Starcraft: Ashfall
starcraft-shooter-2026.pages.devWow, thanks to whoever posted this! I made this game.
Like many, I was frustrated there's no new StarCraft coming till 2030, so I half-jokingly made the mini-game those mobile ads always promise and never deliver. Something you can play with one hand, that your friends who've never played StarCraft can just pick up.(Turns out you can squeeze a lot of extra gameplay/design on top of it.)
Also, if you're going to copy Blizzard you might as well copy the whole package right, so there's a CG trailer too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVDao71LC7A
Honestly didn't expect people to grind this. I designed the endgame to be layer 50 and thought ppl can get at most ~70 if they really try, and somehow there are people on the leaderboard past 100 (without cheating). That's StarCraft players for you.
this may be a long shot, but you aren't <EZMONE>ggEZnore on the SC2 teams ladder, are you?
Hey... if you stay in the middle of the unit choice. you get both? YAY
I've never played those mobile ad games and this scratched my curiosity. Now you're telling me they don't deliver and I'm curious again, how do they fail their delivery?
The games are different than the video. They just don’t deliver that experience at all. In 2026 it does seem strange as the cost of production of graphic and code is less.
But when that trend started back in 2023 or so, the game in the video was much more expensive to produce that what you actually got to play.
The game they're advertising for has absolutely no relation/bearing to the ads. At all. The actual game is more like an Advanced Wars-meets-Civilization/Risk boardgame type microtransaction-bleed-you-dry type game, you have to build a base and if you don't login every ~6 hours then people can take over your base and you lose/die, unless you pay ~$45/mo (or whatever). There is no scrolling arcade element of any kind in the actual game. This guy's game is brilliant tho.
I think there are multiple. The one I tried to play was oddly quite similar to heroes of might and magic but with infinite micro transactions
It ends up being a tiny portion of the game because it's hard to monetize.
The majority of the game will still be timer based buildings/armies (so you pay to speed up) and egregiously p2w pvp.
Hi I posted it. I'm just a guy in the chat who saw it on YouTube.
Thank you so much for sharing it, really made my day!
awesome work
Reddit thread from about a month ago where creator introduced this: https://www.reddit.com/r/starcraft/comments/1wqdabw/i_made_t...
Wow someone made the youtube ad game!
There's also pinball and an asteroids-like game if you click the "Arcade" button next to where it says "Ashfall Crossing"
A shame if they don't recreate the Lost Viking game from Wings of Liberty itself.
it's funny that everyone has had the same experience with that ad
RAID SHADOW LEGENDS SPONSORED BY NORDVPN?!?!?
cool, give me more
Pretty addictive , spend a few hours with it today on the tab in and out
I've never played Starcraft before (brain too smooth) but always loved the aesthetic. Gotta say, this was pretty fun. First run I got to Endless/#22.
Looks to me like Immortal and Firebats both sucked for me, which I guess makes sense. Colossus, Siege Breaker and Marauder were my top 3.
Cool visuals, but doesn't count as a game for me. Can you do anything that make sense, except selecting the upgrade?
Could be a nice little game, though. Strip the IP and let the AI implement a bit more for the user to do.
It’s actually very addicting once you play a couple of sessions. The scoreboard is crazy. Still don’t know how anyone makes it past wave (layer) 35-37.
I got around 42. Protos commander felt stronger for the effort.
It basically has the same gameplay as ProgressQuest, an adventure game that was famously created to minimize user involvement.
It's like cookie clicker, with less clicking and more blood!
Once you get high enough you can switch commanders which gives additional upgrades and active powers.
I've been seeing a lot of Pokemon games recently as well, are companies just not enforcing their copyright/trademarks anymore?
They can't sue everyone, comrade. AI tools will hopefully trigger a rewrite of what copyright means, it's always been silly that it prevents derivitive works.
> AI tools will hopefully trigger a rewrite of what copyright means,
Maybe it will, but this ain't a copyright issues, it's a trademark issue.
It's a legal issue, and the legal part has always been bullshit regardless of which specific label happens to apply.
If you don't make copyright contagious under derivative works then people can just change a few things to get around copyright.
Also, do you really want a world where big film studios can just adapt books of writers without compensating them?
Is 20-30 authors per year making it big really worth the massive suffocation that prevents tens of thousands of authors from writing the stories that are in their hearts?
They do that anyway today. You really think authors, book writing being the lucrative industry for writers that it is, are suing Universal/Sony/whoever to prevent their IP being infringed?
I do really want a world however where fans/communities can riff on and make derivative works of culturally relevant material without being legally nuked from orbit. The last few weeks have been amazing in the gaming world, creativity abounds and there seem to be no limits as to what we can redesign to our own whims.
Surprised to see this level of discourse here on HN, reads like a reddit comment.
Copyright sucks, and Disney is bad etc, but how is using StarCraft and its assets in your random AI game okay?
I mean, creators should be allowed to exert control over how their assets and brand are used.
I've always found that defending laws that don't benefit people to be a stange attitude on a place called "hacker news".
Creative people should be able to create. Trademark/copyright laws, protecting assets for the great-grandchildren of who actually created the art, has never been a positive. The only people who benefit, are themselves not creative (or else they would create, instead of defending "rights" and "image").
How about protecting assets for the people who made the art in the first place, geeze.
And seriously wtf why shouldn't, like, Jack Kirby's grandkids get a share of the huge bounty of stuff he created for Marvel, but Elon Musk gets to inherit emerald mines from his dad?
IP has very low marginal cost, emeralds don’t.
>but how is using StarCraft and its assets in your random AI game okay? How is it not ok? What is the issue exactly? From what I can tell it's totally free, and has an indication it is a fan game on the bottom of the screen.
>Copyright sucks, and Disney is bad etc, but how is using StarCraft and its assets in your random AI game okay?
Because it's cool.
The number of conglomerates has, unsurprisingly, continued to shrink. It's long overdue for a rethink. Maybe if the US political system ever stabilizes, we might get to it in a hundred years. Until then Copyright sucks and Disney is bad.
> creators should be allowed to exert control over how their assets and brand are used
I hate to be glib, but no they shouldn't.
Creators should be allowed to create things and sell them. No one, whether the creator, or the company the creator worked for when they first created the thing, should be able to stop someone else from creating something.
Couldn’t they just use AI to sue at scale? No one should be too small to go after now.
The court system is too bogged up as it is with the current load. So I guess we’d have to create some AI judges and lawyers :p
And robotic cops to enforce the law!
Yeah the law firms just haven't caught up yet. But they will.
And when the judges get around to the case in 300 years after all the other ai court cases, we'll be beyond caring about the consequences.
Law firms are cautious about AI tools, they got burned a couple years ago by hallucinated citations.
Citing made-up cases sure looks like lying to the court, which is a punishable offense. Lawyers have been sanctioned, fined, and in one case received a 30-day license suspension.
When it comes to copyright, I am not so optimistic. When the AI bubble bursts, the usual corporate interests will resurface with a vengeance.
they may well be busy surviving AI induced chain reactions letting lots of people out of work.
It's a totally original creation laundered through LLM derivative works.
Sometimes, yes, but this one is just straight-up calling itself "Starcraft" and using the original art and voice-lines.
Better than the original game - works on ultra-wide.
Game basically plays itself but fun nonetheless
For 10-15 levels or so, then your upgrade choices start to matter.
I only played through it once, but I'm convinced I'd do better on a second run, and a third, etc.
The satisfying pop of the zerglings alone make it fun for me.
This is the second (probably vibecoded?) game in the last few days that I've seen using blizzard ip (the other being d2survivors.lol)
We need a tracker!
I have around 15k games in SC2 and I can honestly say; this is awful. I love it.
Fun! Just sunk a couple hours into it. Super addicting and deeper than it looks. But the difficulty spike at around layer 30 is insane.
Saw Starcraft, spent 30 minutes living the nostalgia playing this.
This has made my day. Thank you! I always wanted to try one of those ad shooters, but I refuse to engage with ads
It's nice to know Stimpack marines still roll face.
Always have, always will.
Ahhhh yeahhhh
I was wondering why there was a dragon there, is it from Wrath of the Lich King?
Fun game.
I have to pick a new upgrade every 3 seconds. I thought they did that to stave off boredom, but actually it increases decision fatigue. (I just wanna shoot!)
I did not touch the controls at all, and I still won with zero losses on the first level - that does not inspire confidence.
In snowball games like this, losing a unit marks the beginning of the end. As such, you really have to go out of your way to lose units in the tutorial.
controls aren't important, upgrade/tech choices are
This is amazing!
It's not a fun game, but it's cool anyway
Great game. It took me way too long to figure out I could use keyboard to control the positioning instead of mouse.
Game crashes when trying to fuse units
You must build additional pylons
*construct !!
THE MERGING IS NOT COMPLETE
Is this AI generated? Pretty impressive if that is the case
The opposite would be correct. AI generated is the norm, and it would be impressive to spend xxx hours creating this when AI can do it in 4 hours
Definitely smells like ai. I don't think a human would spend so much time on the graphics and effects and not have streamlined the gameplay a bit.
What does AI generated even mean, really? Because there is a pretty big difference between “make a star craft game” and a sequence of very specific small prompts to build it up. They are both AI generated, but will vary wildly in quality and implementation.
Assets are very easily duplicated because of the editor that ships with the game. Not as impressive as it would be if it were other games with more tightly-locked assets.
That was pretty enjoyable. Definitely like the ads you see online but with IP people care about.
Lots of fun! Wish StarCraft would come out every year
Too busy making the new StarCraft.
Ah, the music is so nostalgic. Really takes me back.
So what's the meta?
I like seige tanks
there is no meta but what we vibe
I'm noticing that armor pen is super important later on. However, eventually get rekt.. I'm curious how the top person got to the layer he is in now. I'm stuck at layer 26.
Spectacular. Mad props.
Cool game, but isn't this going to make blizzard bring out the big guns?
Great work on this, had a blast!
I did not make this, for the record. I just found it.
Perfect, who needed to be productive anyways
Holy moly, just hearing those sound effects gives me a giant wave of nostalgia.
A mix of everything. Stolen from everywhere. We have AI, but people are still the bottleneck. They lack creativity and ideas :D. lol
Big game hunters Terran vs 7PC zergs. Same feeling.
Really cool game. Spent about 30 minutes playing it. Very fun!
This was really fun!
Fun, but... how is this not already taken down by copyright strikes? I mean straight rips of audio assets, music, 3d assets, graphics, even the damn name...
See also: D2 Survivors https://d2survivors.lol/
The AI games mashups are starting to heat up.
Wake up, Hank. That game ain’t gonna play itself. Oh wait it does.
nice game
so nice!
This is, respectfully, slop piggybacking on nostalgic associations with stolen assets.
Tale as old as time. The second half of what we now call the singular novel Don Quixote is actually the sequel to the original Don Quixote, published ten years later. In it the characters lament that someone published bootleg Don Quixote stories, which really happened!
You must be the fun one at parties
slop
This is the equivalent of asking an LLM for a new harry potter novel and then showing it off as if you wrote it, and it's disappointing that HN approves.