Hello, I am an ex-developer for Fortress Survival, here to just share my story that I'm sure not many will care or read about part of the history of how FS came about and continued to live on, but it would mean a lot to me if you do read, thank you for caring 
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I'm a University student, with a passionate hobby for making games. I've been making games as a hobby since I was 5.
These days kids expand their creativity building stuff on Minecraft. Well, when I was a kid, I sat behind a computer and made scenarios with Age of Empires, Empire Earth, and simple games with GameMaker, and RPG Maker (2000, XP, VX, etc). Of course I played Lego too. And lots of outdoor fun as well.
So I played Fortress Survival many years ago, since 4.80, when it was really simple. I'm sure many people have played way earlier versions (I have too, afterwards, just to see what it was like back then). I actually kind of miss it. Really slow-paced and simple, did not involve much skill, not too much replayability, but it was still fun and darn popular.
I found FS really fun, and it stuck with me, because of the co-op essence that I could not find in many other WC3 competitive games. Other co-op WC3 games usually involved TDs or RPGs, which were also fun but they never made me feel the "I'm in a pinch, we need to work together or else we're doomed" sort of thing. People based together, had different roles, and sometimes I just enjoyed spamming silver walls to stall the enemies to help others.
As I played I noticed there was a fight for a certain popular base in 9/10 of the games I played, and sometimes a troll will be screwing up teammates by building barricades all over their base as well. So then my game-making tendencies took over and I imagined, "what if there was a base-ownership system?" These dramatic base wars wouldn't occur nearly as often then, and trolls wouldn't be able to easily ruin games like that.
And so that was the first spark that made me get into contact with Nevo, to ask for permission to continue the FS development. These were really exciting days, because I knew FS was played a lot back then, even as simple and flawed as it was. Actually, there were 5-10 simultaneous games of 6+ players each going on, hosted by ENT, at the time. That really made me want to improve the gameplay since so many people were playing it.
So I got permission from Nevo after a voice-skype. I had never voice-skyped anyone I didn't know IRL before, but I wanted to further develop FS that badly. And so I got permission. This FS site had been alive all this time still. But it remained largely inactive.
So during my time was series 5.00 to 6.20. I encourage you all to try 4.80 if you haven't, it is a nice change of pace, with very little content of what we have today, but still interesting. 5.00-5.20 series were, in my opinion, kind of unbalanced (very challenging at some parts, such as murloc spawns). But I remember Boberto being a favorite to many people. So there, 5.00 series included a quest to own Boberto, and his special Bite ability that will totally eat up enemies that aren't "chaos" damage. But things were good here, there was base claiming. Each base gave different bonus starting lumber (2-7 lumber, which made a difference back then), based on the difficulty of the base. But people abused that and claimed a base they would never use. There was the Marine hero. Repairs automatically sped up nearby structure building. Things started looking much better beyond that too.
After hundreds of 4.80 games, I thought, what can I do to keep players building, or keep them doing something, instead of queuing 40 minutes of buildings and watching? The idea of tiny structures came into play when I thought about space management of a base. Lag was overkill when I had too many tiny mills, so came the idea of higher leveled mills created by making certain patterns of mills. So came 5.30s and 5.40s, which were major content updates. Maybe it was around this time, or maybe even earlier, that save/load came into play, with ranks and a few hero choices. The game massively transformed here into micro-intensive if you were looking to be "pro". Casual players could still win most of the time though, it definitely was not necessary to make mini stuff to win. Still, I thought, this is just micro war. I need more diverse structures and things for players to do. So then came bookshelves. They're not that great, but at least another thing for players to do if they want to.
Originally I only wanted those who picked Alchemist Hero to have access to transmuting mills (so lumberers would have to pick Alchemist, and then I would make other heroes more important for base survival, so then wallers would pick the other heroes, almost to say "base together to win because each person has their own role and fits a piece of the puzzle!", but that didn't happen, because people were annoyed that they couldn't make tiny structures if they didn't pick alchemist (even though their ally could do it for them if they really needed), and so the alchemist became available as the unit to accomodate). More heroes came into play, I was most proud of rocketeer's nuclear strike because it could help others far away, since I thought I had killed the co-op essence somehow, with the different bases and gameplay, more and more people went off solo instead chain-basing. In the 4.80s, believe me, 90% of games players would base as neighbors chained to each other. I loved that, but unfortunately that never came back, even now. There just isn't the need to anymore, and not too many benefits from doing so either.
And then 6.00 was a mega content update especially in terms of terrain (look at how 4.80 looks, then 5.20-5.40, then 6.00) so instead of naming it 5.50, we just said, yeah, this content is totally worth 100 versions so let's just jump it up to 6.00. Much more diverse looking bases came into fruition. I guarantee you the bases used to all be empty rectangles. Which was fine for most players, but I'm sure playing in different looking areas may be fun to experience.
Oh yes, I added Nightmare mode for more hardcore players, since the addition of all tiny mills allowed for much more lumber income than Impossible mode requires to win at the time. And prizes, such as Behemoth's Wings (were coded in a rush and very messy but it was my favorite! I really liked the idea of flying or gliding in games I play, since they give a feeling of exploration or sandbox or freedom, though too bad FS isn't 1st person view since that would make playing impossible, but yeah, I added flying in some shape or form at least! Of course it wasn't without glitches).
Around this time (6.10-6.20) I felt totally overwhelmed by the massive influx of donators, especially hero donators that wanted custom skin heroes (which are not offered anymore as far as I know due to it increasing mapsize). I just wanted to continue doing what I loved, the FS development. I felt like this "mod" of wc3 was being treated like an actual game, like commercialized. I didn't like that, so drama happened, and I rage quitted the development team. That was a mistake on my part. Childish random anger. And that marks the end of my legend. At this time waffles took over I believe. Great stuffs he does. I see a Marco now too, so excited to know FS is not dead!
Now you shall stop reading here.
The rest is just my giant wall of text on my no regrets/regrets during my time as a Dev.
It's my self-reflection wall of rant so don't read it.
It is my private stuff.
Mine.
Private.
No.
Read.
Kthx.
Regrets?
I absolutely don't regret the journey. It's been so wonderful, to develop something, then test with tons of other players, and know they are all playing what I've contributed to, (without them knowing -- haha, since back then, I refused to be in credits, or if I was in credits, I would play on another account). Eventually I got to know some of the players (insert long list, you know who you are). I test them to see how dedicated they are to FS, then offer them to join as testers, since nearly everyone I meet had no mapmaking experience. I offered them the $10 builder change if they would continue to test, and so after time there was a group. Then a clan (for each server, but East was by far the most active). I had heard of the legend of 5 FS clans back in its prime days, but still, we had an FS clan. We got our own FS bot too (thanks FS-Phoenix) Exciting! Got to meet cool people, play with them something I largely contributed to, and watch their reactions to the wild and wacky additions I've added (like their mills suddenly combining together, haha. Though that was a disaster, since no one knew, they didn't upgrade in squares, and the outcome was a mess, but it was interesting). I thought about making algorithms to check for various things such that it would only take the 4 mills you "want" to be upgraded, but it was a bit too complicated to wrap my mind around. I wanted to prioritize other things like making smarter enemy AI. I'm glad I added more depth to the game, more flexibility on what you can do, more things to discover, but I'm just very slightly bummed people (public games) don't chain-base anymore. Everyone basically runs off on their own base. Sometimes they might be neighbors, but there is not much more teamwork after that, aside from occasional nuke help.
And here's where my regrets roll in. I still had ideas I really wanted to make come into fruition but I let my anger get the best of me, and anger at what, I don't even know any more. So I sought to make an extra end-game content that would require co-operation of everyone! I wanted it to be a slightly different style from the base survival that everyone had been doing all game. To give players another goal to look forwards. So what I wanted was for rescue ship to come at the end, grab all your survivors and heroes, board the ship, and go home. Though, you will be intercepted by "Behemoth" and his space crew. They board your ship. You do battle with them inside the ship using your heroes. This would have been the bonus ending most ideally. Due to my laziness, or lack of time, or whatnot, Behemoth simply became a bonus boss after Trojan. This was my option one. It didn't have to include rescue ship or anything. Another idea I had was to have the final boss (trojan / behemoth / whoever), drop an essence that would unlock the portals and allow each player's heroes to go through dimensional travel into the portal (any of the 4 portals where enemies spawn). There you can enter the Abyss, and battle an epic boss using heroes only. The prize is that you unlock that boss as a Hero that you can recruit -- goes into your save code. Why I wanted this? Because then you have another goal, other than survive your base, you also may pimp up your hero, and then everyone's heroes must work together, to beat this boss. But this was REALLY tough to make a reality. First, the hero spells would need a heck of a lot of revamping, or the fights would be boring as heck and the only "skill" you would need is "blink" to dodge certain nukes of the bosses. I guess if the boss were to channel some creepy stuff, you would need a stun ability / stun hero to quickly cancel it. But all this requires pretty low delay, so players with higher delay may complain here. I would have to revamp all the heroes, so that they are all capable of playing an important role in the boss fights, and that if there is a larger diversity of heroes, then the boss fight becomes more plausible to win. Now that's a lot of work, with me being a student and all. And I had no one else to help at the time with the content update. So you can imagine why Behemoth stayed as simply a bonus boss, and there were no epic hero battles in the end. Of course you may argue I'm trying to mix too many things or genres into the game, but I thought that would bring some of the teamwork co-op back. There was even a time I made outer space travel in the map. I expanded the map boundaries, and even went so far as to make the Trojan's planet. The Trojan, in this scenario, retreated at low health instead of dying, and you are now the hunters. A spaceship takes the survivors and heroes only, to the Trojan planet. This planet's boundaries are really small, so basically as to say you must now all base together in one giant base (or two if you have enough people), to overcome the Trojan on his own planet. But that also never came into fruition, because it's like saying, "oh great, you survived 50 minutes of the Trojan, and nearly defeated him, now you have to invade him, rebuild everything from scratch all over again, this time on his home planet, and survive another 20 or so minutes, until your base is maxed, then he comes out after having recovered, then you kill him". Why? Then we all just bring the wall items from vendors right? Actually, I planned on walls, repairs, command centers, vendors, bookshelves, on being transmutable (not to make tiny, but to turn into an item), so then players could carry that with them to this planet, and rebuild very quickly. But this forced co-op seemed kind of odd to me, not very sure how players would perceive it, if they were all thrown together and told to make a base together for the final battle. Plus the game-time would drag to ~70 minutes, and I thought 50 minutes was "hella long" for a game already and it would take a lot of time to code too, so that, as well, never came into fruition. I know they're not all that great, but I really am a fan of space travel, or dimensional travel, so I wanted to make at least one of those ideas come true. Oh well. FS still was taken quite far, and I'm very glad to see developers still around, cleaning up the mess of triggers I've made, fixing stuff, adding their own new content. Now if you say, then I should get back to the Dev team and make it come true, I don't know what kind of feelings I left behind during my random rage quit, as it was really unprofessional and rude to Nevo. I even tried to spark up public drama during that time, and began a branch map similar to FS but with a different theme (I coded the basics of it and passed it down, not sure where it is at now, surely still unreleased/alpha stages/abandoned since I don't see it anywhere). So yeah it is unlikely I would be able to rejoin and also, I highly doubt I have the time to contribute even if I do. I used to work on it hours each day. Now I'm so busy with University(or some may call College)-life, that I've got maybe 2 hours a week free (assuming I keep my other hobbies). Actually when I was busy in development of FS, I put a little too much time into it that it made my grades drop a lot. I was that into it. Like around december I really wanted to make a major release for those who wanted to play during the winter holidays. The release came near the end of it sadly, but I still flunked a couple exams just for that. Yeah, thats how passionate I can get with things I love doing vs things I should be doing. Plus I think I'm doing too many things atm that if I threw in another thing I might just go crazy. So it seems my journey ends here. Been really fun. Those were magical times. Thank you all . Y'all really cool peoples.
--Bows-- Thanks for reading!
