JetCraft is a 2d platform sidescroller game and level editor for SC2 that has been under development since October 2012. The game's objective is to leave the level through the exit door which will only open once the player has collected all the keys scattered around. The player will also be able to collect various treasures to increase the end score, but only the keys are mandatory to complete the level. As mentioned earlier, the map comes with its own in-game level editor, which allows players to create their own JetCraft levels and share with other people online.
This game has left me speechless; simply amazing, be sure to check the project thread for screenshots and lots more information.
This project is a campaign with several cool features (including 2 player co-op!) that takes place between Wings of Liberty and Heart of the Swarm. Chris and Jonathan, two mercenaries who are apart of Andrew's Elite, have finished their mission on Char. Now they must get back to their ship before it leaves without them, yet strange forces are at work, leaving Chris and Jonathan prey to what is really happening in the Koprulu Sector.
Blizzard's latest featured map goes by the name "Trial of Zeal". Trial of Zeal is a team-based gladiator arena game. To win a game your team must knock out every member of the opposing team. Since heroes revive themselves after a short period of time, team coordination is required to win. To keep games short, players also have to deal with team-health. This special health bar drops as heroes take damage, and after it's depleted, no more heroes on that team can revive.
Take a look at Blizzard's highlight video below!
Be sure to check out the thread on sc2mapster here, and read the official blizzard post here.
CastleUlrezaj is a single player cross-boundary A-RPG which contains an integrated story and multiple areas waiting for you to explore. In this game, you will control Tassadar, the legendary hero to face Ulrezaj, one of the most dangerous terrorist in Protoss history. You need to fight against the destructive war machines, weird alien organisms and most vicious psi-power in the cosmos. You'll also be accompanied by two powerful allies who will fight alongside you.
You can feast your eyes on the map's amazing visuals by checking out the thread here, or taking a look at the video linked here.
CastleUlrezaj is currently available on the NA Battle net servers, so go try it out! If you want to play the game offline, it's available for download on sc2mapster here.
Not too long ago we featured War4Craft as a tech demo/proof of concept; it's recently gone into public beta. The project isn't particularly a Warcraft 3 clone, but more like a Warcraft strategy game with World of Warcraft models. Regardless, it still looks and feels like the old Warcraft RTS games we all know and love, so enjoy your blast from the past!
A brand-new "Spawning" feature has been added to sc2. From now on, every member of a party has the same access to the game as the person with the highest expansion level in the party. In other words, if a starter edition player is in a party with a WoL player, he can access the WoL ladder, custom games, and arcade. The same thing goes for HotS- any WoL player can access the HotS ladder as long as a HotS player is in their party. This means that the HotS-only arcade is now available to WoL players as long as they have a friend with HotS willing to play with them.
As an added bonus, using this feature will unlock a starcrafts in-game portrait.
In this map you control a gladiator (1-6 players) and fight through a series of boss battles, which require dodging and learning each boss's unique mechanics. When you defeat a boss, you gain new equipment and items to strengthen your gladiator, which saves from game to game so that the more you play, the stronger you get. Feel free to check out Blizzard's interview with Clownz as well!
Infested Arena 3, like its predecessors, places four players in an arena setting whereby their objective is to survive each successive round. At the beginning of the match each player will get the opportunity to choose their Specialist (or Hero). Each Specialist is different and has a unique play style. The more Infested you kill the stronger you can make your specialist. Your Specialist will never die; instead, when your specialist reaches 0 health he goes into an incapacitated state. You must wait in this Incapacitated state for a duration of time before your specialist will get on his feet again. If all current players' Specialists get Incapacitated at the same time then the game will end in defeat.
The latest map to receive an Arcade highlight goes by the name "Warships". It's a 6 player space warfare map, where each player constructs their ships to suit their own play style. This highlight even includes a video, which you can check out below.
You can join the discussion here or check out the full article here.
Happy Mothers' day to those of you with children! If you're not a mother, make sure to wish her a Happy Mothers' Day, as you would not be here without her! :P.
Tactics Versus is a 1v1 turn-based strategy game in which each player commands a group of rpg-archetype unit classes to out-strategize and eliminate his opponent. It has a variety of modes: 1v1, 1vAI, 2v2, Co-Op v AI, AI 2v2 Co-Op, and AI vs AI.
Gradius, one of our good friends from SCLegacy, has finally released his singleplayer campaign, StarCraft: Subjection. Subjection is a fully voice-acted 8 mission singleplayer campaign for StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty that features four difficulty levels of Brood War style gameplay. Search for the keyword "Subjection" on the North American or European server on Battle.net.
In addition to the above trailer, he's released the full playthrough as a machinima (as it's all voice-acted). If you prefer to just kick back and watch a StarCraft movie, you may do so below!
Congrats to anyone who got BlizzCon tickets in the first batch! If you were unable to get any tickets, there will be a second phase of tickets going on sale on Saturday! Also worth noting, the map pool for the 2013 ladder season 3 will be changing.
SquadCraft is a highly strategic and tactical game. Players will alternate between commanding troops and customizing them (similar to XCom), with plenty of equipment, strategies, and game settings provide tons of replayability.
Communities StarCraft II Arcade maps would like to invite you to Swarm of Hearts, a StarCraft II Arcade charity event organised by the Community. Swarm of Hearts is a collaborative effort of four Arcade games: Aeon of Storms, Night of the Dead, Star Battle and The Star Strikers. Those games are amongst the most polished and the most popular maps in the StarCraft II Arcade. The four Communites decided to host this event to reach their common goals which are:
Raise funds to a charity - Doctors Without Borders
Promote the best StarCraft II Arcade has to offer
Build better Arcade scene.
For more information, visit their Teamliquid thread. The event will be going on tomorrow (4/20); below is a video of the session they ran last week!
Your brood mother awakens on an unknown planet due to terran activity, but doesn’t remember how she got there. You'll have to regain strength with various evolutions and abilities in order to take back territory from the enemy. As you take back territory, creep will spread over the zones and allow you to establish forward bases for your army.
You can check out Zero's video below. Remember that this is beta footage, so everything is subject to change!
Zero is looking for beta testers for the map, so be sure to take a look at the project page here! The map name on Battle.net is "Zeros Open Beta RPG" if you want to check it out.
Dogfighters is a third person team action game with a focus on aerial combat. The game works entirely through a physics engine, allowing players to take command of their very own ships. Each team has to take down the enemy's bunker, which powers the forcefield protecting their base. Bunkers are tough targets and can shoot down your missiles before they make contact, so you'll need to help the ground troops who assist your team in destroying it. Ships are customize-able and can be fitted with several different weapons and features, each with advantages and disadvantages.
It's currently still a work-in-progress, so remember that everything you see in the video is still subject to change.
Make sure you check out the thread and leave your feedback here!
Also be sure to check out Blizzard's most recent Arcade Highlight!
Simply put, this is a classic tower defense game with mazes and mini games, based off of and inspired by World of Warcraft. The towers utilized in-game are heroes of Azeroth, the enemies are common monsters from Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms, Northrend, Outland and other dangerous places around the world of Warcraft.
Our two loveable Stalkers need subspace travel clearance from an emo Dark Templar who likes to write bad poetry in this episode of the HasuCraft machinima, created through the GalaxyEditor.
That's right, warhounds have been added back into starcraft 2. But not just for the Terrans- that would be unfair. All three races will now be able to use warhounds. You can see the reasoning behind blizzard's decision to reintroduce the warhound here.
At sc2mapster, we agree with blizzard that warhounds are pretty awesome. Make sure you let us know what you think here.
Photon Synergy is the spiritual successor to Photon Discs, and thus has similar gameplay. Annihilate your opponents by synergizing your orbs with the environment by throwing them over various spheres/walls of synergy. At the end of each match players will be awarded experience based on their performance and overall score during the game. Every level in the game will unlock something, whether it be a skin, title or a new hovercraft, every level matters. Whenever an orb synergizes with a wall or sphere, it will deplete the worlds stability. Should the world becomes unstable it will be unable to maintain the stability of the various walls and spheres on the map thus allowing any and all synergies to switch at anytime to another color for 1 minute. When a projectile comes in contact with a sphere or wall of synergy it will synergize with it and create a devastating effect or power up the orb itself.
Blizzard recently announced a brand new game based off the existing WoW IP, called Hearthstone. The game is an online, free to play, trading card game. The game will be a much smaller-scale title compared to most blizzard games. If you want to sign up for the beta, you can edit your beta profile settings inside your battle.net account. You can click here to check out the official website.
You can take a look at the information video below.
Join the discussion and let us know what you think here!
Hi everyone, as I said in a previous announcement, I was able to attend the Swarm launch event live, in California. This post will simply be my reflections of the live event; essentially the things behind the curtain, as I'm sure most of you probably watched the live stream. If you haven't gotten a chance to see the livestream, you can catch all of the videos on the Official Starcraft Twitch page.
Light being projected right when you walk in
My day began at 6am, getting ready to head to the Phoenix airport for 10am to California for this launch event. Once I arrived, I met [all for the first time, might I add,] Temp0, ChanmanV, LivinPink, Kevin Knocke, and Derrick from ONOG in the hotel lobby. For the next hour or so, we just chatted in the hotel restaurant while we waited for the event to begin. At this point, it's about 1:30pm, and the great pug from Blizzard met us outside the lobby with a shuttle and a couple of other community figures (Clutch, Russelo, Barbie from NASL, Amber Dalton from Twitch, JP McDaniel, and a few others), which we all boarded to head to the event, however not before Mr.Bitter and Rotterdam got some footage of us all getting on and a few interviews. In addition, Temp0, at the request of Amber from Twitch, did a small verse of one of his parody songs on the bus (he's way too good, someone needs to give this kid a deal)!
Life-size Kerrigan poster at the entrance
Now is when the interesting and important stuff starts for you. Again, most of my day consisted of walking around, meeting/talking to community figures and Blizzard employees, and just generally hanging out and watching the event unfold, but I will do the best to stick to a timeline! Back to the story... We arrived at the Blizzard campus after a relatively short shuttle ride from the hotel, where we were greeted with an awesome Kerrigan poster (as seen above) right outside of the registration point (yes, we had to register, make sure we were on the proper list, show ID, and get an awesome badge to have access, this was a special VIP event). While we waited for Blizzard to go snag some badges, we were directed back outside, where they had boxes and boxes of pizza hut and a few huge heroes (just big sandwiches), cookies, drinks, and lots more. In addition to the food, they had a few boxes of StarCraft: Risk out, as well as a few Blizzard poker sets for us to play with. Word of warning, never play Gretorp in poker, you're going to lose, -_-;.
K[9] Casting duo in the live stream room
Once we were done eating and got our registration taken care of, we were able to enter the live stream room; it was set relatively dark with lights focused on K[9] (the Day9 and Husky duo), and had probably 50 chairs or so, set in front of a large projector screen, for us to hangout and watch the stream live. I walked in and greeted Husky, who looked completely exhausted (this was only the middle of the afternoon, he had been up since 5am casting games, and still had another 10 hours to go). The next few hours I spent walking back and forth, talking to employees and figures outside, and watching the stream inside. Although, it was pretty awesome getting to watch some of the community videos, like the /r/Starcraft one by Leafeator, the one from the NASL, and Gretorp's commercial, and getting to see their reactions to them. It's like watching a movie for the second time, you know what's going to happen, so you're just looking to make sure the other person is enjoying it, haha. Anyway, not much to say here; at about 8pm we all made our way over to the Irvine Spectrum (a large outdoor mall for the area).
Can you spot a wild Sixen? (photo courteousy of Thunderclaww from /r/Diablo)
Clutch and I used our amazing navigation skills to get from the parking garage to the right place in the Spectrum, however it wasn't very hard to find, as there was a giant purple, glowing stage right next to a ferris wheel. Again, I spent this time walking around a bit and talking (if you couldn't tell, I love to network), but I also stopped in a few stores. The Barnes n Noble there actually had another Kerrigan poster, and put a bunch of Flashpoint and other Starcraft novels up out front to make some sales. There were also employees from the local stores handing out coupons (man, do I love pretzels), etc. Due to the fact that I had an awesome badge, I was able to get into the VIP area, which was literally right up on the front of the stage. From about 10pm to midnight I hungout with Carbots and his wife, and Traysent, (all really awesome people,) as we watched the EG.Suppy and ROOTVibe showmatch, just before the final countdown. Day9 and Husky also interviews Carbots, just before showing his , as well as Robert Clotworthy (Jim Raynor's voice actor), and Chris Sigaty. You can catch all these interviews from the Twitch channel as well.
Myself, Carbots & Wife, ChanmanV, Temp0
Toward the end of the event, we all counted down to midnight, similar to you would on New Years Eve, with the 12:00 marker launching confetti, lots of lights, and the ferris wheel lighting up purple and yellow, which was a really cool sight to see. The night ended with us getting lost, missing the shuttle, and Traysent saving the day. Once we all got a special present from the Blizzard employees, I headed back to the hotel with Carbots and his wife, Temp0, and ChanmanV to conclude the night. The day ended like it began, just like an ironic movie, hanging out in the lobby. Of course, my flight back was at 6:45am, so while they all slept, I just sat and waited for my flight home, caught a shuttle to the airport at 5:30am, and got home around 10am after all said and done... and then of course, after passing out, I had to play some Heart of the Swarm!
I won't spoil anything within the Swarm campaign, I'll just my very brief, general thoughts on the game. Honestly, I thought this was one of the best storylines of any Blizzard game, to date. That may be quite a bit, as it's competing with the campaigns/stories of the entire Diablo series, the Warcraft RTS series, and SC1, BW, and WoL. I just feel like Swarm was exactly what I needed, personally, out of the Starcraft series, at this point in time. It set up Legacy of the Void for a perfect conclusion to the series. Once you complete Swarm, I feel it's pretty obvious the direction Legacy will take the series to an end and it gives me nerd chills thinking about it, let alone the nerd chills I got at several points through the Swarm campaign as we met new and old characters alike. I'll give a much more in-depth write up at some point in time, once everyone has completed the game. If anyone needs catching up on the lore of Starcraft as a whole, I joined Clutch on NASL.tv to give a rundown of the story so far, up until Heart of the Swarm, including some of our own speculation. We'll be joining together next month to do a follow-up lore show about Heart of the Swarm and speculation about the future as well.
I hope you enjoyed y write-up of the experience I had at the live Swarm launch. If not, hopefully at least you got to see some cool pictures and videos, and got some insight into what goes on at Blizzard events. I got a chance to meet some really cool people (you all know who you are, ;) ) and genuinely had a blast. It was a nice change of pace for me, as I'm graduating from university pretty soon, and have been so focused on completing that. The next big Blizzard event at this point will be BlizzCon 2013, see you there!
Heart of the Swarm is finally here, and servers are live across the world! If you haven't purchased the game yet, you can get it at Battle.Net. If you want to see the official patch notes for HotS, take a look here. If you're wondering how publishing works with HotS out, or you're struggling to figure out which dependencies to use in your project, take a look at this thread. If you've already completed the campaign and want to discuss the story, head over here (Spoilers!). Finally, remember to join the sc2mapster group to find testers for your maps and get questions answered.
There were some awesome Heart of the Swarm animations aired during the launch event. If you missed the stream, you can check them out below.
And as always, remember to use [Spoiler] tags in threads discussing the story.
Update #2: For those wondering how publishing maps will work in HotS, take a look at this post.
Sixen Update: If anyone needs to catch up on the lore, I was on a special edition of Up to Speed with Clutch from NASL, I'll link to the VOD as soon as they put it together. In addition, I'll be at the Irvine live event, maybe I'll get some cool stuff to share with you guys!
As you all probably know, Heart of the Swarm launches this Tuesday, March 12th! The official list of launch times for each region is now available here, so you can see exactly when you can start playing! Blizzard also posted updates regarding the campaign. Kerrigan's leveling system is explained here, and the mutation and evolution system is explained here. Feel free to join the update discussion here. If you haven't seen it already, the HotS launch trailer is below.
With the launch of the game quickly approaching, we'd also like to remind you to keep posts spoiler-free. If you're creating a thread to discuss the story, be sure to place a "[Spoiler]" warning in the title.
Following the footsteps of the hero arena genre, Trial of Zeal is best described as a gladiator arena, pitting team versus team duels minus the leveling or item building. In addition, most projectiles in the game can be dodged or blocked through the use of obstacles, adding a new skill twist to this genre.
