Background

A significant part of my teens was spent playing and loving Warcraft and Starcraft. Specifically Warcraft 2, Warcraft 3, and Starcraft 1. I played World of Warcraft as well, but I didn’t progress past level 40 or so before losing interest.

Real time strategy was my preference, and Starcraft particularly drew me in. The gritty space cowboy aesthetic and dark storylines really appealed to me. I regularly rock out listening to the Starcraft 1 Terran themes on Spotify till this day- even right now as I write!

Creatively, my earliest experience “modding” a Blizzard game would be when I was 11 or 12. I took turns making “PUDs” for Warcraft 2 with my grandpa and we had a blast playing each other’s maps! Though, these custom creations consisted of nothing more than modifying terrain layouts, placing units and structures, and fighting it out.

In High School, I took a crack at making a few custom maps for the Starcraft 1 scene, including a multiplayer zombie survival game, and a Battle For Helm’s Deep map with each player controlling Rohan’s army, the Elves, the Uruk-Hai, or the various heroes like Gimli and Legolas. It featured scripted events as you waited for Gandalf to show up in 30 minutes with an army of vultures, a Starcraft unit that was the nearest approximation we had to Rohan’s horsemen.

Starcraft 1 map making went well beyond Warcraft 2’s PUDs, and featured an arsenal of in-editor gui-based scripting tools called Triggers.

In my twenties, I beat all of the Starcraft 2 campaigns on brutal difficulty, acquired 100% completion in all of them (except for 2 achievements in the Wings of Liberty arcade machine, blasted game!), and acquired a Master rank on the ladder in 2v2, alas only Platinum in 1v1. It’s a hard game!

Around this time, I finally starting to focus on a tech-based career path, after roughly a decade of doing general labor and random jobs, and so I dove into Starcraft 2’s Galaxy Editor as a way to start flexing some programming and game design muscle. Starcraft 2’s galaxy editor is Starcraft 1’s map editor on steroids. It is basically a gui-based game engine, with some developers making 2D RPGs, 3D RPGs, 2D platformers, first person shooters, and a lot more. There are thousands of custom games in the Starcraft 2 Arcade.

I enjoyed playing a small underdeveloped game named Ant Colonies, and with the permission of the original developer (Kenoli) who had moved on to other things, I ran wild with a HUGE successor. Ant War.

 

Gameplay

Ant War features multiplayer combat, with matches consisting of 1-12 players.

Each player has a Queen ant, and if they lose that unit, they lose the game. There are multiple team setups including: Free For All, Open Alliances, Two Teams, Three Teams, Four Teams, Five Teams, and Six Teams. Players start as a New Queen unit in the grass that must run to and find dirt. The player uses the New Queen to dig into the dirt and then chooses to morph into a mature queen belonging to one of four possible ant races: Black Ant, Wood Ant, Fire Ant, and Crazy Ant. Each race has its own perks and unique abilities. For example, the Black Ant can dig secret tunnels and hide their base. The Wood Ant can build outside using tree like structures to bunker ranged units or create buildable space on the grass. The Fire Ant can cast powerful offensive spells to support the army. The Crazy Ant can spawn up to two additional queens, having 3 in total, each able to blow themselves up and kill nearby units and structures.

Players use their Queen to build worker nests which produce workers. Those workers automatically collect honeydew (money) from nearby plants. The player then uses their Queen to build soldier nests. Soldier nests create respawning soldiers which are used to find and kill enemy queens. Players may also build specialist nests to train unique race-based specialist units, or they can build other structures like spike shooting guard posts to help them gain an edge against their opponents or defend their base.

Multiple game modes exist that modify the rules and in some cases allow for some absolute chaos, like Super Fast Mode wherein all of the queens move much faster than they should, and can cast their spells endlessly, or Double Queens Mode wherein each race gets 2 queens with the exception of Crazy Ant which can now build up to 6!

The gameplay takes place on 45 official maps, chosen by the host of the game lobby. Alternatively, the host can make their own map using an in-game custom map editor that I developed. Combine official and custom maps with an optional map scrambling feature that intelligently guarantees a playable dirt and grass pattern, and players of Ant War are able to play on an infinite number of procedurally generated or modified game maps.

To see Ant War gameplay videos, check out the youtube channel here.

There is a lot more information about the game on the website, here.

 

Features

I developed a lot of very large features for Ant War including: an in-game custom map editor, AI for enemy or allied computer players, achievements, earnable and purchasable skins, player statistics, data encryption for locally stored game data, procedurally generated game maps, and a detailed endgame score screen. Numerous other features were developed for the game as well, but these are the most notable.