For Ryan Winzen, a 28-year-old former Marine with a background in graphic communications, game design has been a lifelong passion.
He began at the age of six, designing pen-and-paper RPGs before moving on to creating mods for games like Warcraft III and RPG Maker 2003. In January of 2011, Winzen posted a proof-of-concept video of a mod he had been developing for Blizzard's StarCraft II. He called it World of StarCraft.
Two and a half years later, with a successful Kickstarter campaign funding the rest of its development and a name change to StarCraft Universe, Winzen and a small team are grinding away full time on creating one of the most anticipated fan mods ever.
As the original name suggested, Winzen's 2011 proof of concept was like Blizzard's wildly popular massively multiplayer online game World of Warcraft, but with aliens and spaceships subbing in for the orcs and elves. While StarCraft II was a strategy game in which players manipulated whole armies of units, the mod would put them in control of a single character as they completed quests, slayed enemies, gained experience and collected loot.
Winzen proposed to fundamentally change the game's mechanics, while only using the modification tools that Activision Blizzard itself had included with the software.
"The StarCraft II engine is an extremely powerful tool," Winzen told WIRED via phone. "It's not like any of the modding tools we had back in the day, like [Warcraft III's], which just let us move objects around and change very simple triggers. With StarCraft II, you can actually change the infrastructure of the game completely." The game includes Galaxy, a scripting language with similar syntax to the programming language C. This has let developers create some amazing things.
One developed a "Mega Man/Metroid hybrid" called Castle Ulrezaj, which stars StarCraft character Tassadar in a side-scrolling action-platformer adventure.
Another developed a card game called BarCraft, a multiplayer tabletop-style game that is played within StarCraft II. Even Blizzard itself released StarJeweled, a StarCraft-themed Bejeweled-style matching puzzle game, again played within StarCraft II.
"You can do pretty much anything you can imagine," Winzen said. As it turned out, even Activision Blizzard didn't understand just how transformative its own tools could be.
Within a few days of announcing World of StarCraft and racking up 150,000 video views, Winzen's video disappeared from the web. Activision Blizzard had it pulled down, on suspicion of copyright infringement.
Winzen was confused. He didn't see how he had done anything that wasn't explicitly encouraged by the game's maker. Everything he had developed so far was made entirely using StarCraft II's extensive built-in modding tools. As it turned out, Winzen's mod was so impressive that Blizzard thought he was developing a game outside of its platform.
"The Deputy General Counsel from Blizzard contacted me," Winzen wrote in a forum post at the time. "I explained the details of the project to him and made it clear this mod was to be developed within [the StarCraft II engine]."
Winzen did have to change the name of his project to StarCraft Universe, since Activision Blizzard holds a copyright on the name "World of StarCraft." But Winzen had Blizzard's blessing and was free to continue developing his mod.
"I used the notoriety gained from that to start recruiting a team of developers, both professional and hobbyists, who were really talented around the community and really passionate about StarCraft," Winzen said.
StarCraft Universe is aimed at fans of the characters, setting, and story of StarCraft who would like to experience its content in a new environment. Starting up the game, players are greeted with a character creation screen where, in traditional MMO format, they customize their avatar's class, appearance, and other abilities.
However, StarCraft Universe is not actually an MMO – you won't see tons of other players running about in the world. The game's content is delivered in the form of "Acts," similar to those of Blizzard's game Diablo III, which are playable either solo or with a small group of friends. Each act is instanced, meaning that each player or group enters their own copy of the area rather than all hanging out in the same place. So it feels like an MMO while not actually being one. If players want to get a feel for how this all works, the game's prologue is currently available to try out.
After working in their spare time for three years on StarCraft Universe, Winzen's team, now calling itself Upheaval Arts, took to Kickstarter to fund the completion of the highly ambitious mod. The campaign completed last week, raising more than $80,000 to further fund development.
"One really cool advantage is that we have all of Blizzard's assets available to us," Winzen explained. "We have access to all of their models and animations and textures, and that eliminates a lot of development time. That's what makes it possible for a very small team of guys to actually pull something like this off."
However, since StarCraft Universe is a mod completely retained within StarCraft II, it is entirely free to play – you just have to own the original game. This is good news for players, but it also means that means there is no money to be made for Upheaval Arts. This posed a particular challenge for the Kickstarter, which just barely reached its $80,000 funding goal.
"We had a lot of things riding against us on the Kickstarter," Winzen said. "The game's free, so what incentive does someone have to donate aside from generosity? There's also things like the fact that a lot of people look at is as 'this is a mod, this isn't a game,' which is almost anything but the case. The amount of work that we've done on StarCraft Universe is [equal to] most indie games you'll play."
With the Kickstarter campaign complete, Winzen and the team can finally focus on StarCraft Universe full time. The current task is completing development on the game's open beta, currently slated for January of 2014, which is focused on letting the players and developers test the balance of the core gameplay, systems, and progression to ensure the game feels right.
After that, development will shift to focus on "Act I," the first major batch of story content for the game's campaign.
"Act I is going to be frickin' awesome," Winzen said. "It's going to be very highly replayable content, and it should be something that we've never really seen before in gaming. ... It's going to be very dynamic and different every time you play. I cannot wait to release it."
