Terraformers was a mod I raced to make after wrapping up development on Ant War, and in my mind, Terraformers will always be thought of as resting in the shadow of its bigger brother.

The goal was to see how quickly I could make a basic game idea using the Starcraft 2 engine, after spending years making the much larger Ant War.

Turns out, pretty quickly!

I popped out this proof of concept in only 4 weeks of making it in my free time. Compared to 4 years with Ant War!

Admittedly Ant War is a much larger game than Terraformers, but most of my time making Ant War was invested in learning how to use the Starcraft 2 engine, and how to program.

The most time consuming part was learning how to use Blender so that I could customize and combine the thousands of models available in the SC2 galaxy editor dependencies. I kitbashed dozens of models myself including: a work vehicle, a mining camp, resource crates, and a lot of buildings. I also learned about lighting, attachment points, and texture mapping. It was fun to see it all come together.

The actual scripting was a breeze and a whole lot more organized than Ant War, and proved to me that I had definitely learned a lot in my journey. Confidence boost!

I never published Terraformers, unlike Ant War. I published Ant War to the SC2 arcade, and it enjoyed pretty good popularity. Often it was the #1 game in the strategy genre. Even today, in the official Discord server, I see parties of 8 or more players in voice chat playing it. A regular occurrence for the last 5 or 6 years (as of this writing in August 2024). Terraformers is different though. Like I said above, it was mostly made just to see if I could make it- quickly. Since I did not have an interest in really fleshing out the game, I left it as a proof of concept, available for download below. If you’re a Starcraft 2 modder, do with it what you’d like.

Gameplay

Players land on New Terra, a red planet with a valuable resource known for its release of an Earth-like atmosphere when harvested and therefore named Terraformium. Supply ships come and go every couple of minutes in real time, representing days or weeks.

A Supply Ship drops off personnel, vehicles, and supplies to a new colony.

Players build Terraformers on the Terraformium deposits, which then emit fog around the model and generate grass that covers New Terra’s red dirt. Most buildings may be built only on the grass, such as houses for the growing colony.

A new American colony builds its first Terraformer. New Terra begins to look a little like Old Terra!

Most of the Terraformium deposits are guarded by hostile natives and players must train or recruit armies to subjugate them!

Colonial Marines saying hello to the natives.

There are a limited number of Terraformium Deposits on the map, and when 70% of them are harnessed by Terraformers, the world becomes Terraformed. Whichever player, of the 1-12 players, has the most Terraformers at that point, wins the game.