I was thinking the other day about making a campaign, and was wondering if a system like the campaign that comes with sc2 could be made.
Specifically
1. Credits/Researches per mission, Armory/Laboratory to use.
2. Secrets (Additional levels unlocked, etc)
3. Choices (help Terran or help protoss, w/e)
3b. Non-linear levels (would also be nice, but I probably would use a lot less of them then they did. Maybe once in a while it forks into three or something.)

If I am not mistaken, when you pick a level in the campaign it saves your progress (specifically, your upgrades and researches) so that if you replay that level later, it uses the same upgrades as when you first tried it.

Any other information/assistance related to the overall campaign's (not individual levels, except how they contribute to the whole) is very much appreciated.

The whole Campaign SC2 features was completely created with the Editor itself.
I guess basically they have a map for any non-mission stuff (Laboratory, Bar, etc.) and they use Banks to save progress and call it whenever you open this non-mission map which would be completely made of Custom UI.

Not exactly true. All the models were created with whatever modeling system Blizzard uses. The model file extension is .m3, and AFAIK there's a halfway finished Blender plugin for it.

And I'm not sure how Blizzard accomplished the between missions stuff - e.g. the Armory, the Cantina, etc. If you could figure that out, you could create a campaign, although without custom models it would be restricted quite severely in its creativity. And if you did have custom models, your campaign would almost definitely be too large to be published on Battle.net - and I'm not even certain how the system would handle a campaign with several missions. In SC:BW, all we had to worry about was a trigger that loaded the next mission based on things that happened in the current mission, so I have no idea how Blizzard handled that and/or whether or not the battle.net system could handle it. I'm pretty certain it'd be near impossible to actually publish such a campaign on Battle.net, given Blizzard's penchant for restricting its players in what and how they can publish. Bear in mind that Blizzard's own campaign is, in fact, built into the game, and though you can take apart individual missions, there's no way to open up the 'between missions' areas and find out how they are constructed. I'd be willing to bet that SC2's developers hardcoded some portions of their campaign system.

Finally, about storyline - it fails miserably and epically if you don't do a linear storyline. Blizzard's characters were shallow and quite fickle, suffering wild mood swings depending on what order you did the missions in. No doubt there is a specific mission order that works just fine in terms of how characters behave and the decisions they make, but in general I found it difficult to keep from skipping through the cutscenes simply because their characters were alternatively underdeveloped and overdeveloped. Beyond Zeratul's missions, as well, the general feeling I got was that Raynor and his pals messed around finding new units for a while before haphazardly joining up with some out-of-the-blue prince and go charging off to zap Char with some all-powerful artifact that somehow managed to avoid appearing back in BW, although something of its power would no doubt have been a major plot point in its storyline.

TL;DR: The armory and cantina and bridge etc. are probably partially hardcoded and doing something similar would be difficult if not impossible. Also, custom models and size limitations on publishing would kill creativity.

Why would you publish a campaign? Just upload it to sites like SEN. We'll play it.

I suggest reading some of this CC thread. The guys at Campaign Creations are all about campaigns, so chances are they will be able to provide you with a lot of insight for campaign-building.

Being a pretty veteran group and having some people that are really grumpy over SC2's editor and shit (issues like the transitions), a few will probably tell you to just give it up; take their words with a grain of salt and persist.

In all seriousness, the old folk at Campaign Creations are pros at campaigning.

-

For the sake of story-telling, just scrap the whole idea of choices. At the end of the day, they're a gimmick. Those stupid choose-your-own-adventure books? Self-evidently stupid. If you're going to do a "choice" map, I strongly recommend following with Blizzard's implementation in the Enslavers SC1 campaign, and doing only such a gimmick at the end of the campaign or very near to one.

Save your own soul and avoid branches within branches. It works in visual novels and shit, but not for something as consuming as an entire campaign (unless you just feel like taking the challenge, I guess).

-

I think you should forgo hosting campaigns over Battle.Net. For the most part, campaigns are single-player anyway, so you don't need an active hosting service like B.Net. Not only that, but Blizzard has censoring policies as dumb as a scrotum of bricks, and the size limitations don't help.

At this point in time, hosting campaigns over Battle.Net is severely inferior to uploading to a site like StarEdit.Net, which has the added advantage of having a forum for people to actively discuss and critique your work (and even advertise/endorse it!).

give it up it's a bad idea /grumpyoldguy

no really don't count your penises before they hatch man


+1

Focus on character and plot-driven events, not on non-linear faddy trash.