Tactical Chicken Studios is one person: me. I make Section Command: Helmand Ops in six to ten hours a week, alongside the two businesses I run. This is where I started, why it's this game, and how it gets made.
Cannon Fodder and Jungle Strike, when I was four. That's where it started. The first military RTS I played was the original Command & Conquer on the PlayStation, and after it came Sudden Strike and Close Combat.
Then Operation Flashpoint, the original Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six, and Delta Force 1 and 2 made me a PC gamer. What they had in common was tactics and realism. These days it's WARNO, Arma Reforger, Squad and Manor Lords.
At school, in 2001, it clicked that I wanted to make these games, not just play them. I started modding Operation Flashpoint: maps, reskinned units, missions and whole campaigns, on the community forums of the time, OFP.INFO and OFP.CZ. In 2004 I learned C++ at college, mostly coding and building basic tools, and I did very well in my programming exams. I didn't go on to study it at university, and that's the one thing I'd change.
Games stayed a hobby, and work went elsewhere. For fifteen years I've run Decloak Music, a music production learning platform, teaching people to make electronic music with some very technical software. For a decade I've built websites for clients at my agency, Adkonnekt.
Music production has a steep learning curve, and from a learning point of view there's a lot in common between it and making games. It's also why I do the game's sound design myself: choosing, cutting and mixing the sounds.
In 2020 I decided to stop treating games as a hobby and finally commit. Unreal Engine first. Then a Python course in 2021, which went well, so I carried on with Python to explore making games. Then the browser, where a decade of building websites meant I already understood the code. Charlie Foxtrot Company was my first browser game: I wanted to rebuild something like Cannon Fodder and put it on this site, free to play. It was always a test bed. Section Command started when I wanted to see how the same engine would work as an RTS.
I wanted it British Army through and through. My best mate Oli is ex-2 PARA and did two tours in Afghanistan, and there are very few games about the British side of that war, least of all real-time strategy. So I'm making one.
The best moment of the whole project so far was showing Oli the game, and him loving it.
I'm a huge military nerd. Memoirs, documentaries and manuals, all of them, and Oli. Realism, to me, means detailed and immersive. If you were there and something in the game isn't how it was, write to me at hello@tacticalchicken.games. Every one gets read.
What other games never quite did for me is randomisation. In Helmand Ops a mission plays out differently every time because of the enemy forces you're up against. There's more than one way to complete it, and you have real freedom in how you go about it. When you finish Zarghun, the one mission in the playtest for now, I want you to feel the want and need to play again: to see how you could do things differently, and to go back in from the start and see what the game throws at you this time.
The 2D look is a nod to the old 90s RTS games like Close Combat. Art and modelling aren't my strong point, so 2D seemed the easiest way to deliver the idea. Then I really fell in love with the art style and leant into it.
I'll be honest: I went round in circles on 2D and 3D, through more than one artistic fork, before settling on this game being 2D and nothing else. Settling it lets me focus on the systems and the gameplay.
Zarghun is the only mission for now, and that's deliberate: it's where I'm tuning the game's systems, with players' feedback, while I build out the full campaigns.
Six to ten hours a week, for now, alongside the two businesses. It would be a dream to focus on this full time, and that's why I'm releasing Helmand Ops.
It runs on the engine I built for Charlie Foxtrot Company, in Three.js, which is why the demo plays in a browser with nothing to install; the Steam version is the same game, packaged for Windows, macOS and Linux.
I use AI, and I'd rather say so plainly. In my own words:
"AI really has allowed me to push ideas to completion much quicker. But mainly the code. All ideas, both systems and creativity and strategy, remain my own."Jack Mustard
The long version of all this, with pictures, is in the devlog: why I'm making Helmand Ops on my own.
Helmand Ops is the one I'm finishing, and everything I post is about it. The Arcade and the other desktop projects are still on the site.
The demo is the real game as it stands, pre-alpha and all. The devlog says what changed, and every picture of the game on this site is taken from the game itself.
If you served and something in the game isn't how it was, I want to know. Getting it right is the whole point.
One email when Helmand Ops' Steam page and Steam demo go up, and one on launch day. No spam, defect any time.
You're on the dispatch. Stand by for orders. ✓
No spam. Unsubscribe from any email in one click. Privacy.
