is literally nothing we can do about it. The mod site is unofficial, run by a third-party, is completely outside our jurisdiction and we can provide no support whatsoever. The same goes for mods in general.

In the meantime you can use the forums, all the cool kids hang around there, or so I hear.

By popular request, I’ve moved all the OpenXcom translations over to Transifex. Whether you’re an existing or new translator, you’ll need to sign up on the new website to be able to continue contributing translations to OpenXcom. I recommend starting out as Translators until your language team finds a need for the higher roles.

Note that the Git Builds don’t support the new translation system yet. Do not report bugs from trying to use the new language files with the Git Builds.

Some of the new features compared to the old site:

• User roles: For each language, there are Translators, which are allowed to suggest/vote/comment translations. Above them are the Reviewers, which can pick, edit and effectively “lock” translations, finalizing a given string. Finally at the top are the Coordinators, who accept/reject users, control their roles, etc. More info here.
• Looks shiny.
• Suggestion system instead of vote system so nobody unilaterally dominates a language.
• Search and filters that actually work.
• Better editor with support for plurals, comparing translations, string details, comparing languages, validating tags, etc.
• Notifications that don’t spam your inbox.
• Translators can download/upload files themselves.
• More features for translators to organize themselves like comments/forums/glossary/history/etc.
• And so on.

You can read more in the Transifex documentation. Feel free to use the built-in discussion systems or the Translation forum to work things out with other translators.

OpenXcom is old. It might not look it, after all, it’s only been around for like… 4-5 years? I didn’t remember to write down the exact date (protip: write down the date of all your projects in case they become smash hits). But boy, has technology progressed in those few years. When I started, there was no SDL2. No C++11. No GitHub. Managed pointers were a mere illusion (or I probably just didn’t know about them). A lot has changed in game development, to the point our codebase can look positively arcane to newcomers. I don’t blame you. Every decision at its time made perfect sense, but after a while you start questioning what 5-years-ago you was doing.

So a lot of people ask, how did it all begin? How did we get this far? How does a project like this just happen?

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