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Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft

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Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft

#41

Post by andrewljohnson »

noname123 wrote: post #22

Starcraft is important but IMO it's not about APM. But build order, at start of each game, there's a series of steps you need to do like the optimum workers to build, to mine Vespene gas; at which time to send workers to build expansion base, build marines/zerg's etc. And adjusting your strategy depending on map, other races on map and opponent style. Translated roughly to non-player's words, playing Starcraft is not…

They key to StarCraft before the Diamond/Master level is probes and pylons - your build order doesn't matter, your strategy doesn't matter, your micro doesn't matter.

All that matters is you mine exponentially by always building a worker when you can, and never getting supply capped, and spending your money.

A grandmaster can beat a platinum simply by building 10X more primary units than their opponent. There have been demos of this online.

It's true you can "perch" yourself in Diamonds or Masters with a single cheesy build, but if you want your rank to withstand patches and new releases, then you have to master the fundamentals - probes and pylons.

Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft

#43

Post by alexlym »

noname123 wrote: post #22

Starcraft is important but IMO it's not about APM. But build order, at start of each game, there's a series of steps you need to do like the optimum workers to build, to mine Vespene gas; at which time to send workers to build expansion base, build marines/zerg's etc. And adjusting your strategy depending on map, other races on map and opponent style. Translated roughly to non-player's words, playing Starcraft is not…

yeah, it's not even about build order, but improving the kunfu :)

Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft

#44

Post by saraid216 »

lgieron wrote: post #39
hkmurakami wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Introducing randomness is honestly a poor choice in competitive games. Warcraft 3 random item drop, Starcraft: Broodwar Scarab glitching & high ground random miss percentage, etc all made the competition somewhat less compelling.

Magic:the Gathering and Poker have lots of randomness in them and yet they're both very successful competitive games.

There is probably an interesting distinction to be made between the type of randomness that comes from a deck draw versus the type that comes from a loot table... but I don't know it. It feels different, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is.

Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft

#46

Post by lgieron »

saraid216 wrote: post #44
lgieron wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Magic:the Gathering and Poker have lots of randomness in them and yet they're both very successful competitive games.

There is probably an interesting distinction to be made between the type of randomness that comes from a deck draw versus the type that comes from a loot table... but I don't know it. It feels different, but I can't quite put my finger on what it is.

I'm not convinced of that. In either case, the random element just makes the game tree larger. What I like about randomness, is that adding it makes each of the individual games a unique story, which can have a great appeal (just look at the success of MtG,or Binding of Isaac for example). Obviously, designing such games (so that they're balanced) can be an order of magnitude harder than designing a game without randomness.

Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft

#47

Post by hkmurakami »

lgieron wrote: post #39
hkmurakami wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Introducing randomness is honestly a poor choice in competitive games. Warcraft 3 random item drop, Starcraft: Broodwar Scarab glitching & high ground random miss percentage, etc all made the competition somewhat less compelling.

Magic:the Gathering and Poker have lots of randomness in them and yet they're both very successful competitive games.

Poker at the very least is played for EV and moves are made with the expectation of the randomness converging over many samples. This is partly why tournaments are considered luckfests by most money game players since you need to win so many coinflips to win.

Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft

#49

Post by ricardobeat »

tomkin wrote: post #19

I hate to be that guy, but this is a real poor comparison. First, who uses guides anymore outside of print? 1140 Grid or 960 does the job perfectly fine and prepares your design for responsive. You can write an article about Starcraft if you love Starcraft, but juxtaposing against Photoshop workflow is disingenuous at best, misleading and confusing at the worst. Photoshop isn't perfect, but it knocks Fireworks' socks…

Until you need to use that PSD for production. There are a couple things in PS which make it terrible in day-to-day usage:

- no way to quickly export a layer or group on it's own with a transparent background (FW: click object, cmd+c, cmd+n, cmd+v, export) - can't copy layers with transparency to other applications - no 8-bit PNG export - auto-select sucks - takes minutes to load a 100mb file in an up-to-date computer with loads of RAM and scratch disk space. hangs when you move/resize too many layers at the same time - font rendering doesn't match system type at all

Not to mention that 99% of the time layers are not cut to size (have extra transparent padding) so you can't even get it's dimensions without a pixel ruler. That is, after you finally figure out which magic layer contains the actual objects. Please, make it stop :(

Re: Everything I know about design I learned playing Starcraft

#50

Post by d0m »

I also believe there are so many things I've learned in starcraft that help me in my startups. In no particular orders:

- Taking calculated risks - Understanding Macro vs Micro - Timing vs Economy vs Technology - Opponent psychology - Focus / Intelligence / Hard work

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