Articles | SC2 Retrospect

As the grandfather of Starcraft modding it was natural I would make the plunge into Starcraft 2 upon the release of its beta in spite of all the bad omens and red flags that had sprung up over the course of its public exposure, and in spite of the colossal failure that Warcraft 3 was for the custom content scene. After all, lightning does not often strike twice, and Starcraft 2, in my eyes, stood a decent chance of being less hostile to modding than its ancestors. Of course this was a terribly foolish belief and my time with Starcraft 2 would be one of the longest-running, most psychotic adventures I've yet to endure, with little to show for it from my own projects, even though two of the game's largest user-made releases owe no small part of their existence to my labor and research.

This article is a retrospect of my time with Starcraft 2. From personal projects to outsourcing and assistance, my time with its small community and colorful members, and the memories I still retain after I did all that could be done with it. A catalogue of the educational experiences I amounted over the years from Starcraft 2's release to around the end of 2018.

- Commentator & Analyst -

The forefront of my time with Starcraft 2 was the intent to pursue public video commentary. Since ~2004-2006 I had been producing public video content of various types, including mod-related demonstrations (the very first being Halo PC/CE), the XXE compilation series, Stabbyman, and what could be construed as LP's. However, other than the LP's, most of my videos didn't feature extensive vocal commentary. Indeed, other than some comedic VA, the Stabbyman series was entirely narrated through text, an ordeal I still recall to present day as many of the challenges I gave myself in the series required a lot of text to explain the stupidity of.

Prior to Starcraft 2 I had dabbled in Brood War casting, but in Brood War I felt I would never be able to compete with the trusted sources of professional high-energy commentary, being the official Korean casters. I never saw myself as a competitor to English casters because, to be frank, I found all of them boring. I didn't understand Korean, but the energy and pacing they carried with their work was a level of evident professionalism untouched by their foreign counterparts, and this would be confirmed time and time again when translation efforts put real words to their banter. The Korean casters knew their job and they knew it well. English casters, including the most well-respected members of TL, always sounded bored and fake to me.

My personality could be described as excitable and extremely high-energy, and I felt I could obtain the level of energy the Korean casters could turn on at the flip of a dime. However, a critical challenge awaited me in what would become a decades-long trial to learn commentary: talking. As a person whose only social experience was the intermittent use of voice chat and whose voice talent had so far only been practiced in the confines of unit dialogue for Total Conversions, I was extremely unprepared for the challenge of talking over gameplay. My voice was undeveloped and I talked with an unusual slur, sounding almost drunk at times. I recognized I needed experience, so I did commentate several BW games prior to SC2's release, but not nearly enough. I never made those casts public. To be honest, I don't recall ever even listening to them in their entirety. It was treated as an exercise, and I don't recall my excitement level being terrifically high at the time. The games I casted were sourced from Team Liquid's blog section, an area that would be a repeated source of content for my adventures as SC2 didn't feature any major communities or gatherings much less ones for posting silly replays.

At the time I had already extensively followed Starcraft's professional scene for some years, although my interest began to taper off when Savior suicided his career in the matchmaking scandals and several other prominent players either retired or entered military service. Also, my interest in Starcraft began to waver heavily when SC2's announcement brought an influx of newfags onto Team Liquid whom were little more than errant juvenile fanboys. It wasn't long before Team Liquid turned into an utterly hopeless shithole and all quality posters quickly bailed. Since then TL has become little more than an alt-left circlejerk in the vein of reddit or twitter.

I still remember talking to TotalBiscuit and iNcontroL briefly on different subjects, with the former recommending me the capture card I use to present day for console recordings, and the latter expressing interest in my Armageddon Onslaught project. Unfortunately, both individuals are now deceased, and both of their deaths effected me to a non-trivial extent. TotalBiscuit, being one of the only other youtubers whom exhibited some sense of standards, and iNc being the source of much laughter and entertainment over the years, were two core members of my exposure to the Starcraft western community although I did not follow their content.

The jump to youtube was a mistake. Of course, this story has been done to death, so I won't go in detail here. It was a mistake to think because I was amongst the early birds I was going to get anywhere big with casting. I only inspired some of those who did get big, like PainUser and MrBitter, by casting their replays and apparently catapulting their own desire to get into the subject. It often seems like I end up being a stepping stone for someone else to accomplish something instead. This repeated throughout sc2's lifespan. My extensive R&D only went into catapulting Starcrafts out of the grave and into a quick cash grab, and Dwarven Combat may be the only project out there that has normal maps on WoW models because of me, amongst other things. These two projects are worth discussing to some extent, but I'll touch on them a bit later.

Indeed, I learned a lot about what I really wanted out of my video production through sc2. I learned a lot about casting in general, and I wouldn't be anywhere near as good as I am today if I wasn't for those experiences. But those experiences could have been earned through a platform other than youtube. Youtube effectively blackholed the first year and a half of my public casting and it just wasn't worth the trouble to try to follow the whims and demands of randoms.

- Information Demonstration & Flow -

Honestly, the only complaints I ever got about my casting were from people who use Reddit, and it was never about the way I distributed information. In fact, I've been universally regarded for being informative and educational. This doesn't necessarily help me a lot, since it doesn't really give me much avenue for improvement. Coming from a design background I always have a strong sense for design-focused observational duties, which means breaking down what I see on the screen into a thought process that the player is projecting his actions through. The critical part of analyzing gameplay is understanding what the player *wants* to do and how that is translating into the actions in the game. Of course, with years of observing Brood War matches behind moon rune commentary I for the most part didn't understand, I had to infer a lot of what was going on through conjecture and constantly tested myself in doing so.

"Oh, he's fast expanding without defense because it's a large map and he figures it's safe."
"He's blindly building corsairs because he figures the zerg won't be able to keep his overlords safe for a while."
"He's stopping stargate production entirely because it's no longer cost effective to hunt overlords."

When the subjects you observe are extremely high skill level you can almost always assume there's a strong, intentional process behind what they're doing. This means every decision is calculated, often times from hundreds to thousands of similar matches they've played out even in recent history. The meta, so to speak, changes over time, and you can see that change on the most granular level by observing how players take initiative or respond to things in ways that break what you expect. Sometimes it can be misplays or miscalls, but in high level games it's not usually the case. Plays like the double drone drill rush JulyZerg cemented a tournament victory through made perfect sense when you realize his entire goal was to disrupt meta patterns to outplay an opponent whom stood a good chance of beating him in a standard match. In such cases, intent to break a trend can be just as predictable as what you might consider a trend to begin with.

These principles are the building blocks upon information flow. Once you understand what a person wants, you break down his actions to expose that desire, and the forks of how interactions imposed by that desire may play out. Injecting this information between play-by-play is when things got difficult for me because I am extremely scatterbrained and easily distracted, and I can lose track of my thoughts even as I am speaking them out.

Again, I feel like being informative in casting is really easy. I never had any issues with it and no one else seemed to really have any issues with my casting in that regard other than when I commonly struggled with words or lost my train of thought into a Wuhan wet market.

For trying to manage dataflow a technique I developed long after sc2 was to try to compartmentalize subjects I would tackle. This means that, during analysis, I would stop myself and try to segregate certain subjects into a list and only think about one after the other was addressed. The problem was that, while this allowed me to eventually focus on a single subject and address it, I would often times forget that list of subjects and fail to address any of the secondary things. The compromise was to hop between subjects. For example, in a D&D cast I might discuss a certain fight and what the players did during the battle, but I might forget to talk about a strange bug that occurred, or a trap or something they narrowly missed between that fight and something else. If I tried to address all the subjects at once, jumping between them contextually, that meant I'd often forget to close up subjects like discussing the fight before I forgot about it and moved on to something else.

This is mostly a challenge with content I am pacing myself, especially during first-person casting. When casting a replay of something like sc2 I could split my subjects into game relevancy. In one game I might discuss a player's tendency to do certain things, like be extremely thirsty as was the case with SirDraken in the LeagueP casts from 2017. In another game I might discuss about another player's tendency to build in a certain way. Particularly if either of those players are taking up screen time or being highlighted, the context is more relevant. In a way, I allow the game to drive my commentary and watching with a directed camera tends to make that easier, whereas in SC2, when I was first starting, I could easily tunnel vision onto certain parts of the map, especially while talking about something, and miss something else that happened elsewhere in the game, but was visible in the minimap.

A critical skill to playing demanding titles like Shmups, I was told, is being aware of the entire screen at once and not necessarily focusing on any given thing. The idea is to not focus on any single threat, else you'll be surprised by other threats. The same is certainly the case with Starcraft - minimap awareness has won, and lost me, plenty of games in anywhere it's available. I tried to train myself to constantly look back, over and over, but it's not an easy thing for me to do. I often also have issues with lazy eye, where I'll zone out and lose track of everything going on at once. It doesn't happen as often in casting, at least today, but when casting high-level sc2 games, which had very little excitement in them, I might go quiet.

"The worst air is dead air."

Immortal words of the stoner Zilla, whom may or may not once have been a DJ (it was never proven) and mastered the art of monologues in that utterly emotionless, monotone stoner voice of his. That is, before he suffered an unfortunate stroke and became an incoherent, irrelevant schizoposter trying trying to fight his inner demons armed with nothing but a bong and a duck. One might envision him as a dubious sage that you once turned to when you needed direction in your adventuring days but now all that remains is the crusty semen-stained robe and a walking stick that's been gnawed to a sharp point and is suspiciously covered in dried honey. Ah, quirky he may have been, his words had value back then, proven time and time again when he was still involved in social activities such as gaming, and his wisdom can still be reflected upon to present day by consulting my various warcraft 3 or League videos from the era. While I took this advice to heart across many productions, including D&D and casting, there's more to the art than just filling slow or silent points with some background noise. Finding a flow of information and prediction such points ahead of time to address more wordy subjects, especially topics of more technical analysis, can help you pace yourself so you aren't trying to explain the texture of your feet when Astolfo has already worked his way up to the thighs.

In professional environments casters are often a pair or even a trio, with specific individuals fulfilling specific roles, commonly deferred to as Play by Play or Commentary. The goal of most casters is, however, to fulfill both roles - play-by-play in a manner that drives the experience and quickly and meaningfully explains nuances, while also commentating technical and analytical portions between the action. I was always a bizarre mix of the two, with my excitable and colored vocabulary heavily influenced by goofy writing and tapedeck productions of the distant past, not to speak of my many total conversions, but technical breakdown was in my blood from over a decade of modding and game design experience. Wording this contrent was challenging at times, but the ambition was always there.

The primary inspiration for a portion of my earliest commentary style was ByeardMaggott, a blizzard community member whom allegedly shot himself many years ago. While I had spent nearly a decade producing VHS and tapedeck productions in my youth before I discovered the internet and thus his audio productions by extent, it nonetheless drove me to continue my efforts into my digital life.

A carefree, no-bullshit, no-PC casting style without regards for feefees or predatory censorship is where I am at my strongest. And, of course, that was something the youth at the CCP chatroom known as Reddit weren't prepared for.

Sometimes people have asked me if my energy was faked in any of my earlier videos. It was not. Every outburst was completely genuine. Back then, before the trials of 2013 and especially 2017 began, I had a lot of real, larger than life energy. Life was tough, and 2006 was absolutely brutal, but I hadn't lost everything and hadn't come to hate everything yet. Losing my home yet again, starving for weeks at a time, throwing away years of my life on futile projects like those I'll be discussing shortly, struggling for 8 years to keep a cat alive and healthy, and being gaslit and betrayed by many people whom I'd had believed to be my friends - some for over a decade - all had damning impact on my energy as a caster easily traced through the LP's starting from WoL and Darksiders to 2020 castings.

I used to be a very boisterous, energetic person. I didn't give no shits, didn't take no shit, and just did whatever I wanted on the moment, consequences be damned. It was a better life. But, life changed that, bit by bit. Every year took something from me.

Starcraft 2 contributed no small amount to that decline.

- Stillborn Game -

Having been in talks with someone from the CC group whom was a part of Blizzard during the last year or so of sc2's development prior to beta, whom was a part of the editor team, whom presented mock material for me to look over for him, and having had contact with other blizzard developers through, again, community members whom had access to them, one would have expected that I would have had a bit more faith in Blizzard than I did. Truthfully, I always knew sc2 was going to be a bumbling failure. I simply did not expect it to be such a blatant, brazen failure as it was that it would eliminate the entire possibility of even having mods altogether. After all, mpqdraft still worked fine with Warcraft 3, integral to my Loladins of Legend project, amongst others. Sc2 could simply be the same way, or so I had thought.

Then they nuked folder hotloading to try to kill Zelnique's Manly Sound Pack, a mod that was replacing sounds in the beta with their sc1 counterparts since everyone under the sun despised the insulting vomit Blizzard threw onto their lap.

Seeing this didn't work, they then added crc checks to every mpq and never exposed the dependency hierarchy to anything other than their own patches. They locked down distribution of editor content to online-only, an effort some mistakenly masqueraded as an effort to stop Chinese piracy. No, we'd discover in short order when Blizzard tried to sue Valve for the mere name of "Dota", this waas exclusively because of greed. SC2's team was, in fact, aware of the existence of myself explicitly. I was told this on several occassions. There's absolutely no doubt in my mind, knowing the history of Blizzard South's previous interactions with modders, their willfull obstruction of locally hosted content was an effort to prevent mods from existing.

Modding for Starcraft 2 died early into beta, not long after we were adding in new units and replacing things like water with the yet unrevealed lava, some of which with the assistance of the aforementioned editor intern pointing out for us. If you wanted any customs from hereon, they had to be map-only and tied to the highly censorious battle.net 0.2, and you were expected to buy multiple accounts if you wanted more than a few megabytes of storage for game whose individual unit assets would consume the bulk of with only a handful of textures.

Absent from the beta were the numerous old community members whom showed up in our vent during the announcement. No one actually wanted to see what sc2 would become because they knew in their hearts it would be shit. Curse, in a brazen display of incompetence, hired literal nobodies to manage a sc2 site called Sc2mapster in the vain hope they could cash in on what they thought would be a content platform comparable to sc1. That is to say, these people were asked to manage a site they couldn't even ban bots from, so all sc2mapster ever housed was illiterate fanboys scraping for any hint of life from the game's carcass and innumerable moon rune posts that flooded it by the hundreds any given day. That isn't to say sc2mapster didn't have the potential to launch, at least until people realized how trash of a firm Curse really was, as at least one artist joined the site and a plugin developer for 3ds max had also appeared.

Then the game hit and everyone left. The site went from its infancy - ugly, yet clear room to improve for everyone to work towards - to completely abandoned in less than a month. One of the major killing blows was when players tried to replicate a third-person map Blizzard demoed at blizzcon, and realized even so much as displaying the game's cliffs caused colossal performance drops in an already unbelievably badly performing game, and that battle.net for sc2 was even slower than wc3 and made such maps impossible to play regardless. Years later anyone who tried to post a file onto mapster would likely have their content simply disappear since only a few people had access to that portion of the site and it often times didn't work for them, and curse was nowhere to be found to address anything.

Mapster was the only site on the entire internet that sprung up for sc2, and the only hope sc2 had for a competitor to Campaign Creations to right itself. However, the absence of community and drive to create or deliver content wasn't entirely mapster's fault, it was very much a product of what fueled it to begin with.

Starcraft 2 may be the biggest flop I have ever seen in my entire life. A close competitor is Neverwinter Nights 2, whose ancestor's major claim to fame was having a developer-supported community expansion pack geared exclusively towards adding a ton of user made assets in a manner that they didn't clash with one another, a common problem in that specific game's dependency system. NWN2's assets were all copypasted from one another in terms of rigs and animations, all spell buffs were billboards with a spherical texture, and none of the women faces look remotely like women - not to speak of the editor, whom corrupted entire projects and had an utterly asinine interface that failed to compete even remotely with the functions of the first game's. Custom asset support was right out.

SC2, however, wouldn't see an official 3ds max exporter script released for many years after the fact, a script whose pointless delay only completely sealed the game's fate in never having a single competent artist devote their time to it in the ten years it has been out in the wild. The author of the first user-made plugin quickly and quietly abandoned it after the game's release, sensing the destiny of his wasted time, and left the incomplete mess to rot in the remains of sc2mapster's festering raccoon wounds along with the hopes and dreams of every idiot who wanted to sell maps. When it became evident no one was going to make dota 3 overnight and instantly claim millions of shekels all of the fanbouys also fucked off into the recesses of their basements, only to be heard from again when Overweight, blizzard's team fortress 2 clone, bumbled onto the scene and fell into a vat of its own diarrhea. Those whom remained behind spent no small part of their lives trying to unravel the stock .net library used to blindly compile roughly 3/4 of the XML functions from sc2's data into a user interface with utterly no developer insight whatsoever, leaving behind a rat's nest of dislocated, buggy or outright superfluous functions in what felt to be the most intentionally disorganized trainwreck in the history of map editors.

Coming from wc3, sc2's triggers were actually an improvement, which is about the only part of the game that really felt like someone had worked with it before (it's likely they used this UI for triggers, versus data which was pure XML prior to the editor's construction on release day). Constructing cinematics and manipulating units was easier in triggers right out of the box, which is probably why the few people whom wanted to experiment with the game's AI used mostly triggers to do so, like Turtles.

Indeed, the release of sc2 and its bumbling failure to support custom content on the scale of Blizzard's previous titles gutted my hopes instantly of creating my first major project.

- Armageddon Onslaught 2 -

Way back in the days of Brood War, somewhere around 2008, Bajadulce, a man who'd later ban me from his forums then return to CC's forums some years later to apologize - both for reasons never once explained to me (yes, CC's adjacent communities are also schizoposter hell apparently), suggested I move from producing melee AI to building an AI-specific only super race, to push the murderous bounds of my then-current ZAPOC project even further.

ZAPOC at the time was the most capable and deadly of computer AI created for the Zerg for Brood War. AI, however, is notoriously hardcoded and buggy, and with only a few people having dipped their toes into the game, ZAPOC and similar projects in the BWAI launcher were the only sources of information that existed for Brood War all the way until Neiv began to reverse engineer it. Indeed, a lot of the information I had gathered over my decade of endlessly testing the AI was predictably incorrect or only half correct, but the research nonetheless brought us to our collective limits on what could be done with the game's AI at the time.

Armageddon Onslaught, the idea of giving the AI its own units to test a team of players with, rather than an individual player or an AI vs AI competition, was not something I was ever super sold on, to be fair. It wasn't a difficult thing to do, though I would put many of my years-long ideas to the test and found sc wanting (the random projectile speed not working was particularly surprising), but finding graphics was difficult. They kind of came from everywhere. As did audio - Magic did what may have been the last voice acting he ever produced, and Snowfender, whom much later told me she retired shortly after the fact, was someone I scraped from a voice acting website at the time. Laconius - God rest his deported soul - lended some assistance, and I produced what I felt to be some of my strongest pre-modern voicing for The Great Destroyer.

Armageddon Onslaught was an extraordinarily simple project on the surface but represented what I felt to be a real push to advance my skills. From the 3ds max rendered CGI to the attempts to rope in SgtHK for assets, I saw it as a bridge to moving what I really, at the time, felt like I wanted to do - motion picture. On the sidelines was Project Offset, a game engine that I was hoping would let me get into actual game design.

Of course, those familiar with the story are already shaking their heads. Project Offset was bought by Intel and vanished from existence except for the fantastic failure that was Firefall (Ex-blizzard! See monkey do, do monkey do!) and the 3d CGI experiments ceased after I bought a new computer system and sc2 came to the forefront.

A problem that I have is I tend to kick responsibility for something until later. Particularly with what I view to be a non-critical responsibility. Since I started Armageddon Onslaught I had a responsibility to complete it. However, due to the crashing the project was encountering, fatigue, and rapid loss in interest of SC1, as well as having reached my limits, I decided to push the responsibility of "making the project" to its Starcraft 2 version. I released what would be the final version and moved on to preparing for sc2's release.

I wrote out a forum thread in CC that aggregated my concepts and ideas for bosses, units, and general gameflow. Imagining an unrestricted system, I thought about more typical wave-oriented attacks from Armageddon to allow me to balance their numbers and abilities more easily. AO transisted from a melee mod to a sort of a melee gametype mod as a result, not unlike what would be called Horde survival, but my main correlation at the time was Invasion from Chaos UT. I considered how I could make use of Heroes, how the special boss units might function, and other things I couldn't give Armageddon in its sc1 variant.

The largest problem with AO2 was that I was building concepts and not content. Ideas are extremely easy; I can write out a unit list in a day were my hands fast enough. Imagining fight mechanics or character concepts is an utterly trivial thing for me. What is not trivial is assembling assets. At the time I had some experience in Warcraft 3 and porting WoW assets to it, but AO2's demands were going to be significantly higher than that. I had just hoped I would learn how to modify my own assets or port other things - I experimented with porting Lineage 2, Tera and other Unreal-based assets to Age of Wonders 2 with great success. But even those couldn't fill the needs I had in mind for AO2's outlandish concept. I'd need to learn my own skills.

At the time, during the end of 2009 and into the first half of 2010, I had been 3d modeling for nearly 10 years and I had utterly nothing to show for it. I still had the boyish belief that I could find artists for the project were I to fall short on my needs. Perhaps, had sc2 been successful where wc3 hadn't, that may have been possible. But evidence of a customs resurgance in blizzardville was non-existent - it was, at best, a foolish gamble to trust in the nebulous third party for something as valuable as assets.

Another problem - at the time I expected SC2 to expose Lua or C++ to the end-user. While it would turn out sc2 had a stripped-down C, that stripped-down C couldn't even construct a half-functional computer AI with its natives. Were I intending to actually make use of programmatic skills in Starcraft 2 I needed programmatic skills to make use of. At the time I was in talks with a half-dozen people who had skills ranging from corporate entry-level to professional low-level engine building capability. The resources, and people, were there for me to tackle the daunting task of learning the basics of programming to prepare myself for what would have been a challenging project by any margin.

Indeed, I wouldn't touch programming, even conceptually, for nearly ten years after that fact, and only on the dusk of 2019 when all hope began to fade.

The reason why, I deduce today, was fear.

Of course, the problem is a lot more complex than that. I'd failed many times in my past - music composition, voice acting, and now 3d CGI, were all absolute failures, and now I was trying to build momentum to do something larger than I'd ever attempted previous.

The problem has a nebulous connection to the time I'd spent reaching this point. In my ten years of digital work I'd become rather comfortable with my workflow, flow of thought, and the day to day means I made to make ends meet in my projects. Change came slow, if at all, and the final transition away from Brood War had been attempted before without much success. My countless abandoned projects, from various Homeworld 2 mods to Diablo 2 TC's and even RPGMaker games in 2000-2001, were all testimony to my attempts to branch out that all eventually circled back to Brood War.

I scrapped a lot of concepts for games throughout the years for many engines. A Black Sun class-based shooter with Royal Family and Warlord factions, for Source. A turn-based Loladins of Legend rebuild of the 2042 project in a TBS engine whose name I forgot the name of. And yet I wanted to build a space RTS in Project Offset? Whatever made me think I was going to accomplish that? The same project didn't work in Supreme Commander, Homeworld 2, Sins of a Solar Empire, and many other probes, even for X3, all were proven impossible.

When it came to the hotseat of something that was likely to be possible, though - particularly a UDK project as the engine would release in late 2010 - I met a stifling lethargy. It's something that would have surely played AO2 had modding actually been possible in sc2. It has taken me years to figure out the philosophies as to how or why someone who had braved countless failures and trials to force himself into a variety of projects, at least to the point of demonstrability, would suddenly shirk at the prospect of preparing to build his most major work.

One of the major problems was comfort. I had become comfortable doing things a certain way over the years and very gradually tacking on new things onto that process. For example, AoW2 was a tough transition from sc1 but because it was rendering sprites most of what I used to do in sc1 still applied. But the very fundamentals of wc3 triggering was totally alien from how I did work with data in the past, so Loladins of Legend stagnated when I couldn't depend on a third party for such labors. Most of the time I tried to diverge from tried and true methods I ultimately floundered, as inexperienced individuals often do. This lead me to doubling down on tried and true methods or finding ways to adopt those methods into new mediums, though the only major success I had with this was audio -- I used my processing presets built for sc1 for my first blanket dynamics applied to my sc2 videos. It got the job done, but it was a mess. I also had to record game audio with my mic in my early casts, which was also a mess, but that's how I had handled casted productions to that stage. I didn't own headphones, so anything else was unthinkable at the time and left unexplored until I got frustrated with my own results (specifically during Earthbound) and tried new things.

By the time sc2 and my casting was underway, the game was out and I was probing alternatives for AO2 now that the mod aspect was rendered impossible, I entered a vicious cycle of lethargy only the Retribution project would really break. It turned out that trying to leave my comfort zone had become impossible because I had become so adverse to failure I was afraid of the very idea of failure. I had come to expect results from myself and saw the passage of time without results as a tremendous defeat. Furthermore, most of my efforts to learn more technical skills, especially music composition and 3d modeling, were met with a mind blank from my learning disabilities. The frustration, and lack of a means to understand *how* I best assimilated information, compounded my frustration of failing to get work done.

I decided to abandon Armageddon Onslaught 2's melee concept and try a third-person design instead. This one saw a lot more actual personal effort placed into it because my early experiments at building environments in 3ds max were actually yielding fruit. However, it wasn't until my first concept map was built and Corbo tried to put it into sc2 for me that we discovered collision meshes don't exist in sc2 and the sc2 map scales were way too small for precomposited maps. Also, this was when my performance testing for sc2 brought the entire idea of a large-scale project to its knees when I discovered how bad the AI actually performed, how bad the game's rendering engine behaved against skyboxes, and how fucked the cliff tiles performed in third person views.

The initial concept videos garnered a lot of attention from across the spectrum of Blizzard's rapidly dying sc2 fanbase and probably sparked a lot of interest from would-be mappers, as at the time the only other user-built third person concept was a simple video of Alextrazsa's model.

By late 2010, however, I realized no Armageddon Onslaught concept I could necromance from the ideas would work. My model exports with the original user-made tools were a total trainwreck and I needed a tool with actual support and testing to make things behave, and the game's performance was abysmally bad even with the most stripped-down ideas. 2010 saw me return to WoW for a time to play with Lavarinth and his friends, and this, alongside my video production, tided me for a while. The UDK came out in short order - a toolset that was everything I wanted out of Project Offset and much more. But I did absolutely nothing with it. Sure, I gathered tons and tons of tutorials and read a lot about the engine and did performance testing, but I didn't even try to make a project out of it.

I was too scared to even try.

Starcraft 2 was a demoralizing experience. It was demoralizing because it was such a flop, and it was demoralizing because I had banked a lot of my hopes on pushing out of the confines of my old work with it anyways. My tentative, reserved hopes were nonetheless dashed in a way only Blizzard could accomplish. I was left aimless, which eventually drew me to the Black Sun: Salvation and subsequently Retribution productions. But I never could quite let Starcraft 2 go. After all, I conquered Brood War. I thought SC2 was just a more petulant BW and I only needed to find a way to wiggle my dick into some kind of orifice to crack it open and eat all the potential that surely laid somewhere within.

In short, I felt defiant. I wanted to defy the notion that I would fail again. I got so frustrated with everything surrounding the experience I wanted to force it to work so I could defeat my own doubt. My time with sc2 at this point was an effort to prove myself wrong more than anything. It was an utterly idiotic mindset to adopt at a critical period in my life.

- The Apex Projects -

Defiance and stubbornness can be useful traits. They can harden your resolve and push you through challenges like learning curves. But they burn hot and corrode you the closer you brush against them. It's easy to become lost in the act of defiance simply to be defiant and be unable to recognize that what you're really entertaining is sunk cost fallacy.

When AO2's plans sunk I continually downscaled my expectations and project plans and attempted more and more gutted project designs. These were all terribly foolish because Starcraft 2 is an RTS but it doesn't support functional RTS AI so no campaign was actually possible no matter how stripped down. Furthermore the atrocious performance could still cripple top of the line hardware in 2025 because Blizzard is simply that bad at programming.

Nonetheless, the grinding of campaign concepts lead to a stringent protocol of scriptwriting which was used to brick aforementioned concepts in various degrees. Initially pitched as "Apex", each resulting strip-down and rebuild was a proceeding Apex variant. Apex B, C, and so on. As the years ticked by I finally hit Apex F, which was a very significant fork in the concepts by extent of being a UDK project design whose entire ~46 mission script was written in detail complete with gameplay notes. Apex F was also a major departure from all of the existing Apex scripts in setting though it tied many of the endurant characters and concepts together.

Apex was in many cases a rewrite of the Starcraft world, often times mixing both silly and serious concepts as was customary in my older works. I had in some cases felt that overly serious undertones in project writing made me take the actual development too seriously in pursuit of attaining a level of quality respective of that intent. Since my more successful ventures such as CPGA and Loladins of Legend were such "comedy" worlds, I often blended the two to try to make light of the otherwise very frustrating and slow-moving R&D of Starcraft 2. It didn't help that JademusSreg, an old-time CC member, goaded me into trusting him for AI-related work and repeatedly assured me that he could fix all of the troubles. He produced promising tactical AI examples and seemed to have a basic grasp of how the AI worked - but in the end it turned out he was blowing hot air, and due to his wife handing him an ultimatum he had to abandon the internet and ghosted me (which I only learned about from a third party ages after the fact, because no one is an adult in the CC communities and can fucking communicate at any point).

Apex F was a more true to form writing and forked off of an initial concept I pitched on a Staredit RP thread of all things. Since none of the people involved with that thread were invested in the whole writing thing I kind of went off on my own and took the initial idea of concept element bloodlines and turned them into the Prime Realm. This formed the basis of what would eventually fuse to the ~2004 era Warcraft 3 Eternity campaign concept core features and what was coincidentally called Starsworn in 2006. Apex, and Starsworn, became one and the same through continued iteration and refinement via the innumerable scripts.

Unlike Throne of Armageddon, MFTG and similar productions that gave life to my Brood War-era works, Apex was built from scripts almost exclusively and not novella. I entrusted much more heavily in my ability to mentally retain imagery and leaned into my strong dialogue writer over my weak descriptive writing. Furthermore, since the scripts were for game dialogue, I had to keep them fairly concise and genre-relevant - RTS maps should never interrupt gameplay with any kind of cinematic or pause, so all dialogue had to be spaced between game segments and made as concise as possible. Apex F was an ARPG concept with more heavy use of cinematics, but only between missions. Objectives were brought up as dialogue, not prompts, and all tutorialization was to be done via dialogue and not prompts. Tech tree expansion, game mechanics, and other such things were all presented to the player via dialogue and not out-of-game mechanisms. This is an unheard of idea and to present day no custom content or game wholly embraces the idea of ingame presentations. Yet this was a core theme behind Apex scripts.

Apex endured even though my time with Starcraft 2 did not. I abandoned TOA works with the conclusion of Retribution in 2014 and never looked back. Apex inherited TOA's inner mechanics including the Algaste design, psionics and elemental systems, some of the characters and themes, and it also tapped into Loladins of Legend and other dead writings, even CPGA. Eventually, Apex became my largest original work, and it all sparked with writing those Starcraft 2 scripts. It's hard to say why this ended up becoming such a thing. But it's all that survived my decade with Starcraft 2. Many semi-functional map concepts, some even with full voice acting, were created. But none reached even close to their intended goals for the simple fact that Starcraft 2 was incapable. Eventually I became the undisputed king of graphics in Starcraft 2, with the best kitbashes, the best ports, the best original work, and the best tech art. This title had a cost, and it would be a bitter one.

- Carbot & Starcrafts -

I produced some tech art, voice work, and provided QA for Pirate for his map called Dwarven Combat. A sort of a twin-stick shooter, it was unplayabe over battle.net due to the extremely high forced latency but nonetheless he won Rock The Cabinet and received an enormous payout for my efforts. I recall, though I may be wrong, that he's the one who introuced me to Vindicator and the Starcrafts project soon after.

I didn't know what Starcrafts was until then. It's apparently a very low-quality flash animation-styled webseries from a man called Carbot who for some reason was able to scrape together a colossal kickstarter of over $90,000 USD for a very basic "mod" (the closest sc2 could obtain) that effectivey reskinned the game to his basic flash-generated sprites. As something that hardly demands any real technical proficiency it came as a surprise to me when these guys collectively got on their hands and knees and pleaded for me to save their project. Starcrafts was behind schedule. Their original self-proclaimed artist, a 15 year old by the name of Cavraene, had abandoned them mid-floundering and they could find no one else to do work for them.

Pirate was a cool dude. I didn't mind helping him or letting him take the payout for his map. Until now, I'd never been monetarily invested in anything I did. When Archangel offered to pay me on behalf of South Koreans stealing my assets for their shitty ripoff brood war mods (hi black_dream) I declined. When he offered to pay me to do his work I tried to teach him how to do it instead (he gave up like everyone always does). Mods don't deserve money. They're mods. Modding isn't making games. It's not even remotely comparable. You can learn design subjects, but you're skipping all the actual difficult part of making it. Mods can't be sold, and should never receive donations. That has always been my mindset. However, when I was initially pitched the idea of doing simple things like portraits for Starcrafts, I was also struggling with paying for Snowball's drugs and vet visits. I was being offered compensation, and for her sake I had to break my vow of monetary involvement in the subject.

I wasn't prepared.

Starcrafts was in a pitiable state. Every single graphics object in the entire project was an unsalvageable mess. What was initially just "help with portraits" quickly spiraled into "redo the entire project from scratch". Cavraene was incompetent and unskilled. None of the assets were configured for their then-modern shader setup, half of them weren't made at all, and those that existed were fucked beyond belief. Coupled with the fact that nvidia cards apparently can't handle non-square image resolutions and a chunk of sheets had to be redone, or that Carbot wanted higher-frame count images for some units, and the workload and investment exploded well beyond anything I wanted to have anything to do with.

They begged and begged. They were close to defaulting on their kickstarter money and that would mean Carbot couldn't afford to buy extra 6packs. Their pay wasn't enough for the investment necessary given I derive utterly no satisfaction from doing other people's work for them. Instead I tried to work with Vindicator, who fancied himself a "lead developer" despite only doing UI, literally the least significant part of the project, to find extra help. After all, a few people fancied themselves "artists" in the mapster community.

None of them could do it. None of them could animate a flipbook in 3ds max and add spheres for hittest and export it. Not even with the promise of pocket change. It was impossible.

That's when HKS got involved. HKS has a very different viewpoint on monetary involvement than I do. "If I could keep doing easy shit like Starcraft 2 and make money off of it, I would keep doing it". He even gets irate with me if I discuss the subject. I taught him what was necessary for the work and he took off. HKS ended up doing everything I didn't do. He redid all of the shitstains Cavraene left behind. He did the revisions. I did portraits, and we shared tech art responsibilities.

HKS even fixed the computer AI being unable to handle the map setup the project used for start locations, something that had blizzard scrambling to beg him for information about. Yes, this project had associations with Blizzard. See, Starcrafts was always pitched to us as being the launch project for Starcraft 2's long-awaited microtransaction marketplace. This was also in part why they were so desparate for me to save the project. It wasn't just the 90k that HKS and I would barely see any of. It was the promise of a perpetual gravy train. Frankly I found it questionable that the 90k wasn't an elaborate money laundering scheme to begin with - who still played Starcraft 2 enough to donate any amount of money to a reskin project? It didn't really add up. Either way, we were to be retained for post-release support, since the project needed to have a supply of "skins" and other content created for it. Carbot made the sprites, we made them work in the game, and another dude did the data work.

What did add up is how Blizzard ghosted them during the final months of the project. We had access to then-unreleased tools, like an updated 3ds max exporter, and supposedly had their ear. But months would pass and they'd never answer. Presumably the intern responsible for "making the marketplace" was transferred or fired. Starcrafts was released. Our work was featured on the Blizzard launcher, and played at Blizzcon - where the untested maps that Vindicator and friend made were demonstrated as such, and professional players had to fight with unequal and misplaced minerals. Lmao.

Then we discovered two things.

1.) Carbot had no intention for post-release support and the project was quickly broken by patches. He'd rather complain on twitter than even think to ask any of us to help him.

2.) Carbot didn't want to credit the people who made the project. Even though we brought this up and were guaranteed several times they'd fix this. They never did.

To this day, Starcrafts does not credit anyone who made it, other than Carbot and the "Starcrafts team". This could arguably be a slipup on my behalf - I should have forced them into a contract. But I never imagined Carbot would be such a piece of shit as to not even give credit to the people who saved him from returning all of his drug money and embarrassment of a biblical scale.

Not long after, Vindicator contacted us and begged us to help him convince an unrelated team to use Starcraft 2 for a "Youtube Red" production featuring mock esports gaming "written by the guy who made rick and morty". I didn't know what Rick and Morty was, but he promised "it was genuinely funny". He gave me us online forms to sign an NDA and make a resume. He claimed the money was lucrative, but the team wanted to use Unreal or another engine and he had no skills in this, so he was hoping to leverage our skills to convince them to use Starcraft 2 instead.

This experience was insane for two reasons.

1.) Vindicator didn't want me telling his employers I built projects. "Don't say you're a leader, they'll think you want to lead." In other words, he knew his job security was highly dubious and I was a better fit in any role, especially the one he had deceived them into giving him.

2.) The employers took up issue with the font used by the document signing website they gave me.

Upon the latter I dropped them without hesitation. HKS would be given access to their inner social network but bailed, and they never gave him any work to do nor did they ever remove his access.

Unsurprisingly the project died immediately after its initial investment dried up, was considered universally cringe and gross by everyone related, and it remains a colossal stain on Vindicator's already questionable record. I'm so fucking glad I never took the bait on this. Skimming the production yielded it was every bit as embarrassing as I had expected it to be. The production quality was piss poor, the writing and acting was terrible, and it flopped exactly as expected.

Following this I swore I'd never work for another person again, much less for money. I learned a lot about myself and the dubiousness of such partnerships in the process. Carbot, despite living an opulent and undeserved lifestyle was hopelessly ignorant about copyright and legality, and suggested to use random fonts off the internet for commercial purposes, had virtually no interaction with development and was clearly in it only to save his own skin. A streamer we did a presentation with - Lo-Ko - provided us the opportunity to put Blizzard's idea of a multi-dependency project (the sprites were 8k in resolution in many cases, which made the project unusably huge for a single account) to test. It turns out that multiple timeouts and re-attempts were necessary to actually join a Starcrafts lobby, something casual players would never consider even trying. I learned that Vindicator's blizzard fanboyism, much like that I had encountered in other communities, was best stamped out by actual interaction - or lack thereof - with the company. It was great watching all his boyish dreams get ground up by realworld experiences. The slow, perpetual realization that we actually know what we're talking about, it's a distinct taste of satisfaction I've never grown tired of. I also learned that the software these people use for managing workspaces and data are woefully untested and buggy. Dropbox constantly deleted my work and had tons of sync issues. Slack was a piece of shit that had no reason to exist when Ventrilo existed. Skype was a despicable piece of shit and its disgusting Speex codec has endured to modern day in the form of the atrocious Opus regurgitation that some programs still try to pass off as suitable for VOIP.

First and foremost, though, I learned that I can never be passionate about other people's work. HKS made substantially more money than I did as he ultimately did the bulk of the work but it wasn't what I would consider worth the trouble. I made the cut for the cat drugs and that was sufficient for me. Money isn't interesting to me. Even if they offered 100x what I was given, it wouldn't have been a life-changing amount of money. I'm not excited about payment. So, I can't produce good results, or remain interested enough to put in the bare minimum effort. I'm bitter about not being credited - maybe not as much as HKS is, who'd prefer to have something to help market his skills - but the wasted time is what really gets me. The time I spent on Starcrafts could have been spent on my work instead. The reality is, though, I had to do it for Snowball, so I can't complain too much.

Blizzard eventually did release their marketplace, without Starcrafts. It featured a variety of baby's first Starcraft 2 non-RTS maps, as expected, and cringed itself out of the spotlight the instant it had first appeared. Nearly a decade after it was first promised, no one existed to play the "content" at its insane upsell. It was somehow even less popular than Bethesda's efforts to contract random Skyrim modders and sell individual item models for half the price of an actual product.

- Apex J and the final nail -

Apex J was the codename for the final Starcraft 2 projected attempted in 2019. It was written into a 6-7 mission campaign as a probe. By then I had a very firm grasp on kitbashing and was working on learning animation and UV wrapping. However, I never reached the part of making a final swing at the AI. This was due to Snowball's 2019 crisis, which saw me pivot to Unreal 4 and ditch Starcraft 2 once and for all.

Apex J's framework was adopted into a concept BW script but was otherwise abandoned, written into a half-canon for AXX's cosmic shadow world history.

- Endurant Legacy -

Apex had numerous developer productions that were once available on both youtube and GP. The concepts proposed or established by Apex has had a lasting impact and amateur modders in other games took notice and copied from my bible. Amongst the paradigms of Apex were the following;

• Large tech trees and high tech tiers (up to 10) ranging from infantry to battlemoons.
• Removal of upgrades and tech researches, as they don't offer any engagement
• Armor penetration
• Iterative damage (see: Armageddon Onslaught)
• Removal of unit type/damage types other than specific targeting cases (SDI, fighters vs capital ship guns, etc)
• Greatly increased supply cap, large unit counts
• Behavior-driven unit identity
• High race count (AoW2 had 16, so I always treated this as a baseline)
• Map control, buildspace and macro economics based balancing (especially for multi-faction missions, see: 0x05, the old raven map design, etc)
• Reduction of spellcasting/mana units and emphasis on interactive abilities, state shifts and "feel".
• Destructible projectiles such as large-scale missiles (nuke replacements), air artillery, Seeker missile, etc.
• Non-traditional map design

Apex was always focused on interactive concepts. Lockdown, stasis field, irradiate, these abilities had huge impact in BW but they were binary, point and click and uninteresting if not frustrating to play against. Much like the GEC and Living World concepts of my wc3 days, I focused a lot on how players interacted with one another and tried to translate intentions and skill into interaction with behaviors and expression of ability over pre-determining resolutions based on non-interactive and skill-removing concepts like counters, point-and-click abilities, crowd control, and damage types. Tier upgrades were highly expensive and time consuming, representing economic breakpoints, and the units offered by higher tiers usually didn't outclass lower ones in raw stats as much as they provided new behaviors, more flexibility, or more engagement options, e.g. multiple weapons. Battles in Apex lasted longer than Starcraft 2 and units had more sensible collision sizes, so the deathball behavior of the base product was largely avoided, except for air clustering. One of the few things I never looked into was a proposed autodispersal solution using a behavior to break up unit movement so they didn't bundle in transit.

- SC2 in Retrospect -

Starcraft 2 killed my passion for modding and my passion for the RTS. Early into its life, a mapper once said to me "Starcraft 2 hands you everything in a way that makes it uninteresting to work with". This is only half true - Starcraft 2 doesn't hand you anything. It obsfucates and obstructs. Given that one of the Camelot Systems leads was mentioned by name in the AI files during beta it's incredible how locked down, non-performant and inflexible the game really is. There's no shock that not a single campaign mission in Starcraft 2's 3 (three) releases features a genuine RTS map, and not a single one utilizes the built-in galaxy or functions for those that try to fake being RTS maps. There's no shock to me whatsoever that Sc2mapster's IRC was filled with people who told me that you can't modify the melee AI in map dependencies - even though I had already done so. And at the end of the road it's nothing short of part and parcel that every RTS to come after Starcraft 2 was not actually an RTS at all.

Defiance breeds expectation. When you defy and build in order to resist the will of fate, you expect that defiance to be awarded with gains. "If I work hard, I'll eventually succeed". That's what Brood War and other products erronously taught me. It's not always the case and there can be many reasons why not. In Starcraft 2 I had pushed the envelope to the stage that the graphics troubles I had in brood war seemed unthinkable. I could make, port, or butcher just about anything I could need. Yet the process of dealing with the disheveled mess of an editor that performed worse than any other software I have ever used since 1998 whose organization and naming conventions reek of prototype ChatGPT run back and forth through Chinese google translate made even approaching the challenge of implementing that content daunting. What would take me an hour in Unreal Engine 5 would take a week in Starcraft 2, minimum. So, I focused on the toughest battle first - the AI. With HKS' assistance we broke down and rebuilt the RTS AI as much as was possible. But at its heart it was simply unusable. Ignoring building and training commands, poor pathing, horrendous performance - the smallest and most simplest of maps with only 1 or 2 opponents was unacceptable, much less anything resembling an RTS. Each time I got a new processor I'd return to Sc2 and laugh when the FPS hadn't changed one bit. Every rare case I ran into someone who tried to defend this shitheap and tell them to patrol 100 drones back and forth across an empty map. Sc2's entire engine breaks apart at the lowest level when you get to unit counts anywhere near that of Brood War.

I learned all I learned as a result of defiance, but like all other aspects of modding those skills aren't transferrable. When I moved on to game development the only thing I took with me is my 3ds max skills, which were fledgeling and largely useless thanks to needing organic models, not hard surface ones. This means that my time with Starcraft 2 is effectively a void, an abyss that sucked a near-decade out of my life with no permanence whatsoever. That third parties found substance in my teachings doesn't offer me much. Maybe they'll finish what I started. It doesn't affect me. It's not my project anymore. I don't really care.

Following Starcraft 2's professional scene during WOL was boring. The energy from all casters, EN, KR or otherwise was gone. Everyone and every thing was fake. The game was fake, the players were fake, and the hopes pinned upon its success were every bit as fake as its astroturfed numbers were. Like the myriad BW pro players who ditched it for league of legends, I found myself playing other games immediately, but I was drawn back to it by the belief I could bend it to my will as I had so many others. It was an arrogant belief to think my ambitions could overshadow the raw malice of Blizzard. Further yet, the tool to make projects like Apex F had always been there - I could have created a game in the UDK if I was only but brave enough to attempt Unreal Script. All my reading of tutorials and guides did me no good. I'm not a good student. Not to others, not to myself.

Starcraft 2 found me asking what would become a timeless question. "What do I want?" I found myself asking this when I couldn't find motivation to try the UDK. It was right there, the power I wanted, the freedom I wanted. I could do anything. I could make another RTS if I really wanted to. But, I didn't. I didn't even try. Can you really want something if you aren't trying to obtain it? That's been my question for over a decade, now. But, someone like me shouldn't even be asking those questions. I am, or should have been, a creator.

Starcraft 2 was more than just an experience with a shitty product and some equally shitty people. It was a juxtaposition between the me of the dying golden age and me of the attempt to recapture that golden glory. It was an unwillingness to accept that I couldn't push myself forward on ambition alone anywhere in the belief that I only needed to rediscover that passion. Instead I ground it into a fine paste through the fires of defiance, believing I only needed to keep at the problem to resolve it. Even in an ideal world where problems like the computer AI didn't exist I may not have been able to escape that death spiral.

My time with Starcraft 2 is shared with that of Salvation, Retribution, and other ventures - and most notably the homeless incident of 2014 and the unending battle to save the lives of my cats, the financial devastation that begun with 2014 and the mounting responsibilities of senior care, real estate care and acting as a translator and diplomat. The numerous frustrations and ticks produced by the other experiences were thrust into Starcraft 2 as a downward force attempting to break the perceived barriers that prevented me from building what I wholly believed I wanted to build. But, it wasn't really. Was it? I ask myself often if anything I attempted in Starcraft 2 was really worth it. I never fully finished a campaign script other than Apex F. Apex F I never attempted to build in turn. ApexX, the resulting UE4 project at the end of 2019, achieved more in a month than most commercial products have achieved by release - and that was while caring 24/7 for a terminally sick cat in mounting darkness.

Yet, I could never become an artist. ApexX would suffer just as my projects of my golden age did due to this. The selfsame stagnation, depression and decay would strike it down as it had many others. I'd return to it every so often - out of defiance. Now, though, the equation had changed. I had all the tools and the power to do what I wanted to do. The only thing stopping me was myself. My own incompetence. My own inability. My own inhumanity. In such cases I often find myself reflection upon Starcraft 2, wondering if there's further lessons to be learned in doing so.

Every day is a struggle. Every day is a battle. My little cats, and indeed much of my ambitions and dreams, are all long dead now. Those memories will not soon leave me, however. In retrospect, it was simply another brick in the road. Where to, if anywhere? Well, I can't see. All I can do is keep laying bricks, and hope that one day I'll reach the end of that road. It's not like I have a choice.