Wow, thanks to whoever posted this! I made this game.
Like many, I was frustrated there's no new StarCraft coming till 2030, so I half-jokingly made the mini-game those mobile ads always promise and never deliver. Something you can play with one hand, that your friends who've never played StarCraft can just pick up.(Turns out you can squeeze a lot of extra gameplay/design on top of it.)
Honestly didn't expect people to grind this. I designed the endgame to be layer 50 and thought ppl can get at most ~70 if they really try, and somehow there are people on the leaderboard past 100 (without cheating). That's StarCraft players for you.
I've never played those mobile ad games and this scratched my curiosity. Now you're telling me they don't deliver and I'm curious again, how do they fail their delivery?
The game they're advertising for has absolutely no relation/bearing to the ads. At all. The actual game is more like an Advanced Wars-meets-Civilization/Risk boardgame type microtransaction-bleed-you-dry type game, you have to build a base and if you don't login every ~6 hours then people can take over your base and you lose/die, unless you pay ~$45/mo (or whatever). There is no scrolling arcade element of any kind in the actual game. This guy's game is brilliant tho.
The games are different than the video. They just don’t deliver that experience at all. In 2026 it does seem strange as the cost of production of graphic and code is less.
But when that trend started back in 2023 or so, the game in the video was much more expensive to produce that what you actually got to play.
Can you talk a little about the work involved in making this masterpiece. Could something like this be vibecoded today with AI in your opinion? Amazing work! I played Brood War every free second I had in my younger days.
Design looks and feels rewarding, but the players just sit there and do almost nothing for hours on end. No thinking required other than reading rewards coming at you that the game graciously pauses to let you read.
That said, higher order thinking about this thread makes me sad. Not judging anyone here, just sad for everyone who wants to sit there and remove hours of their life and attention for sound pings and moving pixels. I got into programming to make the machine do work for people while they use their brain on better things, not to be hypnotized into zombie mode till days, months, or years are lost. Especially years of peak brain time from really smart people. Does this happen when people lose purpose?
Are we really so terrified of being alone with our thoughts for 30 seconds these days that playing ultra short games while waiting in line at a cafe is said without shame?
just sad for everyone who wants to sit there and remove hours of their life and attention for increasing shareholder value and moving bits in enterprise cloud environments
"Not judging anyone here," then proceeds to list off every reason they are judging people who enjoy something they do not enjoy. Why is this always so predictable? "Not judging, but if you like this game you're a slack-jawed zombie who is wasting their life." Okay.
Wow, I'm not sure "not judging anyone here" is really working out that well ;), but different people live differently and have different needs & priorities.
Note that for a lot of people, a period of emotional regulation with repetitive, low-intensity activity is literally what the doctor ordered. If you're not one of those people, you may not fully understand or have the empathy, so take it on a rational level then. While ab-so-lutely any activity can be used and abused, I don't think this is a strictly black & white binary proposition. And as something built on a lark (presumably heavily AI assisted), it's kinda cool and quite a bit more sophisticated than it has ANY right to be :-). I'm also shocker there are not cease & desist letters yet :(
Your CG (AI?) trailer seems to be an homage to the propaganda reels in the Starship Troopers film. I believe StarCraft was inspired by the Starship Troopers book.
I don't recall if the original StarCraft CG trailers had nods to the film.
Also, I remember ordering a demo CD for 3D Studio Max and it came with videos of a few StarCraft trailers, presumably made with 3D Studio Max.
nope, StarCraft factions (most likely) come from Warhammer40k.
- the Zerg (and its hivemind) are a version of the Tyranids [1]
- the Protoss are adapted from the Aeldari [2]
- the Humans are, well, Humans. with the ghost units being adapted from Psykers [3] and Marines being adapted from the 40k Space Marines [4]
The rumour is that Blizzard wanted to make a Warhammer game, but Games Workshop - the owner of the Warhammer IP - pulled out of the deal, so Blizzard modified their game's universe a a bit and called it WarCraft and later took a similar approach with StarCraft.
Yes! Really nice to see people here at HN catch the Starship Troopers homage. These days many people's first reaction is Helldivers, which of course got that same tone from Starship Troopers too. And yes, the trailer was made with AI video tools.
It’s actually very addicting
once you play a couple of sessions. The scoreboard is crazy. Still don’t know how anyone makes it past wave (layer) 35-37.
If you play as Raynor, you can warp in units with the E key. Just hit your timings and always warp in immediately when it's ready. Also, once the airstrike gets 3 stacks, always fire one off. Finally, every time a unit gets close to touching your firebat, press Q to stim them or whatever. This should take you to level ~44 as soon as Raynor unlocks.
This does t make any sense to me. It just keeps marching and shooting. Are there even controls other than going left and right?
Is this the kinda ‘games’ ppl play on their phones now? It looks like those ads I see but wow… I’m confused
It's mostly about climbing the tech tree. Left and right determine which upgrades you get. I felt like it was a bit too easy, like I was trying to stack upgrades on units that I had many of but it wasn't clear how much this was helping.
They can't sue everyone, comrade. AI tools will hopefully trigger a rewrite of what copyright means, it's always been silly that it prevents derivitive works.
Law firms are cautious about AI tools, they got burned a couple years ago by hallucinated citations.
Citing made-up cases sure looks like lying to the court, which is a punishable offense. Lawyers have been sanctioned, fined, and in one case received a 30-day license suspension.
The number of conglomerates has, unsurprisingly, continued to shrink. It's long overdue for a rethink. Maybe if the US political system ever stabilizes, we might get to it in a hundred years. Until then Copyright sucks and Disney is bad.
> creators should be allowed to exert control over how their assets and brand are used
I hate to be glib, but no they shouldn't.
Creators should be allowed to create things and sell them. No one, whether the creator, or the company the creator worked for when they first created the thing, should be able to stop someone else from creating something.
> Creators should be allowed to create things and sell them.
I'm in two minds over this.
In a free for all, money wins. No small-money creator would get to profit from a truly great idea. Someone with more money simply copies it, builds it bigger/faster/better-logistics with more market budget.
At least let the creator sign over rights to their idea - even if the terms are unfair.
But once an object is in your hands. It should be free for you to do what you want with it for yourself. Deadmau5 legalities over his purrari should not be a thing.
See my sibling reply elsethread - you really don't want to be advocating for reducing consumer protections. You think you are advocating for a reduction in producer protections, but trademarks protect consumers, not producers.
I've always found that defending laws that don't benefit people to be a stange attitude on a place called "hacker news".
Creative people should be able to create. Trademark/copyright laws, protecting assets for the great-grandchildren of who actually created the art, has never been a positive. The only people who benefit, are themselves not creative (or else they would create, instead of defending "rights" and "image").
How about protecting assets for the people who made the art in the first place, geeze.
And seriously wtf why shouldn't, like, Jack Kirby's grandkids get a share of the huge bounty of stuff he created for Marvel, but Elon Musk gets to inherit emerald mines from his dad?
IP is not scarce, in the sense that you can have your own intelectual product that does the same than others, and you having and using an idea don't limit other people ability to have and use similar ideas. But one emerald mine is just one, and only one person can extract from it at any given time. Thus property laws as a replacement of stick-and-stone laws take place.
If you feel that your idea is worth IP protection, just protect it as a trade secret, not as a patent or copyright. Very famously Disney have a copyright over drawing three close circles.
Humans go from birth to being released into the public domain as an adult in roughly that time. Why are ideas somehow not in the Public Domain after a generation has grown up?
That way Jack Kirby gets to make his money. Jack's kids can live off his money. But Jack's ideas are free to use after doing their time.
>but how is using StarCraft and its assets in your random AI game okay?
How is it not ok? What is the issue exactly? From what I can tell it's totally free, and has an indication it is a fan game on the bottom of the screen.
> How is it not ok? What is the issue exactly? From what I can tell it's totally free, and has an indication it is a fan game on the bottom of the screen.
Trademark violation. Trademarks protect consumers, not producers. Surely you can't be advocating for relaxing consumer protections?
Except it's not claiming to be official content and I don't see how it is harming anyone, or do you think the letter of the law is more important than the spirit of it?
Usage of the trademark is a claim to official content. That's kinda the point of a trademark. The Starcraft font and logo as presented on the screen is a claim to be official content. That the fine-print clarifies "well, not really" doesn't make the claim go away.
If you were allowed to use a trademark "Coke" and tack on "well, not really" in the fine-print, it's still infringement.
It's to protect the consumer who doesn't read the fine-print.
We don't want a situation where where have cans of "Coke" at the supermarket with a 2mm-high "not really" printed on the back of the can.
Just do like they do in Japan where you have Gundam fighting Pokemon, but you have to use a new, unique name for it. "Fighting Pon" instead of GundamXPokemon
They do that anyway today. You really think authors, book writing being the lucrative industry for writers that it is, are suing Universal/Sony/whoever to prevent their IP being infringed?
I do really want a world however where fans/communities can riff on and make derivative works of culturally relevant material without being legally nuked from orbit. The last few weeks have been amazing in the gaming world, creativity abounds and there seem to be no limits as to what we can redesign to our own whims.
You really think authors, book writing being the lucrative industry for writers that it is, are suing Universal/Sony/whoever to prevent their IP being infringed?
They don't do it anymore because the studios just pay for the movie rights upfront. The rights are cheaper than litigation, in many cases the studios only pay $100k, which is why it is news when they pay more than that.
Is 20-30 authors per year making it big really worth the massive suffocation that prevents tens of thousands of authors from writing the stories that are in their hearts?
> Is 20-30 authors per year making it big really worth the massive suffocation that prevents tens of thousands of authors from writing the stories that are in their hearts?
I'm not sure if this is sarcasm, but just in case it isn't: I don't think anything is preventing people writing the stories in their hearts.
> It's a legal issue, and the legal part has always been bullshit regardless of which specific label happens to apply.
You are so far off-base I dunno if you're being sarcastic or serious.
Sure, Copyright might be bullshit, but Trademark is not!
Copyright protects the creator, trademark protects the consumer[1]. I sure hope that you aren't suggesting reducing consumer protections :-/
----------------
[1] When a consumer buys a trademarked product, like Coke, or (in this case) Starcraft, they know what they are getting. If you remove trademark protections, then anyone can sell anything as anything else! For example, you would be able to bottle colored water into exact-replica Coke bottles, with exact same labelling, and you would be able to do it legally.
100% a problem. but tight legal regulations never really work long term when technology overpowers it. AI is clearly exposing how fragile IP/copyright is and something a lot more extraordinary needs to exist for it to work properly. Perhaps cryptography related
In snowball games like this, losing a unit marks the beginning of the end. As such, you really have to go out of your way to lose units in the tutorial.
I have to pick a new upgrade every 3 seconds. I thought they did that to stave off boredom, but actually it increases decision fatigue. (I just wanna shoot!)
This is the equivalent of asking an LLM for a new harry potter novel and then showing it off as if you wrote it, and it's disappointing that HN approves.
Assets are very easily duplicated because of the editor that ships with the game. Not as impressive as it would be if it were other games with more tightly-locked assets.
What does AI generated even mean, really? Because there is a pretty big difference between “make a star craft game” and a sequence of very specific small prompts to build it up. They are both AI generated, but will vary wildly in quality and implementation.
I'm noticing that armor pen is super important later on. However, eventually get rekt.. I'm curious how the top person got to the layer he is in now. I'm stuck at layer 26.
Weird I thought the D2 one was genius. Genuinely a great game.
You probably didn’t spend more than a minute before dismissing it.
It looks much better on a big screen too.
Fun, but... how is this not already taken down by copyright strikes? I mean straight rips of audio assets, music, 3d assets, graphics, even the damn name...
Why should they instantly take it down?
They might take it down if they plan something like it or if there is a reason it might impact their business.
Otherwise why bother, they probably didn’t even notice this.
Tale as old as time. The second half of what we now call the singular novel Don Quixote is actually the sequel to the original Don Quixote, published ten years later. In it the characters lament that someone published bootleg Don Quixote stories, which really happened!
Didn't expect to enjoy this as much as I did. There's something oddly satisfying about watching everything unfold and picking upgrades. The StarCraft nostalgia is a nice bonus too.
Wow, thanks to whoever posted this! I made this game.
Like many, I was frustrated there's no new StarCraft coming till 2030, so I half-jokingly made the mini-game those mobile ads always promise and never deliver. Something you can play with one hand, that your friends who've never played StarCraft can just pick up.(Turns out you can squeeze a lot of extra gameplay/design on top of it.)
Also, if you're going to copy Blizzard you might as well copy the whole package right, so there's a CG trailer too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVDao71LC7A
Honestly didn't expect people to grind this. I designed the endgame to be layer 50 and thought ppl can get at most ~70 if they really try, and somehow there are people on the leaderboard past 100 (without cheating). That's StarCraft players for you.
Hi I posted it. I'm just a guy in the chat who saw it on YouTube.
Thank you so much for sharing it, really made my day!
I've never played those mobile ad games and this scratched my curiosity. Now you're telling me they don't deliver and I'm curious again, how do they fail their delivery?
The game they're advertising for has absolutely no relation/bearing to the ads. At all. The actual game is more like an Advanced Wars-meets-Civilization/Risk boardgame type microtransaction-bleed-you-dry type game, you have to build a base and if you don't login every ~6 hours then people can take over your base and you lose/die, unless you pay ~$45/mo (or whatever). There is no scrolling arcade element of any kind in the actual game. This guy's game is brilliant tho.
I think there are multiple. The one I tried to play was oddly quite similar to heroes of might and magic but with infinite micro transactions
It ends up being a tiny portion of the game because it's hard to monetize.
The majority of the game will still be timer based buildings/armies (so you pay to speed up) and egregiously p2w pvp.
The games are different than the video. They just don’t deliver that experience at all. In 2026 it does seem strange as the cost of production of graphic and code is less.
But when that trend started back in 2023 or so, the game in the video was much more expensive to produce that what you actually got to play.
Hey... if you stay in the middle of the unit choice. you get both? YAY
this may be a long shot, but you aren't <EZMONE>ggEZnore on the SC2 teams ladder, are you?
awesome work
Can you talk a little about the work involved in making this masterpiece. Could something like this be vibecoded today with AI in your opinion? Amazing work! I played Brood War every free second I had in my younger days.
This was made less than a month ago, it was almost certainly vibe coded already.
this is clearly vibecoded though?
It's crazy how such a simple game can be so addictive. Solid game loop!
You sir are a legend to me :D i already can tell i will spend to much time in this in the future xD sc 4 ever
@ggnore7452 this is your boss.
Have you used the company's tokens to do this?
Where is the customer's software feature we promised?
(just kidding of course. Thx for doing this and thx to whomever paid for the tokens)
This was addictively awesome! I came here to comment and off back to the game (it's my day off).
Just the music and sound effects brought me so much joy.
Design looks and feels rewarding, but the players just sit there and do almost nothing for hours on end. No thinking required other than reading rewards coming at you that the game graciously pauses to let you read.
That said, higher order thinking about this thread makes me sad. Not judging anyone here, just sad for everyone who wants to sit there and remove hours of their life and attention for sound pings and moving pixels. I got into programming to make the machine do work for people while they use their brain on better things, not to be hypnotized into zombie mode till days, months, or years are lost. Especially years of peak brain time from really smart people. Does this happen when people lose purpose?
> just sad for everyone who wants to sit there and remove hours of their life and attention for sound pings and moving pixels
you mean the gamer public?
Meh, this is just the game you play in line while you're waiting for your coffee, it's not someone's life pursuit to be a hypno zombie.
Are we really so terrified of being alone with our thoughts for 30 seconds these days that playing ultra short games while waiting in line at a cafe is said without shame?
> All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
-Blaise Pascal, 1670
> got into programming
just sad for everyone who wants to sit there and remove hours of their life and attention for increasing shareholder value and moving bits in enterprise cloud environments
See it works both ways.
"Not judging anyone here," then proceeds to list off every reason they are judging people who enjoy something they do not enjoy. Why is this always so predictable? "Not judging, but if you like this game you're a slack-jawed zombie who is wasting their life." Okay.
Wow, I'm not sure "not judging anyone here" is really working out that well ;), but different people live differently and have different needs & priorities.
Note that for a lot of people, a period of emotional regulation with repetitive, low-intensity activity is literally what the doctor ordered. If you're not one of those people, you may not fully understand or have the empathy, so take it on a rational level then. While ab-so-lutely any activity can be used and abused, I don't think this is a strictly black & white binary proposition. And as something built on a lark (presumably heavily AI assisted), it's kinda cool and quite a bit more sophisticated than it has ANY right to be :-). I'm also shocker there are not cease & desist letters yet :(
I was mid masters for a while. Not that that matters, but it feels like you can get pretty far without much input.
Really fun tho. I had to stop myself from not playing for the rest of the day.
This is very polished and hooked immediately, please keep making more games.
This game looks very polished but the Arcade room looks very obviously AI generated and therefore cheap/not polished. Please update that.
lol you think the main game wasn't AI generated? You're gonna have to be more specific with your feedback or get over yourself.
Wait, is there a StarCraft coming in 2030??
Sort of. It's an FPS. I also highly doubt it will ever be released.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9eQUtOQXYgQ
Yes https://youtu.be/9eQUtOQXYgQ?t=183 But it's a shooter, not a RTS
Your CG (AI?) trailer seems to be an homage to the propaganda reels in the Starship Troopers film. I believe StarCraft was inspired by the Starship Troopers book.
I don't recall if the original StarCraft CG trailers had nods to the film.
Also, I remember ordering a demo CD for 3D Studio Max and it came with videos of a few StarCraft trailers, presumably made with 3D Studio Max.
The newest StarCraft trailer is also a homage to starship troopers.
And the Zerg design always was inspired by it for sure.
nope, StarCraft factions (most likely) come from Warhammer40k. - the Zerg (and its hivemind) are a version of the Tyranids [1] - the Protoss are adapted from the Aeldari [2] - the Humans are, well, Humans. with the ghost units being adapted from Psykers [3] and Marines being adapted from the 40k Space Marines [4]
The rumour is that Blizzard wanted to make a Warhammer game, but Games Workshop - the owner of the Warhammer IP - pulled out of the deal, so Blizzard modified their game's universe a a bit and called it WarCraft and later took a similar approach with StarCraft.
[1] https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Tyranids
[2] https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Aeldari
[3] https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Psyker
[4] https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Space_Marines
Brood War definitely took some inspiration from the movie.
Yes! Really nice to see people here at HN catch the Starship Troopers homage. These days many people's first reaction is Helldivers, which of course got that same tone from Starship Troopers too. And yes, the trailer was made with AI video tools.
Reddit thread from about a month ago where creator introduced this: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1wqdabw/i_made_t...
Wow someone made the youtube ad game!
cool, give me more
There's also pinball and an asteroids-like game if you click the "Arcade" button next to where it says "Ashfall Crossing"
A shame if they don't recreate the Lost Viking game from Wings of Liberty itself.
it's funny that everyone has had the same experience with that ad
RAID SHADOW LEGENDS SPONSORED BY NORDVPN?!?!?
Has anyone ever downloaded Raid Shadow Legends?
I’ve always secretly wanted to try that game but won’t out of principle of not wanting to support annoying ad campaigns.
Cool visuals, but doesn't count as a game for me. Can you do anything that make sense, except selecting the upgrade?
Could be a nice little game, though. Strip the IP and let the AI implement a bit more for the user to do.
It's like cookie clicker, with less clicking and more blood!
Once you get high enough you can switch commanders which gives additional upgrades and active powers.
It’s actually very addicting once you play a couple of sessions. The scoreboard is crazy. Still don’t know how anyone makes it past wave (layer) 35-37.
I got around 42. Protos commander felt stronger for the effort.
6 hours of play and i finally got to level 50.
wayyyy past my bedtime.
Wow, well done! Please share your strategy.
If you play as Raynor, you can warp in units with the E key. Just hit your timings and always warp in immediately when it's ready. Also, once the airstrike gets 3 stacks, always fire one off. Finally, every time a unit gets close to touching your firebat, press Q to stim them or whatever. This should take you to level ~44 as soon as Raynor unlocks.
Protoss, upgrade battle cruiser, follow Artanis.
A few colossus for anti small.
Tempests and archons for splash
Stack anti armor like immortal and tempest and upgrade anti big damage
Terran units: tanks and Thor.
Keep 40+ zealots at all times
Upgrade recursive self improvement, most wild card options like bigger unit size , upgrade units when offered bonus 10% damage.
Battlecruiser upgrade : slow, guard, barrier, everything defensive.
Stack spells so you can spam them when you hit lane 47
Never fuse units
Works pretty hands free, zealots never need to engage until Lane 47 or 48 when a screen full of zerglings ended the game for me.
Would love some forum where people discuss this more, maybe with experiments.
It basically has the same gameplay as ProgressQuest, an adventure game that was famously created to minimize user involvement.
https://progressquest.com/play/newguy.html
This does t make any sense to me. It just keeps marching and shooting. Are there even controls other than going left and right? Is this the kinda ‘games’ ppl play on their phones now? It looks like those ads I see but wow… I’m confused
It's mostly about climbing the tech tree. Left and right determine which upgrades you get. I felt like it was a bit too easy, like I was trying to stack upgrades on units that I had many of but it wasn't clear how much this was helping.
I've been seeing a lot of Pokemon games recently as well, are companies just not enforcing their copyright/trademarks anymore?
they may well be busy surviving AI induced chain reactions letting lots of people out of work.
They can't sue everyone, comrade. AI tools will hopefully trigger a rewrite of what copyright means, it's always been silly that it prevents derivitive works.
Couldn’t they just use AI to sue at scale? No one should be too small to go after now.
The court system is too bogged up as it is with the current load. So I guess we’d have to create some AI judges and lawyers :p
And robotic cops to enforce the law!
Yeah the law firms just haven't caught up yet. But they will.
And when the judges get around to the case in 300 years after all the other ai court cases, we'll be beyond caring about the consequences.
Law firms are cautious about AI tools, they got burned a couple years ago by hallucinated citations.
Citing made-up cases sure looks like lying to the court, which is a punishable offense. Lawyers have been sanctioned, fined, and in one case received a 30-day license suspension.
> AI tools will hopefully trigger a rewrite of what copyright means,
Maybe it will, but this ain't a copyright issues, it's a trademark issue.
It's a legal issue, and the legal part has always been bullshit regardless of which specific label happens to apply.
Surprised to see this level of discourse here on HN, reads like a reddit comment.
Copyright sucks, and Disney is bad etc, but how is using StarCraft and its assets in your random AI game okay?
I mean, creators should be allowed to exert control over how their assets and brand are used.
>Copyright sucks, and Disney is bad etc, but how is using StarCraft and its assets in your random AI game okay?
Because it's cool.
The number of conglomerates has, unsurprisingly, continued to shrink. It's long overdue for a rethink. Maybe if the US political system ever stabilizes, we might get to it in a hundred years. Until then Copyright sucks and Disney is bad.
> creators should be allowed to exert control over how their assets and brand are used
I hate to be glib, but no they shouldn't.
Creators should be allowed to create things and sell them. No one, whether the creator, or the company the creator worked for when they first created the thing, should be able to stop someone else from creating something.
> Creators should be allowed to create things and sell them.
I'm in two minds over this.
In a free for all, money wins. No small-money creator would get to profit from a truly great idea. Someone with more money simply copies it, builds it bigger/faster/better-logistics with more market budget.
At least let the creator sign over rights to their idea - even if the terms are unfair.
But once an object is in your hands. It should be free for you to do what you want with it for yourself. Deadmau5 legalities over his purrari should not be a thing.
argument of a child
if you feel so strongly about it share your wifes face so we can make pornos with it
> I hate to be glib, but no they shouldn't.
See my sibling reply elsethread - you really don't want to be advocating for reducing consumer protections. You think you are advocating for a reduction in producer protections, but trademarks protect consumers, not producers.
I've always found that defending laws that don't benefit people to be a stange attitude on a place called "hacker news".
Creative people should be able to create. Trademark/copyright laws, protecting assets for the great-grandchildren of who actually created the art, has never been a positive. The only people who benefit, are themselves not creative (or else they would create, instead of defending "rights" and "image").
How about protecting assets for the people who made the art in the first place, geeze.
And seriously wtf why shouldn't, like, Jack Kirby's grandkids get a share of the huge bounty of stuff he created for Marvel, but Elon Musk gets to inherit emerald mines from his dad?
IP has very low marginal cost, emeralds don’t.
IP is not scarce, in the sense that you can have your own intelectual product that does the same than others, and you having and using an idea don't limit other people ability to have and use similar ideas. But one emerald mine is just one, and only one person can extract from it at any given time. Thus property laws as a replacement of stick-and-stone laws take place.
If you feel that your idea is worth IP protection, just protect it as a trade secret, not as a patent or copyright. Very famously Disney have a copyright over drawing three close circles.
You two are arguing over a timeframe.
Limit IP laws to 20 years.
Humans go from birth to being released into the public domain as an adult in roughly that time. Why are ideas somehow not in the Public Domain after a generation has grown up?
That way Jack Kirby gets to make his money. Jack's kids can live off his money. But Jack's ideas are free to use after doing their time.
> I've always found that defending laws that don't benefit people to be a stange attitude on a place called "hacker news".
Trademarks benefit people - see my explanation in a different response to you.
>but how is using StarCraft and its assets in your random AI game okay? How is it not ok? What is the issue exactly? From what I can tell it's totally free, and has an indication it is a fan game on the bottom of the screen.
> How is it not ok? What is the issue exactly? From what I can tell it's totally free, and has an indication it is a fan game on the bottom of the screen.
Trademark violation. Trademarks protect consumers, not producers. Surely you can't be advocating for relaxing consumer protections?
Except it's not claiming to be official content and I don't see how it is harming anyone, or do you think the letter of the law is more important than the spirit of it?
> Except it's not claiming to be official content
Usage of the trademark is a claim to official content. That's kinda the point of a trademark. The Starcraft font and logo as presented on the screen is a claim to be official content. That the fine-print clarifies "well, not really" doesn't make the claim go away.
If you were allowed to use a trademark "Coke" and tack on "well, not really" in the fine-print, it's still infringement.
It's to protect the consumer who doesn't read the fine-print.
We don't want a situation where where have cans of "Coke" at the supermarket with a 2mm-high "not really" printed on the back of the can.
Just do like they do in Japan where you have Gundam fighting Pokemon, but you have to use a new, unique name for it. "Fighting Pon" instead of GundamXPokemon
>Usage of the trademark is a claim to official content.
I think maybe this would have a lot more weight if he were selling this as a product, but he isn't
>It's to protect the consumer who doesn't read the fine-print.
I'm going to ask, protecting the consumer from what in this case?
> I'm going to ask, protecting the consumer from what in this case?
Just because you give your crap away for free does not mean that you can fool the consumer into thinking it is someone else's crap.
The protection of branding is to protect the consumer against being deceived. The item being free or not is irrelevant.
If you’re not charging anything for it it’s free press for the original content creators imho
If you don't make copyright contagious under derivative works then people can just change a few things to get around copyright.
Also, do you really want a world where big film studios can just adapt books of writers without compensating them?
They do that anyway today. You really think authors, book writing being the lucrative industry for writers that it is, are suing Universal/Sony/whoever to prevent their IP being infringed?
I do really want a world however where fans/communities can riff on and make derivative works of culturally relevant material without being legally nuked from orbit. The last few weeks have been amazing in the gaming world, creativity abounds and there seem to be no limits as to what we can redesign to our own whims.
You really think authors, book writing being the lucrative industry for writers that it is, are suing Universal/Sony/whoever to prevent their IP being infringed?
They don't do it anymore because the studios just pay for the movie rights upfront. The rights are cheaper than litigation, in many cases the studios only pay $100k, which is why it is news when they pay more than that.
Is 20-30 authors per year making it big really worth the massive suffocation that prevents tens of thousands of authors from writing the stories that are in their hearts?
> Is 20-30 authors per year making it big really worth the massive suffocation that prevents tens of thousands of authors from writing the stories that are in their hearts?
I'm not sure if this is sarcasm, but just in case it isn't: I don't think anything is preventing people writing the stories in their hearts.
> It's a legal issue, and the legal part has always been bullshit regardless of which specific label happens to apply.
You are so far off-base I dunno if you're being sarcastic or serious.
Sure, Copyright might be bullshit, but Trademark is not!
Copyright protects the creator, trademark protects the consumer[1]. I sure hope that you aren't suggesting reducing consumer protections :-/
----------------
[1] When a consumer buys a trademarked product, like Coke, or (in this case) Starcraft, they know what they are getting. If you remove trademark protections, then anyone can sell anything as anything else! For example, you would be able to bottle colored water into exact-replica Coke bottles, with exact same labelling, and you would be able to do it legally.
When it comes to copyright, I am not so optimistic. When the AI bubble bursts, the usual corporate interests will resurface with a vengeance.
> it's always been silly that it prevents derivitive works.
For example though, if you spend two years writing a novel and I change one word of it and sell it for half what you do, isn't that a problem?
100% a problem. but tight legal regulations never really work long term when technology overpowers it. AI is clearly exposing how fragile IP/copyright is and something a lot more extraordinary needs to exist for it to work properly. Perhaps cryptography related
It's a totally original creation laundered through LLM derivative works.
Sometimes, yes, but this one is just straight-up calling itself "Starcraft" and using the original art and voice-lines.
This is the second (probably vibecoded?) game in the last few days that I've seen using blizzard ip (the other being d2survivors.lol)
We need a tracker!
wow this one is cool as hell, as a diablo/ARPG fan
A friend asked if this was fair use. I lol'd.
The Diablo 2 one is really good damn. Didn’t expect that.
I clicked Hosted files but can't leave the rogue encampment. How do I do it?
Game basically plays itself but fun nonetheless
For 10-15 levels or so, then your upgrade choices start to matter.
I only played through it once, but I'm convinced I'd do better on a second run, and a third, etc.
The satisfying pop of the zerglings alone make it fun for me.
Saw Starcraft, spent 30 minutes living the nostalgia playing this.
I'll plug my own self-playing game here: https://idlequest.net/
It's classic EverQuest, in your browser, and it plays itself!
Better than the original game - works on ultra-wide.
Unrealistic. The dead carcasses just disappear. No consideration given for traversing the ground covered with waves of dead bodies.
I have around 15k games in SC2 and I can honestly say; this is awful. I love it.
It's nice to know Stimpack marines still roll face.
Ahhhh yeahhhh
Always have, always will.
Cool, but it gets stuck for me on 'fusion' of 2-3 heavy units: can't select them (neither does dragging work).
I was wondering why there was a dragon there, is it from Wrath of the Lich King?
I did not touch the controls at all, and I still won with zero losses on the first level - that does not inspire confidence.
controls aren't important, upgrade/tech choices are
In snowball games like this, losing a unit marks the beginning of the end. As such, you really have to go out of your way to lose units in the tutorial.
I've never played Starcraft before (brain too smooth) but always loved the aesthetic. Gotta say, this was pretty fun. First run I got to Endless/#22.
Looks to me like Immortal and Firebats both sucked for me, which I guess makes sense. Colossus, Siege Breaker and Marauder were my top 3.
Fun game.
I have to pick a new upgrade every 3 seconds. I thought they did that to stave off boredom, but actually it increases decision fatigue. (I just wanna shoot!)
The flappy bird of our generation.
This was quite fun, thanks ggnore7452
Great game. It took me way too long to figure out I could use keyboard to control the positioning instead of mouse.
Got to level 35 very easily by picking randomly and without reading, then out of the blue I got destroyed.
This is the equivalent of asking an LLM for a new harry potter novel and then showing it off as if you wrote it, and it's disappointing that HN approves.
If it's that easy to make a game that people like then why didn't you do it?
Not really. If you would’ve spend a bit more time with it instead of instantly dismissing it, there is a lot more going on.
Disappointed by the many lazy “game bad” comments on here; next time just don’t comment if you have nothing to add.
Fun! Just sunk a couple hours into it. Super addicting and deeper than it looks. But the difficulty spike at around layer 30 is insane.
Is it supposed to just be a black screen in Firefox?
It's not a fun game, but it's cool anyway
This has made my day. Thank you! I always wanted to try one of those ad shooters, but I refuse to engage with ads
Is this AI generated? Pretty impressive if that is the case
Definitely smells like ai. I don't think a human would spend so much time on the graphics and effects and not have streamlined the gameplay a bit.
Assets are very easily duplicated because of the editor that ships with the game. Not as impressive as it would be if it were other games with more tightly-locked assets.
The opposite would be correct. AI generated is the norm, and it would be impressive to spend xxx hours creating this when AI can do it in 4 hours
AI cant build a game like this in 4 hours; it can help but you definitely need a bunch of back and forth to get a game as polished as this.
What does AI generated even mean, really? Because there is a pretty big difference between “make a star craft game” and a sequence of very specific small prompts to build it up. They are both AI generated, but will vary wildly in quality and implementation.
Lots of fun! Wish StarCraft would come out every year
Too busy making the new StarCraft.
Ah, the music is so nostalgic. Really takes me back.
How did you make the UI menus? The UI feels right!
Game crashes when trying to fuse units
THE MERGING IS NOT COMPLETE
You must build additional pylons
*construct !!
Perfect, who needed to be productive anyways
Pretty addictive , spend a few hours with it today on the tab in and out
That was pretty enjoyable. Definitely like the ads you see online but with IP people care about.
Great work on this, had a blast!
I did not make this, for the record. I just found it.
Cool game, but isn't this going to make blizzard bring out the big guns?
So what's the meta?
there is no meta but what we vibe
I'm noticing that armor pen is super important later on. However, eventually get rekt.. I'm curious how the top person got to the layer he is in now. I'm stuck at layer 26.
I like seige tanks
A mix of everything. Stolen from everywhere. We have AI, but people are still the bottleneck. They lack creativity and ideas :D. lol
Everything is stolen from everywhere.
I guess you have built a lot of very creative and original games yourself? Feel free to share here so we can shit on them.
"Game" for zombies.
“Comment” for “smart” people
Spectacular. Mad props.
Holy moly, just hearing those sound effects gives me a giant wave of nostalgia.
This is amazing!
ugh 5 hrs later
reavers immortals artanis
This was really fun!
Wake up, Hank. That game ain’t gonna play itself. Oh wait it does.
Sounds like you didnt get very far.
See also: D2 Survivors https://d2survivors.lol/
The AI games mashups are starting to heat up.
This is as engaging as watching an animated gif.
At least SC has satisfying effects.
Weird I thought the D2 one was genius. Genuinely a great game. You probably didn’t spend more than a minute before dismissing it. It looks much better on a big screen too.
Fun, but... how is this not already taken down by copyright strikes? I mean straight rips of audio assets, music, 3d assets, graphics, even the damn name...
Why should they instantly take it down? They might take it down if they plan something like it or if there is a reason it might impact their business. Otherwise why bother, they probably didn’t even notice this.
awesome
Really cool game. Spent about 30 minutes playing it. Very fun!
realy cool!
This is, respectfully, slop piggybacking on nostalgic associations with stolen assets.
Tale as old as time. The second half of what we now call the singular novel Don Quixote is actually the sequel to the original Don Quixote, published ten years later. In it the characters lament that someone published bootleg Don Quixote stories, which really happened!
You must be the fun one at parties
It's not slop at all. Definitely the most fun I've had with a browser-based game in many years and its extremely impressive
nice game
so nice!
Big game hunters Terran vs 7PC zergs. Same feeling.
Didn't expect to enjoy this as much as I did. There's something oddly satisfying about watching everything unfold and picking upgrades. The StarCraft nostalgia is a nice bonus too.