Fifty Days of UFO 50: Day 38

 

   Getting caught up in the work-like rhythms of this project has perhaps caused it to become slightly less personal over time. There was initially a lot of frustrated "whatever, I guess this is what I'm doing now" energy that sort of burned off as I began to focus on what made each UFO 50 game special; broadly, these games are far more interesting than my own problems and limitations as a game designer. Well, playing what amounts to a more focused console version of SimAnt has put me right back in my feelings today.
When I wrote about my reaction to playing CombatAnts for the first time, I wasn't fully ready to unpack some of those memories and experiences. Apologies in advance for once again getting way too real about my past...

So when I say that StarCraft had a huge, but not necessarily positive, impact on me as a teenager, I mostly mean that it changed me in several ways, but not into someone that generally enjoys real time strategy games.
Long before I fell head-first into League of Legends and got used to playing against people, some of my first forays into competitive gaming were on Battle.net in Starcraft: Brood War. I was terrible; mostly because the mere knowledge that my opponent was a person somewhere in the real world caused my hands to tremble uncontrollably. I was so nervous about making the right moves and winning that I could barely play the game; it's hard to get your Actions Per Minute up when you keep mis-clicking and nearly falling out of the chair by bouncing your leg up and down! The wobblies eventually chilled out a bit, but I wouldn't become a slur-hardened, cynically toxic MOBA player until years later, when my team flamed me mercilessly for picking Morgana as a support champion in Season Three.

[She was considered a mid laner at the time for whatever idiotic reason, and all the other sheeple playing League at the time were literally incapable of seeing your glorious vision for how the newly introduced support items would synergize with her kit... that is, of course, until Morgana support became her ONLY meta role mere months after the fact; yes, you're clearly still salty about it!]

    All this excitement with online gaming culminated in a creative project that was inspired by the time I spent with my copy of SimAnt on the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. Thanks to my copy of Mario Paint, I had access to a SNES Mouse, which made playing the game feel a lot closer to the home computing origins it was ported from. I haven't thought about this in years, but in spite of the mouse, I discovered that rapidly mashing the A button on a gamepad let you juice your odds of winning a direct battle with another ant by something like 1% per tap. No recollection whether that was taking place on the second controller port of the console, or whether this was considered a cheat-code-like technique. For all I know you were intended to button mash in battle, and I happened to discover it organically rather than read about it in a manual? That doesn't sound quite right given how voraciously I read the manuals that I had access to, but I digress. It felt like cheating because of the sheer number of times I snuck into giant enemy nests on solo suicide missions from my pitiful holdings to assassinate the enemy red queen!

This was all cool, and gross, and fascinating in ways that reminded me of The Zerg, (the third, monstrous biotechnological faction in Starcraft). So, I set out to create a 1v1 PvP custom Starcraft map based on SimAnt. My goal, on paper, was to replicate as many of the mechanics as I could in the modding tool StarEdit. Being a silly tween with no engineering experience outside of making crappy adventure games in HyperCard, this left a TON of features on the cutting room floor:

• No yellow protagonist/leader ant with scent trail abilities
• Warcraft 3 didn't exist yet, so there was no Aeon of Strife or Defense of the Ancients mod for me to reverse engineer and figure out how to manage a respawning hero unit that's technically a separate faction from the body of your ant army.
• No AI NPC ant behaviors
• Without a hero ant and scent trail tech there wasn't a framework for your ants to belong to the CPU, meaning you'd just have to command your ants manually the usual RTS way
• Probably the biggest single factor for this mod not really "feeling like SimAnt"
• No roaming neutral spider hazards
  
• I think I tried to get some Ultralisk units to work this way, but my limited knowledge of spawning rules and AI influencing nodes made them an unfun wash
• No giant human foot stomp hazards
• No third "nursery" caste of bugs to go with the workers and warriors
• In hindsight I should have attempted this with the Zerg Broodling unit, but I suspect it being a temporary unit traditionally gated behind the Queen's ability made that feel impossible in ways I now understand could have been worked around
• No actual nests or transitioning into a separate "underground" map
• And thus, no digging
• This one may have actually been impossible as anything but a bad-feeling separate section of the same flat map you teleport to, which would never have felt like a separate tileset or space give you could pan the camera right over to the "overworld" on that same map

That's a daunting list of "cant's" right there, eh? But to my youthful credit, the list of things I did manage to accomplish was almost as impressive:

• Zerglings with reduced move speed to act as "Warrior Caste" ants
• Drones to act as harvesting "Worker Caste" ants
• Semi-randomized scattered "food" drops in various scripted locations on a global timer
• Impressively, there was a poorly-play-tested system for these drop locations to slightly favor the player with fewer total units; possibly my first-ever stab at game balance
• A stationary "Ant Queen" building for each side that regularly "pulsed" consuming some of your food minerals in exchange for producing more worker and warrior "ants"
• Not having enough food would produce fewer units and incur a "starvation" queen damage penalty, theoretically enabling a "starve the enemy out" strategy
• I recall being proud of thinking to use a special Zerg Cerebrate structure from the campaign for this purpose
• A couple of burrowed Lurker antlion trap locations in choke points that would occasionally "eat" units that were passing over them
• These were placed such that if you casually ordered your ants across the map without waypointing them around the hazard, a small handful of them wouldn't make it
• An innovative caste selection system that controlled the ratio of workers to warriors born on the next pulse
• This was a triangular section in each player's corner of the map with a single un-burrow-able Lurker unit trapped inside
• Depending on which unit-labeled corner of the triangle it was sitting in, you could order all workers, all warriors, or a mixture of the two

The map was relatively small and simple, but I was inordinately proud of it given the amount of careful iteration and surprisingly mature design thought funneled into the process of making it. Excitedly, a naïve young Xeneth would put up a custom game lobby during peak weekend playtimes and wait for another player to join up and download his new custom map. Most people were too busy playing wildly popular custom maps like "Turret Defense" and "Protect Slim Shady" to have any interest, but a few players took the bait and played a round of SimAnt v1.0 with me.

Usually, they would quit midway through the match when they realized it just wasn't the next "Starship Troopers" or whatever. One got confused by the instructions chat automatically printed at the start of the match and said it was dumb. I think I only ever managed to get one player to stick around long enough after a match to chat about what they thought about the experience, and they hated it.
They said it didn't feel anything like SimAnt, (which is harsh but fair criticism) and accused me of rigging the game to ensure whoever was in the first player slot would win. They called me a cheater and left before I could explain my intent or offer to go again in the second player slot.

It felt terrible. I was an awful modder who'd designed a bad player experience, despite being principled enough to mirror the map and mechanics perfectly so neither player would have an advantage.

And just like that, my career in modding was over before it began.

I'm sorry to report that I lacked the mental and emotional fortitude to just... ignore that random guy, or try again. I have a long personal history of responding to an early stumble or failure by taking it as a sign that "this is not the way" and quitting. When I was lured into playing basketball as a tall kid, I got so excited and confused the first time I was passed the ball that I dribbled the wrong way and scored 2 points for the opposing team; their echoing laughter relegated me to simple shooting games like HORSE for decades. When a violin teacher got mad at me for trying to bow with my dominant hand, it threw me off badly enough that I momentarily confused the directions mapped to the words Left and Right; the question, "can't you tell the difference between your own hands?" heralded the end of those lessons.
My tendency to be a bit of a bridge-burner is most likely something I should be working on to this day.

    This obviously didn't completely kill my dream of making video games, here I am trying to psyche myself up into getting back into development. I would go on to work in quality assurance and help with multiple projects in a design capacity, but I'm realizing now that it did close a specific door I haven't really been considering. I didn't get into the industry or learn to make games through modding, but it's a very well documented and seemingly beneficial path.

This isn't exactly a sad feeling, per se, but I can't help but wonder at the branching realities. Where might I be today in the timeline where that first SimAnt custom Starcraft map generated some encouragement or positive reinforcement instead of planting a seed of doubt in the pit of my stomach?

This shouldn't really be the story of why I haven't been playing more CombatAnts, so much as a tale of how I thought about modding for the first time in over a decade.

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