I have decided to return to the world of StarCraft campaign creating! And I've decided to completely remake my old Doodan campaign from scratch!

I recently happened upon a StarCraft Let's Play of my old Doodan campaigns. I couldn't resist watching, and as I've done so over the last few weeks, I've been left feeling a lot of dissatisfaction with the old story.

The more I watched, the more changes and improvements I ached to make. There are too many characters. There are too many planets. There are too many factions. The story's tone jumped between too serious and too silly rather clumsily, at times. Some parts of the story really dragged and got more attention devoted to them than they deserved. Other parts were so quickly brushed over, with so many potentially interesting things only hinted at, instead of actually shown. And how much of the campaign can I really call mine? Most of the missions featured a mission briefing, with maybe an in-game cut scene or two, and the rest was usually the standard RTS or micro-mission game play. Probably 70 - 80% of the entire play time is not devoted to the story or any custom game play mechanics.

So I'm planning to make a shorter, better paced, more consistent, and more story/character-driven version of the campaign. I wanted to make an announcement here and update my progress, rather than keeping it a secret and then dropping it when it's all finished. It'll keep me honest, haha. I'm thinking of making a developer's log series as I make and test play the maps, as well.

I'm planning to break ground on the first map tonight. Does anyone who's played the old campaign in the past have any thoughts? Any parts of the story seem puzzling, or boring, or not make enough sense? I'm open to suggestions.

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Welcome back.

When making a singleplayer video game experience, the majority of the story should be told through gameplay - and when your experience is an rts campaign in brood war, the exceeding majority of the gameplay should be build and destroy macro gameplay with AI driving the engagement. Break into modding, especially AI and techtree edits as these are the most important things when characterizing factions and the personalities of their commanders. You won't want to stick with the remaster for advanced changes or any graphical changes, but feel free to explore what's possible all the same. Definitely include voice acting - there are plenty of amateurs interested in padding their resume pro bono and anything with StarCraft on it looks good to them.

My discord server is the most in depth BW modding resource out there so feel free to hop in by clicking the u below this post. You'll find plugins, documentation, and plenty of people interested in assisting, critiquing, and testing for you. Outside of that, feel free to ask anything here and I'll respond when I can. Good luck!

Dang...
I have up to 2 maps left before I completely finish uploading Doodan and now this happens lol.

I enjoy the goofy dialogues that Doodan provides and the gradual shift in tone as each passing Episode, but the only thing I would like to point out is the level of difficulty. It's really pretty standard. I felt like some maps should've been a lot harder especially towards the end of each Episode.

There are some people who thoroughly enjoy macro maps (myself included) so I would also revisit increasing the difficulties for certain maps. However, if you want to get to the point of your story-telling then by all means condense it as you wish.

Good luck with your endeavor.

Good luck Doodan. There's definitely a lot of inspiration that can be drawn from SC2 for unique and varied campaign mechanics.

In fact that has been my complaint with many fanmade campaigns - the gameplay is just so pedestrian. It's a big wasted opportunity when so much can be done with triggers in this game.

And good on you DK with the lets plays. We've come full circle now the player is inspiring the creator!

@Pr0nogo: I definitely agree about the story coming through the game play. I don't want to force the player to sit through multiple, long passages of text that have little/no bearing on the player's actions. I intend to focus MORE on RTS in this new rendition than I did on the old campaign (for instance, I plan on eliminating most, if not all, of the cinematic and RPG elements), but I'll probably have more instances of the objectives and game play changing as a given mission progresses. I will check out your Discord, but I admittedly don't feel very confident about my patience when it comes to learning how to mod, as I barely have the patience to set them up and play them, haha. I definitely am a fan of the idea of voice acting, though.

@DK: Maaaann, I have LOVED watching your play-through. Even if I wasn't always proud of what you encountered in the maps, I always walked away from your videos feeling entertained, happy, and with a ton of thoughts to process. Thank you for your feedback about the difficulty. I'll probably be hitting you up with more questions about your experience later, haha.

@Oh_Man: Yeah, I don't want many, if any at all, of the missions to be a vanilla "build your base and destroy the enemy base" kind of goal. I intend for there to always be at least one twist to the mission, if not multiple.

I've gotten the terrain and most of the triggering done for the first map. I still need to add dialogue and make some tweaks. It feels good to be making SC maps again!

Might not be your speed but to me, learning new aspects of SC modding is pretty rewarding. The process of doing it can be a bit frustrating when you have to go back and tweak things to be perfect, but once you're done there's a definitive feeling of accomplishment - especially if it's something like custom terrain or a new behavior for a unit, since those things often show up in a lot of different maps.

Looking forward to seeing your completed project.

I would be happy to help you with some modding stuff if you'd like, Doodan.

So, what's up Doodan?

Haaaaayyyyy

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jan 8 2019, 2:55 am by Doodan.