Andrea Rosa

There is a bizarre misconception about me, which is slowly crawling out of some niches of the StarCraft community, saying that I have a hatred towards modding. I never said that. This false impression probably stemmed from an edgy podcast that surfaced on YouTube some months ago, in which I was depicted like a stubborn fundamentalist averse to any kind of innovation, and a halfwit who doesn't have a clue about what he is doing (this is certainly true when it comes to certain aspects of real life, for example I still don't know how to interact with toddlers without breaking them LOL). Putting aside the gratuitous mocking contained in that podcast, I don't hate modding by any means... why should I hate it? I have played and enjoyed a lot of modded custom content for several games, and I have done some limited modding myself in the past for Quake II, Unreal and the Need For Speed series, but the sheer fact that I don't do it for StarCraft doesn't necessarily mean that I have something against it, that's a very askew assumption to make. What I really think is that modding is not the only legitimate way to create an enjoyable and immersive gaming experience: of course, StarCraft is a very old game, and its engine shows both its age and its limits, but I really like to design around limitations, it yields a special satisfaction that is attractive in itself. When I was working on Little Big Nordic Adventure for Age of Empires, I faced a series of challenges regarding the game environment, struggling to render convincing northern landscapes on a game which is mostly set in a mediterranean context. Modding the tileset and graphics would have made the map design process much easier and faster, but it probably wouldn't have given me the same gratification. Modding is cool because it opens up a whole new host of possibilities, but it has always been optional, and the idea that a level designer should also necessarily be a modder in order to be worthy of consideration and respect is bogus to say the least, haughty, and even somewhat discriminatory. And yet, this doesn't automatically mean that I hate modding. 
 
Even though I always crave to learn new things and challenge myself in new projects, sadly I no longer have the same amount of free time I had 15 or 10 years ago, because life gets more complicated as you move through it, much like a game of chess (and, guess what, you can't win, you can only delay your inevitable defeat). At this point, if I have to choose between focusing on hacking a game or producing actual playable content, then I go without hesitation for the second choice, because I simply don't have enough time for both things: the Level Design scene is already littered with highly promising but ultimately unfinished projects, and this is especially true for StarCraft. Up until now I have always been able to finish what I started, and this is already something to be glad for. To wrap it up, I'm always open to well-founded, constructive criticism on my work and I expect it, but please don't make up stuff that I never said.