Starcraft: Ashfall
starcraft-shooter-2026.pages.dev
starcraft-shooter-2026.pages.dev
Like many, I was frustrated there's no new StarCraft coming till 2030, so I half-jokingly made the mini-game those mobile ads always promise and never deliver. Something you can play with one hand, that your friends who've never played StarCraft can just pick up.(Turns out you can squeeze a lot of extra gameplay/design on top of it.)
Also, if you're going to copy Blizzard you might as well copy the whole package right, so there's a CG trailer too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVDao71LC7A
Honestly didn't expect people to grind this. I designed the endgame to be layer 50 and thought ppl can get at most ~70 if they really try, and somehow there are people on the leaderboard past 100 (without cheating). That's StarCraft players for you.
The majority of the game will still be timer based buildings/armies (so you pay to speed up) and egregiously p2w pvp.
But when that trend started back in 2023 or so, the game in the video was much more expensive to produce that what you actually got to play.
Supposedly the ads need to be based on some element of the game, so what they do is they make mini-games and use that as advertising material. It's all a tactic to get people to their actual game.
It's basically bait and switch.
Have you used the company's tokens to do this?
Where is the customer's software feature we promised?
(just kidding of course. Thx for doing this and thx to whomever paid for the tokens)
That said, higher order thinking about this thread makes me sad. Not judging anyone here, just sad for everyone who wants to sit there and remove hours of their life and attention for sound pings and moving pixels. I got into programming to make the machine do work for people while they use their brain on better things, not to be hypnotized into zombie mode till days, months, or years are lost. Especially years of peak brain time from really smart people. Does this happen when people lose purpose?
you mean the gamer public?
-Blaise Pascal, 1670
—Arcturus Mengsk, 2495
just sad for everyone who wants to sit there and remove hours of their life and attention for increasing shareholder value and moving bits in enterprise cloud environments
See it works both ways.
Note that for a lot of people, a period of emotional regulation with repetitive, low-intensity activity is literally what the doctor ordered. If you're not one of those people, you may not fully understand or have the empathy, so take it on a rational level then. While ab-so-lutely any activity can be used and abused, I don't think this is a strictly black & white binary proposition. And as something built on a lark (presumably heavily AI assisted), it's kinda cool and quite a bit more sophisticated than it has ANY right to be :-). I'm also shocker there are not cease & desist letters yet :(
(FWIW, I personally think of it analogous to psychosomatic side effect of allergies - I can be induced into sniffles by convincing me my pillow is stuffed with cat hair, and there's a legitimate underlying physiological thing :).
(and to clarify, I personally had about 2 runs of the above game before my brain caused stress/anxiety that I'm wasting my time and life is limited and I'm not using it productively and I'm not accomplishing anything meaningful aaaaaaack; not sure if that's ultimately healthier or not - clearly, spending time on hacker news doesn't trigger the same reflex :-)
Really fun tho. I had to stop myself from not playing for the rest of the day.
I don't recall if the original StarCraft CG trailers had nods to the film.
Also, I remember ordering a demo CD for 3D Studio Max and it came with videos of a few StarCraft trailers, presumably made with 3D Studio Max.
And the Zerg design always was inspired by it for sure.
The rumour is that Blizzard wanted to make a Warhammer game, but Games Workshop - the owner of the Warhammer IP - pulled out of the deal, so Blizzard modified their game's universe a a bit and called it WarCraft and later took a similar approach with StarCraft.
[1] https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Tyranids
[2] https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Aeldari
> The idea of armoured warriors in space – well that comes from classic SF like Starship Troopers
https://awesomeliesblog.wordpress.com/2024/05/26/interview-w...
You are correct on the tyrannies/zerg and elder/aeldari i agree
Could be a nice little game, though. Strip the IP and let the AI implement a bit more for the user to do.
wayyyy past my bedtime.
A few colossus for anti small.
Tempests and archons for splash
Stack anti armor like immortal and tempest and upgrade anti big damage
Terran units: tanks and Thor.
Keep 40+ zealots at all times
Upgrade recursive self improvement, most wild card options like bigger unit size , upgrade units when offered bonus 10% damage.
Battlecruiser upgrade : slow, guard, barrier, everything defensive.
Stack spells so you can spam them when you hit lane 47
Never fuse units
Works pretty hands free, zealots never need to engage until Lane 47 or 48 when a screen full of zerglings ended the game for me.
Would love some forum where people discuss this more, maybe with experiments.
Citing made-up cases sure looks like lying to the court, which is a punishable offense. Lawyers have been sanctioned, fined, and in one case received a 30-day license suspension.
Maybe it will, but this ain't a copyright issues, it's a trademark issue.
Copyright sucks, and Disney is bad etc, but how is using StarCraft and its assets in your random AI game okay?
I mean, creators should be allowed to exert control over how their assets and brand are used.
Because it's cool.
I hate to be glib, but no they shouldn't.
Creators should be allowed to create things and sell them. No one, whether the creator, or the company the creator worked for when they first created the thing, should be able to stop someone else from creating something.
I'm in two minds over this.
In a free for all, money wins. No small-money creator would get to profit from a truly great idea. Someone with more money simply copies it, builds it bigger/faster/better-logistics with more market budget.
At least let the creator sign over rights to their idea - even if the terms are unfair.
But once an object is in your hands. It should be free for you to do what you want with it for yourself. Deadmau5 legalities over his purrari should not be a thing.
if you feel so strongly about it share your wifes face so we can make pornos with it
See my sibling reply elsethread - you really don't want to be advocating for reducing consumer protections. You think you are advocating for a reduction in producer protections, but trademarks protect consumers, not producers.
Creative people should be able to create. Trademark/copyright laws, protecting assets for the great-grandchildren of who actually created the art, has never been a positive. The only people who benefit, are themselves not creative (or else they would create, instead of defending "rights" and "image").
And seriously wtf why shouldn't, like, Jack Kirby's grandkids get a share of the huge bounty of stuff he created for Marvel, but Elon Musk gets to inherit emerald mines from his dad?
If you feel that your idea is worth IP protection, just protect it as a trade secret, not as a patent or copyright. Very famously Disney have a copyright over drawing three close circles.
Limit IP laws to 20 years.
Humans go from birth to being released into the public domain as an adult in roughly that time. Why are ideas somehow not in the Public Domain after a generation has grown up?
That way Jack Kirby gets to make his money. Jack's kids can live off his money. But Jack's ideas are free to use after doing their time.
Trademarks benefit people - see my explanation in a different response to you.
Trademark violation. Trademarks protect consumers, not producers. Surely you can't be advocating for relaxing consumer protections?
Usage of the trademark is a claim to official content. That's kinda the point of a trademark. The Starcraft font and logo as presented on the screen is a claim to be official content. That the fine-print clarifies "well, not really" doesn't make the claim go away.
If you were allowed to use a trademark "Coke" and tack on "well, not really" in the fine-print, it's still infringement.
It's to protect the consumer who doesn't read the fine-print.
We don't want a situation where where have cans of "Coke" at the supermarket with a 2mm-high "not really" printed on the back of the can.
I think maybe this would have a lot more weight if he were selling this as a product, but he isn't
>It's to protect the consumer who doesn't read the fine-print.
I'm going to ask, protecting the consumer from what in this case?
Just because you give your crap away for free does not mean that you can fool the consumer into thinking it is someone else's crap.
The protection of branding is to protect the consumer against being deceived. The item being free or not is irrelevant.
Also, do you really want a world where big film studios can just adapt books of writers without compensating them?
I do really want a world however where fans/communities can riff on and make derivative works of culturally relevant material without being legally nuked from orbit. The last few weeks have been amazing in the gaming world, creativity abounds and there seem to be no limits as to what we can redesign to our own whims.
They don't do it anymore because the studios just pay for the movie rights upfront. The rights are cheaper than litigation, in many cases the studios only pay $100k, which is why it is news when they pay more than that.
I'm not sure if this is sarcasm, but just in case it isn't: I don't think anything is preventing people writing the stories in their hearts.
You are so far off-base I dunno if you're being sarcastic or serious.
Sure, Copyright might be bullshit, but Trademark is not!
Copyright protects the creator, trademark protects the consumer[1]. I sure hope that you aren't suggesting reducing consumer protections :-/
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[1] When a consumer buys a trademarked product, like Coke, or (in this case) Starcraft, they know what they are getting. If you remove trademark protections, then anyone can sell anything as anything else! For example, you would be able to bottle colored water into exact-replica Coke bottles, with exact same labelling, and you would be able to do it legally.
For example though, if you spend two years writing a novel and I change one word of it and sell it for half what you do, isn't that a problem?
I only played through it once, but I'm convinced I'd do better on a second run, and a third, etc.
It's classic EverQuest, in your browser, and it plays itself!
I guess you have built a lot of very creative and original games yourself? Feel free to share here so we can shit on them.
Besides, does it matter if a game is easy or hard if you enjoy spending the time playing it?
I have to pick a new upgrade every 3 seconds. I thought they did that to stave off boredom, but actually it increases decision fatigue. (I just wanna shoot!)
Looks to me like Immortal and Firebats both sucked for me, which I guess makes sense. Colossus, Siege Breaker and Marauder were my top 3.
Disappointed by the many lazy “game bad” comments on here; next time just don’t comment if you have nothing to add.
The AI games mashups are starting to heat up.
At least SC has satisfying effects.
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