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DevlogHow the game is being built: the screenshots, the models at every stage, and what's changing next. Zarghun, the only mission for now, is the playtest where the systems get tuned with your feedback while the full campaigns are built.
Tactical Chicken Studios is one person, and Helmand Ops gets six to ten hours of my week. Cannon Fodder at four, Operation Flashpoint mods at school, fifteen years of music, my best mate Oli, and what I want you to feel when the first tour ends.
Before Helmand Ops can be sold, every one of its 90 sounds has to be cleared for it. Four couldn't be, so I rebuilt them from free recordings and picked the replacements by ear.
I called a casualty evacuation, and the Chinook landed and flew straight off again without him. Why it happened, and how fixing it gave the game the stretcher party it should have had all along.
Zarghun is April 2008 and the valley is summer 2012, and the British soldier looked different in each. The camouflage, the helmets, the webbing and the rifles, side by side, as the game builds them.
The sun now follows its real path over Lashkar Gah for the day you're fighting, the moon is the real one for the date, and everything in the world casts a shadow that moves with them.
The men went from drawn sprites to 3D models, and then the question was size. At life size they were dots. Here's how they ended up at 1.3.
Every vehicle in Section Command is now a 3D model, built to its real measurements and photographed from above. The Chinook was built too, and went straight back to being drawn.
A qalat is thirty to fifty metres across, and my compounds were twelve. Rebuilding the valley's hamlets at their real size meant tripling every range in the fight.
This afternoon I copied Charlie Foxtrot's engine into a new folder to see if it could carry a real-time tactics game about the British Army in Helmand. By midnight, a section could fight.
My first browser game is a squad shooter in the Cannon Fodder tradition, free to play on this site. It's also where I'm learning to build a game engine of my own.
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