And that's exactly what he did. His bot barely mines any gas; it just cranks out zerglings and sends them straight at enemy bases. It's literally only 450 lines of code. Nothing complicated.
Watching his video, I felt proud—seeing him get his bot up and running was awesome. Naturally I got curious and I checked how his bot was doing on the ladder.
And there it was—his bot had beaten mine (bruh!). The bot I spent months working on, complete with multiple strategies, detailed responses, and various modules, was taken down by his simple 450-line zergling rush bot.
So I'll tell you what I realized,
Replay Pick:
Big Breakthrough on Overlock the Terran MicroBot, we get the units to move in a Concave formation...sorta!
LaughNGamez nailed three critical things every bot maker should learn from:
Scoped it down. He didn't aim for a complex, feature-packed AI. He picked one simple strategy—a zergling rush—and focused entirely on making that effective. Many people I know spend months trying to build the perfect bot, covering every possible scenario, and they never even get it up and running. The lesson? Keep it simple and just get started.
Leveraged existing tools. He didn't start from zero. He used available tools like Windsurf (referral bonus for you and me🙂↕️) , the Angentic AI IDE, and incorporated Sharpy Speed Mining techniques to enhance his mining efficiency. You don't have to write everything from scratch—use what's already out there and adapt it to your needs.
Iterated quickly. The best part: he immediately put his bot on the ladder. At first, it actually lost to mine. But after one key iteration—a tweak to that same zergling rush strategy—it flipped the outcome. In another game, he also noticed his bot getting stuck in ties when buildings floated, so he quickly added mutalisks as a solution. Instead of trying to plan for everything upfront, he responded to real matches in real-time. Bots are dynamic; it's better to learn and adjust on the fly as new data comes in.
If you're stuck waiting until your bot is "perfect," follow LaughNGamez’s lead:
Keep it focused and simple.
Use existing resources.
Iterate quickly and publicly.
If you're curious how it played out, I went over the replay this week on stream. NATURALLY I am going to do some iteration of my own and code my response to his bot, and I'll keep you posted.
For Your Radar:
I’ll be speaking this June at the XP Game Summit in Toronto.
XP Game Summit - June
I’ll be talking to game developers and studio leads about something I care a lot about—how AI bots that play games aren’t just fun to build, but can actually shape the future of how we design, test, and interact with systems.
At VersusAI, our mission has always been to help AI makers grow by building smarter bots—but the real magic happens when those same skills translate into real-world impact: faster iteration, better testing, more adaptive thinking.
In the next couple of emails leading up to the talk, I’ll be sharing some of the things I’ve learned while practicing how to talk about bots in public settings—what resonates, what doesn’t, and how to explain this stuff without sounding like you're pitching sci-fi. So keep an eye out.
If you're going to be there, grab your ticket(affiliate link), come say hey. It’s a great event for professional networking
🔍 Why It Matters Instead of scripting Queen behavior from scratch, the bot offloads it to a purpose-built library via a manager. This keeps the core strategy focused on macro and build order while Queens are handled independently.
🧠 Insight Modular thinking helps bots scale. By isolating Queen control into a separate manager, you reduce complexity and open the door to plug-and-play AI components — whether you're handling injects, scouting, or map control.
🎯 Try This What part of your bot could you hand off to a separate module? Would your logic be cleaner if you treated Medivacs, Observers, or even Supply Depots as their own thing?
All those applications and still no interviews?
Let’s fix that.
Pick a time—we’ll go over what’s not working and how to stand out → [Link]
All those applications and still no interviews? Let’s change that
July 9th 2025 Why hello Reader, In June, I spoke at the XP Summit here in Toronto—a gathering of game developers from across the industry. Instead of focusing on the usual competitive angle, I talked about something that doesn’t get as much attention: how the bots we build could actually help make games better. Think about it—most studios are drowning in QA work. Testing is repetitive, slow, and expensive. Meanwhile, our bots already do what testers can’t: run the same scenario over and over...
June 24th 2025 Why hello Reader, While adding my build to my bot and deploying it to the ladder, I was reviewing a replay from a Protoss bot. In that replay, the bot completely countered mine. Naturally, I jumped into solving that problem — tweaking things, adjusting timing — only to review another replay where a Reaper harass tore my bot apart. And then another one. Before long, I was reacting to everything and making no real progress. I didn’t even feel like working on the bot anymore....
June 10th 2025 Why hello Reader, Ever watch your disruptor fire a perfect shot... right into your own units? Yeah. RIP my army. You know, when I started I thought I had everything figured out. Disruptors look simple—just aim for the biggest group of units and boom, free wins. But turns out, in StarCraft, disruptor shots aren’t even spells. They’re units in the API. Which means the bot needs to steer them. Every. Single. Frame. This is nothing to say the risk factor of 100 true damages it does...
