Wow, thanks to whoever posted this! I made this game.

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.

Hi I posted it. I'm just a guy in the chat who saw it on YouTube.

Reddit thread from about a month ago where creator introduced this: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1wqdabw/i_made_t...

Wow someone made the youtube ad game!

There's also pinball and an asteroids-like game if you click the "Arcade" button next to where it says "Ashfall Crossing"

A shame if they don't recreate the Lost Viking game from Wings of Liberty itself.

cool, give me more

Cool visuals, but doesn't count as a game for me. Can you do anything that make sense, except selecting the upgrade?

Could be a nice little game, though. Strip the IP and let the AI implement a bit more for the user to do.

It’s actually very addicting once you play a couple of sessions. The scoreboard is crazy. Still don’t know how anyone makes it past wave (layer) 35-37.

I got around 42. Protos commander felt stronger for the effort.

It's like cookie clicker, with less clicking and more blood!

Once you get high enough you can switch commanders which gives additional upgrades and active powers.

I've been seeing a lot of Pokemon games recently as well, are companies just not enforcing their copyright/trademarks anymore?

They can't sue everyone, comrade. AI tools will hopefully trigger a rewrite of what copyright means, it's always been silly that it prevents derivitive works.

When it comes to copyright, I am not so optimistic. When the AI bubble bursts, the usual corporate interests will resurface with a vengeance.

> AI tools will hopefully trigger a rewrite of what copyright means,

Maybe it will, but this ain't a copyright issues, it's a trademark issue.

It's a legal issue, and the legal part has always been bullshit regardless of which specific label happens to apply.

Surprised to see this level of discourse here on HN, reads like a reddit comment.

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.

I've always found that defending laws that don't benefit people to be a stange attitude on a place called "hacker news".

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").

>Copyright sucks, and Disney is bad etc, but how is using StarCraft and its assets in your random AI game okay?

Because it's cool.

The number of conglomerates has, unsurprisingly, continued to shrink. It's long overdue for a rethink. Maybe if the US political system ever stabilizes, we might get to it in a hundred years. Until then Copyright sucks and Disney is bad.

> creators should be allowed to exert control over how their assets and brand are used

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.

Couldn’t they just use AI to sue at scale? No one should be too small to go after now.

The court system is too bogged up as it is with the current load. So I guess we’d have to create some AI judges and lawyers :p

Yeah the law firms just haven't caught up yet. But they will.

And when the judges get around to the case in 300 years after all the other ai court cases, we'll be beyond caring about the consequences.

Law firms are cautious about AI tools, they got burned a couple years ago by hallucinated citations.

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.

It's a totally original creation laundered through LLM derivative works.

they may well be busy surviving AI induced chain reactions letting lots of people out of work.

This is the second (probably vibecoded?) game in the last few days that I've seen using blizzard ip (the other being d2survivors.lol)

It's not a fun game, but it's cool anyway

Game basically plays itself but fun nonetheless

For 10-15 levels or so, then your upgrade choices start to matter.

I only played through it once, but I'm convinced I'd do better on a second run, and a third, etc.

The satisfying pop of the zerglings alone make it fun for me.

Saw Starcraft, spent 30 minutes living the nostalgia playing this.

Game crashes when trying to fuse units

THE MERGING IS NOT COMPLETE

You must build additional pylons

Fun game.

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!)

I did not touch the controls at all, and I still won with zero losses on the first level - that does not inspire confidence.

In snowball games like this, losing a unit marks the beginning of the end. As such, you really have to go out of your way to lose units in the tutorial.

controls aren't important, upgrade/tech choices are

Is this AI generated? Pretty impressive if that is the case

Definitely smells like ai. I don't think a human would spend so much time on the graphics and effects and not have streamlined the gameplay a bit.

The opposite would be correct. AI generated is the norm, and it would be impressive to spend xxx hours creating this when AI can do it in 4 hours

Assets are very easily duplicated because of the editor that ships with the game. Not as impressive as it would be if it were other games with more tightly-locked assets.

Great game. It took me way too long to figure out I could use keyboard to control the positioning instead of mouse.

So what's the meta?

there is no meta but what we vibe

I'm noticing that armor pen is super important later on. However, eventually get rekt.. I'm curious how the top person got to the layer he is in now. I'm stuck at layer 26.

It's nice to know Stimpack marines still roll face.

Ahhhh yeahhhh

That was pretty enjoyable. Definitely like the ads you see online but with IP people care about.

I was wondering why there was a dragon there, is it from Wrath of the Lich King?

Lots of fun! Wish StarCraft would come out every year

Too busy making the new StarCraft.

Ah, the music is so nostalgic. Really takes me back.

Big game hunters Terran vs 7PC zergs. Same feeling.

Cool game, but isn't this going to make blizzard bring out the big guns?

Great work on this, had a blast!

I did not make this, for the record. I just found it.

Perfect, who needed to be productive anyways

A mix of everything. Stolen from everywhere. We have AI, but people are still the bottleneck. They lack creativity and ideas :D. lol

Fun, but... how is this not already taken down by copyright strikes? I mean straight rips of audio assets, music, 3d assets, graphics, even the damn name...

This was really fun!

Holy moly, just hearing those sound effects gives me a giant wave of nostalgia.

Really cool game. Spent about 30 minutes playing it. Very fun!

Wake up, Hank. That game ain’t gonna play itself. Oh wait it does.

This is, respectfully, slop piggybacking on nostalgic associations with stolen assets.

nice game

See also: D2 Survivors https://d2survivors.lol/

The AI games mashups are starting to heat up.

so nice!

slop