Welcome to another edition of Developer Diaries! This week we spoke with Mike Sole, the lead developer on Nuke Them All, an upcoming real-time strategy title, coming on Steam in 2024, made fully in Construct 3.
LET'S START OFF WITH AN INTRODUCTION
Hey there! Papa Mike here, thrilled to chat about our game, "Nuke Them All." As a father of three, it's a project close to my heart, especially since all three of my kids are now diving into the world of coding through Construct.
I’ve been a software developer since 2006, and I’ve been a 3D artist event longer thanks to 3ds max back in the 90s. I still mainly consider myself a designer rather than a programmer so finding a visual-language engine like Construct has been a game changer for me!
CAN YOU TELL US A BIT ABOUT YOUR GAME?
Nuke Them All is a thrilling real-time strategy game that brings the excitement of '90s classics like Z and Command & Conquer: Red Alert while adding a modern flair.
The main goals of the game are to capture the flags, speed up your base’s production and ultimately destroy the enemy’s fort. On the surface, it may seem relatively simple, but we’ve got deep strategic gameplay with a lot of attention to detail.
We’ve tried to include things that people love from strategy games of the past – zombies, aliens, mechanoids, battle tanks… We could go on! The variety of the units and their special abilities should mean you won’t get bored even after hours of gameplay.
In fact, one of the game’s testers went to record a short, 30-minute stream and ended up going for eight hours he was so immersed!
WHAT PUSHED YOU TOWARDS DEVELOPING A REAL-TIME STRATEGY GAME?
The inspiration for developing an RTS came from a deep love for classic '90s RTS games.
I strongly believe that the RTS genre is due for a big comeback in the next couple of years. After the ‘death’ of the PC market in the early 2000s with the rise of consoles, PC game piracy and other factors, the market changed and the RTS genre was no longer favourable to AAA studios.
If you remember the heyday of RTS games, we had wonderful hits like Z (1996), the Command & Conquer series, Total Annihilation and KKnD. Those games were such an inspiration to me back in the day and my dream was to create something akin to those classics but in 3D.
Originally, this game was supposed to be released during the ‘Golden Age’ of the RTS genre, when things like Command & Conquer were still releasing good games. The project started back in 2006, but long story short, the task of creating the game of my dreams was monumental and completely out of scope for a small team of five people. So, unfortunately, the project was shelved.
The main issue we had was the lack of a game engine. Generally, building a game also meant building your own engine which was a huge task on its own before you even got to the game itself.
Fast forward to nearly 20 years after I first had the idea of creating my dream RTS game, I discovered Construct 3 and that reignited the spark to complete the game. I finally had the tools to do it!
Plus, there are now so many new games coming to the genre like Stormgate as well as things like the 2020 remaster of Command and Conquer, it’s confirming that I want to be a part of the revived interest in RTS games!
HOW HAS THE DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY BEEN AND WHY DID YOU CHOOSE CONSTRUCT FOR THE PROJECT?
I want to start off by saying that this kind of game is a very, very difficult thing to make, not only in Construct, but in any engine. There is so much to think about, and you’ll end up with tons of objects on the map, effects and explosions going off everywhere and lots of complicated pathfinding. It’s a lot to deal with!
So, when choosing the engine for Nuke Them All, I really wanted visual scripting as part of it because I only really have Python skills. I looked at Gamemaker, Unreal Engine, Unity… They all have some sort of visual scripting but they all felt too overwhelming to me. Plus, I didn’t want to repeat my first mistake of going for a completely 3D game, so I started looking at 2D only, and that’s how I found Construct.
Though, at first I wasn’t sure if it was going to be the right engine – the game has a lot to handle during standard play and a lot of the examples I found for Construct games were simple platformers. But then I found a YouTube channel called Game Design with Reilly – a channel fully devoted to Construct 3. He showed a simple RTS template made for Construct and it opened my eyes to the scope of the engine! The rest is history!
WHAT'S BEEN YOUR BIGGEST DEVELOPMENT HURDLE SO FAR?
Optimization.
This game is very complex and we have thousands of lines of code across tons of event sheets so keeping everything running at its best is a challenge. For a long time, my biggest issue was having low FPS and laggy performance when a lot was happening at the same time – particularly when you include resource-heavy events like pathfinding, map generation, particles etc.
But, huge thanks to people like Rio, Khaled, Rodrigo and Wilson Percival (as well plenty of others) – they’ve really helped me solve complex problems and the whole community is incredibly helpful.
Keeping the graphics optimised has been tricky too. Though I’ve learned a lot from Ashley’s blog posts on optimisation and memory use – you should definitely read them!
My main advice here is that you should accept that you won’t know everything and that it’s okay to ask for help. There are a lot of talented Construct programmers who offer their help when you need it!
DO YOU ANY MEMORABLE DEV STORIES?
I do have a couple, and they involve my kids. Firstly, it turns our my 4-year-old is a secret bug-finding hero. He plays my game every weekend as a reward for doing some studying. He’s managed to find more bugs than all of our paid testers! And it’s helping him develop his skills like using a keyboard and mouse, and his reading!
And this isn’t strictly to do with my game, but my older daughter is also developing her own game in Construct. She’s found it really easy to learn and while she’s also learning Python with her grandfather, Construct is helping cover the gap between her desire to make games and the challenges she sometimes has when learning the text language.
HOW ABOUT ANY ADVICE FOR PEOPLE DOING THEIR OWN GAME PROJECTS?
Simply, be ready to face challenges.
The journey will never be smooth, but you’ll learn a lot along the way.
For example, we ran a Kickstarter for the game (which was a challenge to set up in the first place due to location restrictions!) The campaign itself wasn’t successful but that’s okay. It might not have brought in funding for the project, but it did help me to find a lot of passionate players and testers who have helped a lot with sharing ideas, beta testing and streaming the game! Finding people who are passionate about your game is invaluable when it comes to indie game marketing!
It's also worth looking at new technologies that are coming along. Making games can be a hard, slow-going, and expensive process but modern tools and in some cases, AI can help speed things along, especially while on a tight budget.
ANY FINAL THOUGHTS?
My goal was to prove that Construct is a powerful tool, not just for simple mobile or platform games, but can be used for hugely complex projects too. I’d like to think I’m doing that with Nuke Them All!
The game is already up on Steam, so feel free to try the demo or even wishlist the game!
Thanks again to the Construct Community for their help so far, and I hope you enjoy Nuke Them All!
🚀