Gamasutra have interviewed Dustin Browder about the design and all the challenges that involves to recreate one of the best RTS of all time. We both learn about his past and his philosophy about gaming design and how to bring back old players as well as new.

Read the interview.

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Dustin Browder Interview

If you recall the Fansite Q&A With Browder, we are now back to interview the same man, but not in a group of people. Stressing between all the press-related stuff we found Dustin Browder, Lead Designer of StarCraft II, and talked about his favourite subject: Game Design! Seeing as we are fansite crew, we were not afraid to bring him in to specifics on things like the Map Editor, map protection, modding, extra races, the complicated Mothership, the Queen and much, much more. One of the more interesting pieces of information is that the Map Editor possibly could be released before the game!

All Blizzard developers, he is warm, open and humorous (I mean, some even play in the Blizzard metal band L80ETC!), and Dustin is no exception, despite being the "newbie" among the bosses of the company. His attitude to the game is healthily no fanatic, and will probably be able to make better gamemaking decisions for it. Let's continue with the interview:


A question about replays, with StarCraft and WarCraft III they always have the problem with a new patch the old replays are not working. How do you consider on handling that with StarCraft II?

Dustin: There is a problem and we've talked about it. I don't know what the answer is yet. That's not the answer that you want to hear, but we know about it, we understand that its real and it's a challenge for us to obviously to make it work since the data would be out of sync. If we could have done it already we would have in previous games but I know that we've just been talking about it so we'll have to see what can be done. But we do take it seriously and it is a problem. If we can't get it done then it couldn't be done but we want to try harder to make it happen.


You mentioned in one of the Q&A sessions with Kevin that you're hoping to have some integrated map protection for map authors.


Dustin: That's all Battle.net stuff, I don't know what the final deal on that will be yet but we'd love to. Obviously map authors are a huge part of Battle.net right now; we've even hired guys out of the mod community to work on our team. So we really want to continue to support the mod community as best we possibly can and the kids need to flaunt their style.

We have a pretty cool map editor which is coming along really well right now; I can put a unit together in about 10 minutes. It's very very powerful right now but I don't know how user friendly it is at the moment. But very very powerful so I'm going to ship that with the game as well.

We also do make a lot of conscious decisions on the team when we talk about any new feature or anything we want to add to the game, like; "how can this be used to support the modders?" If it's something that we could convert easily from one version to another and we often just go back and re-do things because we know that; "that works for our needs for a solo play mission but if we put in another couple of hours work then that could be something that modders could use across the board."


Which mods are the most popular ones for StarCraft?

Well,he modding scene has quite decreased in the last year. There was some really cool mods which made some kind of new and super new units and things like that. There was some kind of Warcraft III TC [Editor's note: "Total Conversion"] which Blizzard took down because it was too much and some other things. Now the modding community is just looking at the Project Revolution mod from WarCraft III that converts Warcraft III to StarCraft I. This is one of the things where the fans compare: the Starcraft II graphics and the Project Revolution graphics, and if the Project Revolution graphics exceed the StarCraft II graphics [then] that's a problem.

So when will the Starcraft II editor become available to modders?[/B]

Dustin: I don't know yet, it'll certainly be shipped with the game but I don't know the answer to whether it will be earlier. That would be cool though.


The WarCraft III map editor is pretty involved and it can be daunting for anyone who doesn't know programming and stuff. Is that something you are aware of?

Dustin: It's definitely going to be a trade off between usability and power. Anything that seems more powerful is ultimately going to be a little bit more daunting. I know that it's pretty easy, I've done it myself with little to no training at all, I just jumped into the WarCraft III editor and made multiplayer maps and that's easy. That's sort of the basic level we expect players to be able to do to a certain degree, with a little messing around they can eventually do up a map.

Advanced mods are going to be advanced and we can do whatever we can to make them easy for people to do, but the end of the day if you want to do some crazy stuff, you're going to have to make a little bit of effort. That's what separates the great modders from the not-so-great modders.


Will there be that same level of skill required to make that same type of conversion?

Dustin: I don't know for sure, but I guess, let me put it this way. I don't know that a full conversion like that really is going to be easy. I don't want to promise that. I mean, it's not really a full conversion but it's a lot of work. So we're definitely going to do what we can to make it easier, but still if you're going to make a really complicated mod, then it's going to be a complicated mod. That's how it's going to work.


Concerning 3D graphics, what's tools do you need? In StarCraft it was just using paint and opening it and just adding new units. What 3D do you consider for modders? Will you be giving your own editor for the graphics?

Dustin: I think we may ship the art tools but you still have to have a 3D program, there's no way around that. And you can check with Samwise and Chris in terms of what format we support and that sort of thing, I don't really know the details on that but we'll see.

We're also going to include a lot of the art into the game that we're not using in the multiplayer experience so we'll include some of the old units that didn't make the cut for the multiplayer so they can be used as well and anything else lying around. You get the idea. If it wasn't good enough for StarCraft II then we'll put that in the editor so you can still have access to it.

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