Marveling at Stormgate: How Simu Liu Scored a Sneak Peak

Simu Liu visited the Frost Giant Studies on Monday. While we weren't able to get in touch with the Shang Chi actor directly, we were able to get answers to some more pressing questions from Gerald Villoria, Communications Director at Frost Giant Studios. Enjoy!

How did Simu hear about Stormgate?

Simu is a huge StarCraft fan who has been following the game and the state of the franchise for many years. You might remember his epic “SAVE STARCRAFT” post on Twitter. He caught wind of what we were up to following our announcement of Stormgate at Summer Game Fest.

Simu Liu visited Frost Giant studios on Monday - who started that conversation?

We connected with Simu through a mutual contact, as these things often happen, though we’ve been very openly trying to slide into his DMs since we first became aware of his passion for StarCraft and RTS. We’re all fans of his work and were very eager to meet him and show him what we’ve been building, even at this early stage.

Can you talk about how you were able to make the visit happen?

It’s not really that exciting a story. Simu lives within driving distance of our Southern California headquarters and we set a date for his visit. On the team’s end, we just had to make sure we had a stable test build available for him to play.

What did Simu's visit entail (i.e. tour, how many games did he play, etc)?

We gave Simu a tour of our studio (which doesn’t take very long—we’re a relatively small operation), and he sat down to play a single 1v1 match against his longtime friend and business partner, Jason Chan. We had lunch and talked about some of our plans for the game. He was incredibly kind, thoughtful, and generous with his time too, staying long enough to sign a pile of his books (be sure to read his NYT best-seller We Were Dreamers: An Immigrant Superhero Origin Story!) and take photos with the entire team.

Did Simu play the same version of the game as Neuro? If not, were there any key iterations that you can talk about?

Simu played a newer version of our internal Stormgate pre-alpha than what Neuro tested. The team is iterating very quickly and we generally have new playtest builds each week. I believe he had access to a newer air unit as well as the latest version of our human faction’s tech tree.

How did the games go? Who did he play against?

Simu and Jason played a full game against each other – you could tell they had a strong, friendly rivalry going that was no doubt built on many years and countless hours of playing StarCraft together. They are both very skilled and experienced RTS players and they put on a great match!

On our side, Tim Campbell and Kevin Dong provided some light coaching to help familiarize them with our units, interface, and the map layout. They split time fairly evenly to keep things fair, and Simu and Jason were able to jump right in and put the game through the paces.

While there was a lot of early back-and-forth, Simu emerged victorious by playing a very strong macro game and building an overwhelmingly large late-game army.

We wanted to gift Simu with something special to remember his visit, so we had a trophy made as a reference to his hilarious Saturday Night Live sketch with Bowen Yang. In that sketch, he shows off his trophy for being the “First Asian Man To Beat StarCraft II” and we thought it would be fun to pass the proverbial torch and name him the “First Asian Man To Beat Stormgate.”

It’s a good thing that Simu won fair-and-square, as it would have been pretty awkward giving the trophy to the loser of their match!

What were his impressions about the game?

We can’t speak on behalf of Simu to share his impressions of the game. That’s a better question for him. Our hope is that he had a lot of fun and that he will visit us again for another playtest!

How much of the new-player onboarding system is implemented? What was Simu's response to it?

The systems you’re describing are not something we are focusing on at this early stage. Our plan is to implement them further down the line while we channel most of our effort into core gameplay. Work on the onboarding experience will require extensive player testing to get right, so that will largely commence when we get to closed beta.

In the background of one of the images, we got our first look at the alpha UI. Can you talk about the different tabs we see -  is that a combined command cart, auto-hotkeys, or something else?

We’ll be sharing more information on our UI in the future. We’re happy to see the community get so excited about anything new about our game, but we want them to remember that we are still very early on and things like UI can undergo lots of change between now and release.

Do you have any plans for future collaboration with Simu or other celebrities?

There’s something really special about how people connect with Frost Giant Studios compared to other companies or teams that I’ve been on.

When I first joined this team, I learned that for every investor in Frost Giant, from top to bottom, had at least one RTS fan at their firm. They didn’t just want us to succeed because we were a sound investment, they truly loved playing Blizzard-style RTS games and wanted to be a part of creating the next one. One of our investors was even being coached by Kevin [Dong] because he wanted to be a stronger competitive player!

We’ve been in touch with a few celebrities, and we’re sure that we’ll be welcoming more of them to play at some point, but in every instance they’ve always approached us as players first–not a business opportunity. They’re gamers just like you or me (only richer, more popular, and in my case far more good-looking) who love RTS and want to be a part of bringing them back.

Simu’s passion and 100% authentic love for RTS made his visit far more special than any paid promotion. It really energized our team and we’d love to do something together in the future, but right now we have no plans to announce.

Can you give us any hint about what was blocked out in the background of that one image?

Ah, you noticed my expert photo editing skills! I painted over one of our placeholder resources because it’s very brightly colored and drew a lot of attention to itself. Simu and Tim Campbell were meant to be the focus of the photo, and I didn’t want to raise too many questions by revealing something super distracting and misleading in the background.

Any thoughts on the next person you invite?

You’re officially invited! Thank you for covering all the news about our game and for helping kickstart the Stormgate community. Just let us know when you’re planning to be in town!

Getting Involved

As always, if you want to engage with the Frost Giant developers and get information from them as they post it, you should sign up for their newsletter, head on over to /r/Stormgate on reddit, and sign up for the beta and wishlist the game on steam!