In an unexpected twist, Simu Liu paid a visit to Frost Giant Studios yesterday. The actor, best known for Marvel's blockbuster Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings as well as highly-regarded sitcom Kim's Convenience, has publically tweeted his support for Starcraft 2 and the Starcraft franchise, so it only makes sense that Frost Giant would endeavor to associate his name with the project. That being said, an A-list actor hang around the studio is not what most people have come to expect when talking about small game studios.
Not only did Simu have a great time at Frost Giant, it seems like the Stormgate devs have posted some leaks about what the UI/UX will look like. Lets get into it
Simu's Playest
On top of getting a tour of the studio, Simu sat down with the Frost Giant team and played a couple of games, becoming the "First Asian Man to Beat Stormgate" in the process - a callback to the excellent SNL Skit from 1 year ago.
Not only is he a Marvel superstar, @SimuLiu made me feel seen and represented as an Asian growing up in the Americas. His memoir, We Were Dreamers, so eerily mirrored my journey of pursuing my own dreams.
— Kevin Dong (@Solid_monk) February 28, 2023
Today, I could not be more proud to present him with this award. 🏆🐐🏆 https://t.co/CFHCUbJAQj
He seemed to have a great time as well, tweeting that he was the "first pro RTS player with an APM of 3." We don't know much about how the games actually went, outside of the Frost Giant twitter telling us that he put on a "hell of a match." PR fluff or the making of a new world champion? Time will tell.
We should also point out that the alpha of Stormgate seems to be deployed to Steam for testing already, based on the below image. Not surprising, but certainly a sign of progress.
While we are unlikely to be able to secure an interview with Simu about his experiences playtesting Stormgate, we have reached out to Frost Giant to get their thoughts on the entire thing - be on the lookout for that!
UI Leaks
As exciting as the fact that Simu Liu was playtesting Stormgate is, the more interesting part of this visit was the UI/UX leaks in one of the images posted on Frost Giant's LinkedIn page.
This image appears to be just a PR piece, but the background had the budding Stormgate community in an furor. It appears to be our first look at the Stormgate UI (and a conspicuously obscured section of the game). Lets take a look at what we can see.
The first thing that jumps out is that resources appear to be shown above the command card, in contrast to games like Starcraft II that place resources in the upper right of the screen - definitely something that will reduce the amount of spots to look on the screen in the standard micro cycle.
We can also see the merged macro card that previous interviews have talked about. There appears to be 4 tabs (with hotkeys shown) that the player can select - I would assume that these are different categories of units and structures that can be produced. We also should point out that there appears to be a unit portrait box - a recent Harstem interview with Kevin "SolidMonk" Dong generated controversy when Kevin mentioned that animated unit portraits aren't a guarantee. This screenshot seems to mollify that somewhat.
The final immediate comparison is to that of DOTA 2's interface. They used to have a lower-third interface like Starcraft 2 has, but converted over to a more minimal setup in 2015. It seems Stormgate is looking at taking a page out of that book, which also allows them to scale the UI better to ultra-widescreen formats.
We also need to keep in mind that this is not the final version of the UI by any stretch of the imagination, as Gerald Villoria reminds us on the Stormgate subdreddit.
The other elephant in the room is the conspicuous green blob in the screen - clearly some unit or structure that Frost Giant is not ready to reveal just yet. While we can only guess what that will be, it does mean that we can make a more educated guess as to what the visible structure is - likely one of the "laser 3D printers" that were teased in the Holiday Newsletter, albeit a slightly different version.
Getting Involved
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