14 DAY TRIAL // Before embarking on the Kickstarter journey for Chaos Reborn, Julian Gollop, the famed creator of X-Com, left the PC and worked his turn-based strategy magic on handheld platforms for over a decade.
He worked as an independent developer and as a producer at Ubisoft Sofia, where he focused on Nintendo's handheld consoles for the most part, platforms which for him where the last refuge of strategy gaming.
Before starting work on Chaos Reborn, Gollop last worked on Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars, a game shipped on the 3DS, that he pitched to the Ubisoft brass as "Ghost Recon meets X-Com for the Nintendo DS."
Apparently successfully so, as Nintendo handheld owners were keen on turn-based strategy gaming, with the likes of Advance Wars and Fire Emblem and other stuff like that being extremely well received.
Before Firaxis' announcement of the XCOM reboot, it seemed to Gollop that the PC platform was only open to a certain kind of turn-based strategy game, and that his vision on turn-based tactics would not be a viable one for the platform.
"Civilization is the flagship turn-based game, and PC-based strategy gaming was all about these complex 4X games and that seemed to be it, or maybe obscure war games perhaps if you were lucky. So until the recent Firaxis XCOM there wasn't really any turn-based game that could really break through and gain this hold, this popularity," Gollop shared.
But now he believes that things are starting to look up for the turn-based squad-based strategy genre on the PC, where the quality of recent games such as XCOM, The Banner Saga and Age of Wonders, as well as their varied content, will ensure that turn-based strategy games will reach a wider audience.
As such, he started the Kickstarter campaign meant to revive the classic strategy game which, he feels, has the most untapped potential out of all his creations so far.
The campaign is going great, and the necessary funding to create the base game has already been secured, with 18 more days to go in the process.
Chaos Reborn already has a playable prototype, using Unity and accessible in any browser. Gollop also expressed his views that Unity "really changed the landscape of gaming, because it has made this cross-platform development much, much more economical."
One of the stretch goals of Chaos Reborn is a version for iOS and Android tablets, and in time Gollop hopes that Unity will allow cross-platform play between the PC and tablets.
Chaos Reborn will most likely come out sometime next year, on the PC, Mac and Linux platforms.