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Why I'm making Helmand Ops on my own
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.
The best moment so far
My best mate Oli is ex-2 PARA, and he did two tours in Afghanistan. The best moment of this whole project so far was showing Oli the game, and him loving it.
Helmand Ops is about the British side of that war. I wanted it British Army through and through, and there are very few games about the British side, least of all real-time strategy. So I'm making one, on my own, and this is why.
Cannon Fodder at four
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.
Operation Flashpoint, the original Ghost Recon and Rainbow Six, and Delta Force 1 and 2 turned me into a PC gamer. What they had in common was tactics and realism. These days it's WARNO, Arma Reforger, Squad and Manor Lords.
The moment it clicked that I wanted to make these games was at school, in 2001, when I started modding Operation Flashpoint. I made maps and reskinned units, and built missions and whole campaigns, on the community forums of the time: OFP.INFO and OFP.CZ, if you remember them.
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. Looking back, that's the one thing I'd change.
The long way round
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 is technical, with a very steep learning curve, and from a learning point of view there's a lot in common between it and making games. It's what I bring to the game's sound, too: I do the 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, and it was always a test bed. Section Command started when I wanted to see how the same engine would work as an RTS.
Why it looks like this
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.
Never the same twice
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.
So when you finish Zarghun, 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.
Behind all of it is the fact that I'm a huge military nerd. Memoirs, documentaries and manuals, all of them, and Oli. Realism, to me, means detailed and immersive.
Six to ten hours a week
That's what I get for game development at the moment, alongside running Decloak Music and Adkonnekt. It would be a dream to focus on this full time, and that's why I'm releasing Section Command: Helmand Ops.
Zarghun is the only mission for now, and that's deliberate. It's the playtest: the place where I tune the game's systems with players' feedback while I build out the full campaigns.
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."
What I'd like from you
- Play the playtest, the training areas and Zarghun: play it here. Training and day 1 are free; the game asks for your email after day 1 to keep going. Then play Zarghun again, and tell me how differently it went.
- If you served and something isn't how it was, write to me at hello@tacticalchicken.games. Every one gets read.
- Join the dispatch below for one email when the Steam page and the Steam demo go up.
Who makes this: Section Command: Helmand Ops is made by one person, Jack Mustard, who is the whole of Tactical Chicken Studios.