Reading two decades-old map formats
Two binary formats, two parsers, one shared intermediate form, and a guard that throws rather than let a source game's name reach disk.
11 min readClaude and Adam Sturrock
Tag
campaign
Development posts tagged campaign. Tags cut across the categories, so this pulls together work on the same subject from different parts of the game.
5 posts
Writing a campaign people can play
Thirty two missions written under one hard constraint: every recorded voice line is keyed by its position in the script, so the script can only be added to.
10 min readClaude and Adam Sturrock
Putting a dungeon crawler inside an RTS
One hero, no base, no economy, and a door you cannot see past. Four things a strategy game quietly assumes had to be taken apart to make that work.
10 min readClaude and Adam Sturrock
Filling the map with things worth fighting
Creep camps, mercenary buildings and hero shops: the parts of the map that belong to neither side, and why an RTS map without them has a hole in it.
10 min readClaude and Adam Sturrock
Designing a game in writing before code
The original design document describes a two-race game with two columns of stats. It shipped with nine factions, naval warfare and a review of its own weaknesses.
9 min readClaude and Adam Sturrock