Revisiting Mekran's Will

I went on a quest recently to find the first thing I kinda programmed, a custom StarCraft map.

I remember sitting in the computer room turned dining room of my childhood home, on the family computer, inserting the StarCraft CD and joining a Battle.net lobby on dial-up.

StarCraft, normally a space-themed real-time strategy game, had a custom game mode where you’re not playing the same game anymore. You’re playing some 13-year-old’s tower defense game, a Harry Potter-themed free-for-all, or capture the flag.

Custom games became my primary experience of StarCraft.

Eventually, I decided to make one of my own. I made a role-playing game called Mekran’s Will. Years later, I remembered the map’s name, and not much else about it, including how much programming it involved.

I had no hard drives from back then and hadn’t saved it anywhere. Ten years ago, when I first looked, I came up empty-handed. Maybe five years ago, I found a copy of the map in someone’s public archive of StarCraft maps.

I downloaded it and booted up StarCraft. As the scenario description page came up, it started coming back to me.

It felt like traveling through time. Sometimes, you get a smell of something that takes you back to childhood, like my grandmother’s bread. My grandparents would bake it, freeze it, and then toast it for breakfast. Frozen and toasted, the Trader Joe’s sourdough loaf reminded me of it.

I clicked “Start” and waited. When the map loaded a few moments later, I saw:

What did I do wrong? Did I have a bug in the map, or did a StarCraft patch break my custom map?

I tried to open the map in the StarCraft editor. It wouldn’t load. I had run a map protector on it so no one else could edit the public version. But I didn’t know what I’d used to protect it, or how to undo it.

I uninstalled StarCraft and assumed that would be it. I felt a little sad about it.

Recently, I saw someone mention on Hacker News that they used AI to fix their old keyboard firmware. I wondered, could I use AI to fix my map? Or at least let me play it without instantly losing?

I asked an agent to unprotect the map and it… did. I hadn’t expected that it would because most forums I came across restricted posting map unprotectors (e.g. this StarEdit forum post). But the agent expressed no concerns and didn’t ask any follow-up questions.

I booted it up and lost again. I discovered that, because I had made it as a team RPG, you could only play it with other people. I had the agent change it so you could play solo and started it up. No loss this time! I chose a character.

As I walked out of the first town and into the wilderness, I encountered an egg and more of the past came back to me.

I had programmed it so when you touch the eggs, they spawn enemies, like in Aliens. I struggled to get it to work how I wanted, including making it so the enemies spawned in reachable spots, the egg exploded without sticking around, and the enemies didn’t trap the player.

The trigger zones around the eggs had to be the right shape and size, not too far or too near, and it had to be clear that it wasn’t an accident.

By the end of the map, I was so sick of the eggs. I had put them everywhere.

I made progress through the map by playing carefully and going back and healing often. I worked my way through the enemy camps until I reached the first boss after about 30 minutes.

The first boss warps you to an arena where there’s no escape. With my lack of upgrades and low health, there was nothing I could do to beat the boss alone.

I had the agent rebalance it to make the player have 2x health and 1.5x damage. With that change, I beat the first boss pretty handily.

As I kept playing, the novelty wore off. Eventually, I was attack-moving into enemies, switching to do something else, checking back to see when my health had gotten low, and going back to town. That repeated for the next few towns.

The map I remembered as amazing felt just okay. It’s kind of like revisiting elementary school when I was a teenager and saying, “were the hallways always this small?”

Back when I created it, many of my playtests ended quickly. Public groups often didn’t understand what was happening and died. One of the advantages of that is that I played the beginning of it quite a lot. There were rock walls that disappeared and gave you a shortcut. The heals weren’t too far.

In the second town, there’s an attack on the town when you get there, which feels cool.

But the third town is filled with infested Command Centers, and there’s not anything going on. I had to grind, because there is an upgrade to a light or dark version of your unit you can choose. But to get there, you need a lot of experience, and there aren’t enough enemies in the map.

After I got there, I found the first upgrade path I chose didn’t work. After upgrading, the cave and temple warps stopped working, because I’d missed that unit in the programming. When I went to warp, nothing happened. Luckily, I saved my game a lot.

I made it to the final boss and beat it easily. I had created a little fireworks sequence where units spawn and explode, and credits that roll.

I watched the fireworks, and I saw a bunch of names I hadn’t seen in a long time: old internet handles from friends back then, or friends I’ve lost contact with.

I thought back to all those moments of camaraderie, spending nights and weekends and after-school time tweaking, improving, and balancing this map, trying to finish it. Writing notes as I played through about what works and what doesn’t. We all worked on it together. It took me back to seeing my friends, joking around, not taking what we were doing too seriously.

I enjoyed visiting that time and memory, and I didn’t need to stay there.

When I finished the map, I quit out of the game and uninstalled StarCraft, maybe for good now that I’ve closed this chapter.