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.)
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.
Design looks and feels rewarding, but the players just sit there and do almost nothing for hours on end. No thinking required other than reading rewards coming at you that the game graciously pauses to let you read.
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?
"Not judging anyone here," then proceeds to list off every reason they are judging people who enjoy something they do not enjoy. Why is this always so predictable? "Not judging, but if you like this game you're a slack-jawed zombie who is wasting their life." Okay.
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
Wow, I'm not sure "not judging anyone here" is really working out that well ;), but different people live differently and have different needs & priorities.
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 :(
Is it possibile that the emotional dis-regulation comes from the stimulus of games/social media? That after the brain is used to the fast dopamine rewards not present anywhere in real life, everything else becomes boring/disbalancing? Drug withdrawal has similar effects.
Certainly possible to induce it, but I do not believe it's the only path. I do believe current consensus is that e.g. autistic people find need for emotional regulation as a baseline as well - but as with everything in sociology/psychology, it's hard to control the variables.
(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 :-)
Are we really so terrified of being alone with our thoughts for 30 seconds these days that playing ultra short games while waiting in line at a cafe is said without shame?
Your CG (AI?) trailer seems to be an homage to the propaganda reels in the Starship Troopers film. I believe StarCraft was inspired by the Starship Troopers book.
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.
Yes! Really nice to see people here at HN catch the Starship Troopers homage. These days many people's first reaction is Helldivers, which of course got that same tone from Starship Troopers too. And yes, the trailer was made with AI video tools.
nope, StarCraft factions (most likely) come from Warhammer40k.
- the Zerg (and its hivemind) are a version of the Tyranids [1]
- the Protoss are adapted from the Aeldari [2]
- the Humans are, well, Humans. with the ghost units being adapted from Psykers [3] and Marines being adapted from the 40k Space Marines [4]
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.
I've never played those mobile ad games and this scratched my curiosity. Now you're telling me they don't deliver and I'm curious again, how do they fail their delivery?
The games are different than the video. They just don’t deliver that experience at all. In 2026 it does seem strange as the cost of production of graphic and code is less.
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.
The game they're advertising for has absolutely no relation/bearing to the ads. At all. The actual game is more like an Advanced Wars-meets-Civilization/Risk boardgame type microtransaction-bleed-you-dry type game, you have to build a base and if you don't login every ~6 hours then people can take over your base and you lose/die, unless you pay ~$45/mo (or whatever). There is no scrolling arcade element of any kind in the actual game. This guy's game is brilliant tho.
There was a youtube video that analyzed those game ads and I think they found that the games being shown in the ad are mini-games within the real game.
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.
I have a feeling this game is made using AI but I am 100 percent sure it's not a one shot result of a prompt. Author worked on bits (no matter how) to make it good. AI games are demos. This looks like a finished product, not a demo.
Can you talk a little about the work involved in making this masterpiece. Could something like this be vibecoded today with AI in your opinion? Amazing work! I played Brood War every free second I had in my younger days.
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.
If you play as Raynor, you can warp in units with the E key. Just hit your timings and always warp in immediately when it's ready. Also, once the airstrike gets 3 stacks, always fire one off. Finally, every time a unit gets close to touching your firebat, press Q to stim them or whatever. This should take you to level ~44 as soon as Raynor unlocks.
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.
Is 20-30 authors per year making it big really worth the massive suffocation that prevents tens of thousands of authors from writing the stories that are in their hearts?
> Is 20-30 authors per year making it big really worth the massive suffocation that prevents tens of thousands of authors from writing the stories that are in their hearts?
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.
They do that anyway today. You really think authors, book writing being the lucrative industry for writers that it is, are suing Universal/Sony/whoever to prevent their IP being infringed?
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.
You really think authors, book writing being the lucrative industry for writers that it is, are suing Universal/Sony/whoever to prevent their IP being infringed?
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.
> It's a legal issue, and the legal part has always been bullshit regardless of which specific label happens to apply.
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.
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").
How about protecting assets for the people who made the art in the first place, geeze.
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?
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.
IP is not scarce, in the sense that you can have your own intelectual product that does the same than others, and you having and using an idea don't limit other people ability to have and use similar ideas. But one emerald mine is just one, and only one person can extract from it at any given time. Thus property laws as a replacement of stick-and-stone laws take place.
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.
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.
>but how is using StarCraft and its assets in your random AI game okay?
How is it not ok? What is the issue exactly? From what I can tell it's totally free, and has an indication it is a fan game on the bottom of the screen.
> How is it not ok? What is the issue exactly? From what I can tell it's totally free, and has an indication it is a fan game on the bottom of the screen.
Trademark violation. Trademarks protect consumers, not producers. Surely you can't be advocating for relaxing consumer protections?
Except it's not claiming to be official content and I don't see how it is harming anyone, or do you think the letter of the law is more important than the spirit of it?
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.
Just do like they do in Japan where you have Gundam fighting Pokemon, but you have to use a new, unique name for it. "Fighting Pon" instead of GundamXPokemon
> 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.
> Creators should be allowed to create things and sell them.
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.
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.
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.
100% a problem. but tight legal regulations never really work long term when technology overpowers it. AI is clearly exposing how fragile IP/copyright is and something a lot more extraordinary needs to exist for it to work properly. Perhaps cryptography related
Perhaps, but I'm curious about what the person meant by "it's always been silly that it prevents derivitive works". AI may have exposed something (although the photocopier could've exposed something similar, so I don't know yet what the problem is) but IP protections are definitely important. As you say, perhaps there will now need to be a way to better protect IP, but that comes with downsides too.
This does t make any sense to me. It just keeps marching and shooting. Are there even controls other than going left and right?
Is this the kinda ‘games’ ppl play on their phones now? It looks like those ads I see but wow… I’m confused
It's mostly about climbing the tech tree. Left and right determine which upgrades you get. I felt like it was a bit too easy, like I was trying to stack upgrades on units that I had many of but it wasn't clear how much this was helping.
No, sorry but you are deliberately trying to whitewash stealing. People got used to expropriate things from others and gain credit from it, pretending to be their intellectual project. How shallow :D.
Btw, why do you want to shit on them? When you haven't seen none of them? :D
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.
What does AI generated even mean, really? Because there is a pretty big difference between “make a star craft game” and a sequence of very specific small prompts to build it up. They are both AI generated, but will vary wildly in quality and implementation.
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.
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!)
This is the equivalent of asking an LLM for a new harry potter novel and then showing it off as if you wrote it, and it's disappointing that HN approves.
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...
Why should they instantly take it down?
They might take it down if they plan something like it or if there is a reason it might impact their business.
Otherwise why bother, they probably didn’t even notice this.
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.
Weird I thought the D2 one was genius. Genuinely a great game.
You probably didn’t spend more than a minute before dismissing it.
It looks much better on a big screen too.
Tale as old as time. The second half of what we now call the singular novel Don Quixote is actually the sequel to the original Don Quixote, published ten years later. In it the characters lament that someone published bootleg Don Quixote stories, which really happened!
Didn't expect to enjoy this as much as I did. There's something oddly satisfying about watching everything unfold and picking upgrades. The StarCraft nostalgia is a nice bonus too.
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.