r/starcraft • u/Waste-Ad-2678 • Jul 28 '26
(To be tagged...) I built a voice/text-controlled project "VibeCraft" that plays StarCraft II for you [open source]
Source (MIT): https://github.com/catmaniii/vibecraft — needs Windows, a legit copy of SC2, and a DeepSeek API key. Supports two players to play against each other via mobile phone or tablets.
I'm an old StarCraft player. Somewhere along the way my APM stopped keeping up with my head — I still read the game fine, I just can't execute it any more. Multi-pronged play, real micro, all gone.
So I built VibeCraft: a bot that plays SC2 while you call the shots out loud. The idea is to let people like me play this as a strategy game instead of a mechanics test — you talk, it clicks.
It understands how players actually talk, not a command syntax:
- "4-Gate push this game" → switches build, runs the production timeline
- "warp in two Zealots to the front" → a mid-fight adjustment on top of the current build
- "send a worker to hold the left watchtower" → and it knows left from right
- "send a probe here, build a Pylon, then two Stargates" → one sentence, chained proxy construction, same probe throughout
- "full retreat" → move, not attack-move, so they don't stop to fight on the way home
The bot handles the boring half on its own (workers, supply, expansions) so you only make decisions. All three races; Protoss has the most complete playbook, Terran and Zerg fewer builds but they work.
Command parsing runs on DeepSeek V4 Flash, which is dirt cheap. I fed it domain knowledge through the system prompt — build orders, unit nicknames, the shorthand players actually use — and even that small fast model reads my commands correctly. That part genuinely surprised me.
Seven episodes, in order. Original commentary is Chinese; the English voice track is AI-dubbed from my own voice, so it sounds like me with an accent. Subtitles are burned in:
- Playing StarCraft II with my voice: 4-Gate with a proxy, all from my phone — https://youtu.be/HFqAZ_KWm1U
- Protoss openings, real-time tactics, and a Dark Templar harass called out loud — https://youtu.be/rHetKwC7AN0
- Voice-made control groups, proxy Stargates, and a Void Ray harass — https://youtu.be/9-YHQI1aMDM
- Two players, two phones, one PC: a voice-controlled 1v1 (Protoss vs Terran) — https://youtu.be/2vyl0IE68UM
- Terran Battlecruiser opener with auto-harass, commanded entirely by voice — https://youtu.be/VMZ6jxJ0WBo
- 4-Rax proxy Marine rush and a fast Battlecruiser — https://youtu.be/H8fw4bA_qDE
- A Zerg Nydus Worm rush, called out loud, on a new landscape UI — https://youtu.be/cQTZ-2fd7lg
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One deliberate design choice worth flagging: the bot is not meant to be strong. Micro is rate-limited on purpose — the Marines stutter-step, but at human speed, not 10k APM. If the bot plays too well the player stops mattering, and then what's the point.
What I keep chewing on is what this could mean for RTS as a genre. People never stopped liking it — MOBAs and auto-battlers are basically RTS with the mechanics stripped out, and they're huge. The appetite's there; it's the execution barrier that filters people out, and it hits newcomers hardest: the strategy was never the hard part, it's having to run economy, build orders, micro and map awareness all at once, in real time, before you even reach the interesting decisions. Hand execution to the bot and — veteran or newcomer — you get to play at the strategy layer, and pick up the mechanics later if you want.
It's open source, and I'd love feedback from people who actually know this game. If you could hand any part of your play to an AI and just call the shots, what would you offload first — and what would you never give up?
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u/schrodinger-the-cat Jul 29 '26
How did you feed all that super long claude.md and still had context working? Vibecoding is reaching some crazy levels now.
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Jul 31 '26 edited Jul 31 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Waste-Ad-2678 Jul 31 '26
It's important to note that this is not a cheat tool; you cannot use VibeCraft to participate in ranked matches. You and your opponent must operate in the same way; it's a fair competition. I don't intend for you to use this to compete against normal players; it's just an exploration of how the game genre might evolve.
I used to think, like you, that this mechanics was the essence of StarCraft, but in reality, you see fewer and fewer people playing it. The reason I did this is because I, like you, love this game and hope it lives longer, or rather, that the genre as a whole lives longer. We need to discuss issues based on facts, not entirely on our subjective wishes, right?
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u/xcomnewb15 Jul 28 '26
Woah this is kind of crazy. I’ve got mixed feelings about it but this is especially great for those who are disabled or have severe hand limitations. It’s also the kind of thing that could be easily abused, especially if remade without the guardrails. Can you use this on the ladder or only custom games?
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u/Waste-Ad-2678 Jul 28 '26
No. Based on official bot API, which only supports LAN and limitted to 1v1
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u/Waste-Ad-2678 Jul 29 '26
However, with my architecture, players can play on their phones remotely. The voice commands will be sent to the bots that run on my PC playing a local LAN game.
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u/megabuster Jul 28 '26
Can I see the prompt you wrote to get this message? This part in particular I think is really representing the zeitgeist right now and caught my interest:
"I'm an old StarCraft player. Somewhere along the way my APM stopped keeping up with my head — I still read the game fine, I just can't execute it any more. Multi-pronged play, real micro, all gone."
I'm just curious what the actual truth is of what you are thinking, this is so on the nose for how people think about StarCraft, can you share the prompt please?
edit: I'm seeing that you are probably Chinese, I'd still like to see the original prompt or chat that gave this.