The current version of the campaign can be downloaded here. Thanks to some great feedback, it has received a decent amount of polish, especially on the first 4 levels.


Chapter 1: The Grand Experiment



As you may have guessed, this is the single player campaign I've been working on. My grand design (and potentially overly ambitious plan) includes a massive 30 mission undertaking including fully scripted "Cinematic" levels where you sit back and watch parts of the story unfold. Much like the retail version, I'm splitting it into 3 chapters, one for each race. The Cinematic maps will not count toward the total of 30 missions.

This campaign will start you off as the Zerg, starring Duran, one of my favourite Starcraft characters. The main plot of this chapter is Duran carrying on his Hybrid experiments and will eventually introduce us to his sinister master, only known as the Dark Lord (yes, I have a name for him, but I won't reveal it until a later chapter).

This chapter will feature 10 fully playable maps as well as 2 or 3 Cinematic levels. While it mostly does stick to the old school SC "build a base, create an army, smash the computer's face in" formula, I've tried to create some variety to break the monotony, whether it presents you with completely different mission objectives or throws in a plot twist, hopefully it sticks to the tried-and-true SC formula yet presents enough flavour to present a worthy playthrough.



Specifications

-Players
• 1 (obviously). These are strictly single player maps.

-Map tileset
• Since it's 12 different maps for the first chapter alone, it uses multiple tilesets including Jungle, Snow, Installation, and Space Platform.

-Map size
• The smallest actual map is 128x128 and the largest is 256x256.



Storyline

To expand upon my opening paragraphs, you will be playing as a Zerg Cerebrate created by Duran as a temporary minion and guide Duran and his forces to victory in each mission, be it fending off a massive enemy attack on your space ship, investigating the ship itself for intruders, or simply hammering an enemy starfleet into space dust.

I'm designing the difficulty of the missions to hopefully be at least on par with Brood War, so hopefully most of them won't be too much of a walk in the park. With that said, in spite of my difficulty aims, the first few missions are still pretty darn easy.



Features

-Player Interface
• The game will always use a standard interface. While sticking very closely to the vanilla style, there are a few very obvious signs of using something other than the stock Staredit client, such as a few illegally placed structures and different player colours. With that said, don't expect to find any crazy square terrain, out-of-whack doodads, or stacking.

-What's new in your map that others have not done before?
• Hopefully this mapset provides a decent fanmade direction to the Starcraft storyline, picking up where Brood War left off. I'm out of touch with the mapping community, so I'm not sure how many Duran-inspired storylines there are floating around, but if it hasn't been explored in-depth as of yet, there you go.



Details

-Characters
• Duran will be the main protagonist.
• There are multiple antagonists that you come across throughout the campaign. The only one I'm giving away is Xianou, a Protoss Praetor bent on thwarting Duran's schemes.




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All 10 missions are functioning properly and are ready for beta testing. However, I still need a lot of feedback before I deem the campaign "ready". In the mean time, I will begin work on Chapter 2, the Terran campaign. I highly recommend you play the maps fully in order, otherwise the current map you're playing will probably make little sense.



Campaign Progress

-Missions
Z1 - Open Beta
Z2 - Open Beta
Z3 - Open Beta
Z4 - Open Beta
Z5 - Open Beta
Z6 - Open Beta
Z7 - Open Beta
Z8 - Open Beta
Z9 - Open Beta
Z10 - Open Beta

-Cinematics
Z3C - Completed
Z8C - Completed



As a final reminder, any and all feedback is greatly desired and appreciated as this is a Beta thread and will be until I feel all 10 missions and any extra Cinematics are working properly and are well-tuned. I originally began work on the campaign when I was 14, over 8 years ago, only to end up scrapping it on mission 30 due to the atrocious quality of the maps. Many years later, I started the project over from scratch only to have it snuffed out by the WoW bug.

I think it's high time that I at the very least get Chapter 1 out the door and finish what I start for once.

Feel free to hit me up on MSN as well (dartheldraganus@hotmail.com).

Post has been edited 13 time(s), last time on Mar 8 2010, 11:57 pm by Robotron.

I got some feedback for ya.

First off, the first mission was great. I loved the limited unit supply. However, I never used my marines. The only useful terran unit that I was given was the ghost. You should remove all other terran units.

You should place only as many Infested Terrans as there are Archons. I only used the infesteds to take out Archons, anyway. Therefore, if the player messes up and gets one of his infesteds killed, he has to find a different solution.

If you're careful, you can avoid losing a single unit. It'd be easier, actually, if you didn't have to worry about those crummy marines that just got in the way.

The second mission had problems. First of all, the enemies almost never attacked my western ramp. It was bothersome because that's where I stationed my siege tanks after the initial battle.

The Protoss base is almost impossible to crack. It took well over 60 hydralisks and probably over 72 Zerglings to finally destroy everything (not all at once; I usually attacked in waves of 24/24 or 24/12). Make the base more open to flanking. As it is, the computer has several chokepoints that they can use to their advantage, and it's nearly impossible to get in there. I suggest limiting their tech further; I was having difficulties since I couldn't access mutalisks and scourge. Removing the computer's access to Dark Archons and Scouts would help balance the map.

Oh, and I nearly ran out of resources. It would be wise to add a few mineral nodes here and there around the map.

I haven't started the third mission yet. It looks like it'll be good, though.

Thank you very much for the feedback!

I wanted to add those Marines in there to keep the Terran flavour (Duran has Terran mercenaries in the first 6 missions), and I couldn't really think of much else to put in there. Medics would be far too overpowered.

I've personally used the Infesteds to wipe out High Templars and Zealot packs, hence why I gave the player so many. I may take one or two out, though. I'm not intending the first mission to promote strict micro, but it's definitely something to consider.

In mission 2, did you find the expansion on the lower right corner of the map? You are also able to use Overlords as transports so you can Lurker/Hydra drop the side of the base fairly easily. I also recommend sending at least 48 Hydralisks in an attack. IIRC it took me two fairly strong attacks to take the Protoss down, but that was brute forcing the chokes. I had the computer run on an "easy" AI script and gave them 1 Dark Archon, so they shouldn't build more. Either way, I've disabled them. I'll also thin out their Photon Cannons a tad.

Hopefully that'll improve it. I can see why you'd have difficulty if you didn't scout out one/both of the expansions or push. Wimpy attacks of ~24-48 mixed Zerglings and Hydralisks won't get you too far in my missions, but I can see how the Protoss base may be unfair.

Mission 9 is coming along smoothly, about 1/3 of the way done I'd say. When I get it into Beta phase I will be uploading missions 4-6 to this thread. Once I get mission 10 in Beta, I'll upload the rest.

Keep the replies coming. The above post is exactly the feedback I'm looking for.

I'm almost certain they built more dark archons. I can recall at least three mind controls in fifteen seconds, when I was dropping forces of hydralisks and zerglings into the foothold that I'd hacked out of the east side of their base.

I tried to assassinate Xianou with the infested terrans that I was given, but two or three of them died prematurely. The one that got through didn't do enough damage to get through all of his shields. I'd say you need to reduce Xianou's stats a bit.

I did find both expansions, and I didn't need the gas at the second one. However, if I recall correctly, I had approximately 2500 minerals when I finished the game, out of something like 25000 that I mined total. I can understand that overwhelming forces of hydralisks are better, but there are a lot of things that can go wrong with an attack like that. I would suggest adding one more chokepoint to the protoss base at least.

Also, some of your terrain was not very professional - in particular, the protoss base is build on top of cliffs that mirror the straight edges of the structure. It doesn't look natural.

What other options do I have when I'm limited to zerglings and hydralisks? The Protoss base is simply too hard to crack; they have so much more unit diversity. Sure, quantity > quality in some cases, but it's more dynamic if you give the player more to work with. If the player is limited, the computer should be, too.

Good call on the terrain on the right side of the Protoss base. This is one of the maps that I made 3 years ago so I'd forgotten about that mistake.

I added another ramp into their base.

I'm surprised that the "easy" AI script builds Dark Archons. In either case, the version that's currently uploaded has them disabled, so you should only have to fight the two of them that they start with.

Hopefully that'll make the map more fair. I'm going for something that will challenge people that are able to play through Brood War without cheat codes, but not at the expense of making my maps fun and fair. I really appreciate your comments about specific areas of my maps' tuning.

As for the rest of the maps, hopefully you'll enjoy them a bit more than the second one. None of them are particularly easy, but most of them were designed with one or two weaknesses in mind (especially mission 6).

So far I'd say that mission 9 is by far the best Starcraft map that I've made to date, as I've really gone out on a limb with it. I'm going to upload it when I've gotten some decent work done on mission 10, which I'm going to start once I finish my play test of mission 9.

I've been playing through your campaign and it's been really enjoyable so far. The dialogue is good, the maps are well made (as in, nice terrain) and the missions are, so far, entertaining and challening (well, mission 3 was challenging, the first two were pretty easy)

I've just finished mission 3 - that was quite a fun mission. I actually failed first time around about 15-20 minutes in and I didn't mind starting over straight away - usually I cannot stand repeating missions 'til at least a few hours have passed, so that should attest to how enjoyable I found that particular mission.

I can't really think of any negative feedback - besides one small error in mission 4 - one of the Vespene Geysers in the middle of the map belongs to the green Zerg - it's not neutral.
I'm guessing mission 4 is a difficult one, judging by the size of the force you start off with.

I'll play through some more of the missions and give you more feedback as I go along.

Thanks very much for testing the maps!

I've made various tweaks to the maps since I've uploaded them here (I've had multiple people test and post feedback). However, I haven't updated the maps online since the changes.

I noticed that bug with the Geyser and changed it.

Mission 4 is a survival mission, so it is fairly difficult. One important note is about mission 10, when you reach it. There is a particular mechanic that is potentially too unforgiving about the mission, which I have nerfed since posting it here. When you reach that level, shoot me a PM if you want the nerfed version of the map (nothing except the mechanic I'm talking about has been changed).

Thanks again for testing my maps! Hopefully I can get the rest of them shaped up soon so I can officially release the campaign.

After the Zerg campaign is tested enough, I should be able to launch a full 10 mission beta of the Terran campaign that I'm working on currently.