One Sibling, Then Three

Remember the list from the first chapter? Castle Fight, Tower Survivors, Line Tower Wars, Custom Hero Survival. The Warcraft III maps that spent years in the place where good memories are kept.

In October, all four left there.

Each one is a faithful rebuild of the original map, with its rules and numbers, made as a game of its own for Steam and with no Blizzard material. And each brought a different problem.

Castle Survivors: a castle that grows

In Castle Survivors you don't command anyone either, but in a different way. There's a castle in the middle of an island, armies rising from the sea on every side, and not a single troop of yours. The castle fires on its own with every weapon you buy. Your part is the shop: every 30-second round you choose what to buy, and the choices add up until the castle becomes an absurd war machine.

The castle grows along with it. It's built from pieces of a medieval hexagon pack: it rises with the level, gains a piece for each weapon bought, and shows the damage it takes.

The longest job was fidelity. Weapons and upgrades were checked one by one against the map's reference database. Today there are 90 weapons, 97 upgrades, 36 enemies and 9 bosses, each boss with one to three mechanics of its own and a warning before the big blows.

Then the island got siblings: seventeen worlds, from islands in the sea to a plateau above a sea of clouds and a sanctuary of cherry trees. The rules are the same in all of them; what changes is the look, even what floats in the air. Petals, banks of mist, shafts of sunlight, waterfall spray. And leaves, again.

Castle Survivors is also the game that came closest to the dream from the first chapter. Every art, music and sound pack has its license noted and its author on the credits screen. The game speaks five languages and accepts mods through the Steam Workshop, and a single command builds a Steam test version from any version of the code.

Line Tower: reading a protected map

In Line Tower, each builder holds a lane, makes a maze with towers so enemies take longer to cross, and sends enemies into the neighbor's lane. Up to twelve builders in a match.

The problem here was reading the original. The map's script is 34,580 lines long and protected: scrambled names, units created in code, texts hidden inside ability descriptions. The first job was to rebuild those texts, annotate the script line by line and cross-check everything against the map's data. Where the code contradicts its own tooltip, Line Tower follows the tooltip.

Line Tower already plays online, against the computer and fully with a controller, including on the Steam Deck. What's still provisional is its look: names, art, sounds and texts are in place, but the game's own universe is the next step.

Custom Hero Survival: a ledger

In Custom Hero Survival you don't pick a ready-made hero. You choose a body, buy abilities in eleven shops, raise each one to level 20, and build the hero you want, while surviving level after level of enemies. At the end, there are PvP rounds with bets.

Here the method became stricter than in any other game. Each rule points to the line of the script it came from, in a fidelity ledger that is checked against the code at every stage. A report separates, without sugarcoating, what is identical to the original, what is equivalent and what still differs.

Each rule points to the line of the script it came from.

Today, all 122 abilities of the original map are there. And the game has two phases. CLASSIC is the map as it is, with its rules, numbers and quirks, before any modernization. Only with CLASSIC standing did MODERN begin, with a redesigned shop and quick-buy builds. Behind the menus, a tavern holds every hero, filmed in nine shots.

The same thing, three times

Four games at once, for a two-person team, is a lot to keep in mind. And the most important lesson this month didn't come from any rule. It came from noticing that each new game started by writing the same things again: the 3D world, the creatures, the sound, the menus, Steam, saves, online.

Line Tower was the first game not to start from scratch. On the same day it was born, so was the piece the four would come to share.

— The team