We spoke with indie developer Alejandro Nunez about his ambitious strategy game.
Will The Last General be the last real-time strategy game you will ever need? The game is set to be a massive RTS featuring procedurally generated terrains, dozens of towns and cities, and, most importantly, fully destructible environments. We took a closer look at this promising game and asked the developer how it’s coming along.
Tell us about yourself and what it’s like to work alone on such a comprehensive game.
I am Alejandro Nunez, a 38 years old Argentinian currently living in the United States. I have been programming for about 25 years, starting with games, then web applications and mobile apps, and I finally decided to go back to my roots in game development but to do something much larger this time.
I have worked independently most of my career and I really enjoy the freedom it gives me to bring the vision I have for the game to life, and experiment on every aspect of the game. It’s a very long process as a solo developer, and I will dedicate several thousands of hours to create The Last General. However, I am really enjoying the process and the constant challenges, and at this point in my professional life that’s exactly what I was craving.
Tell us what kind of game The Last General is.
The Last General is a massive real-time strategy game set in modern times, on a fictional archipelago. It puts you in the boots of a general leading an entire army of thousands of soldiers and vehicles, taking care of production and logistics, your reputation (which influences your allies’ support), recruiting levels and troops morale.
The main gameplay involves hand-drawing strategic orders for entire companies, but you can also give orders to any platoon, squad, or individual unit in the game, and watch the action unfold from any angle.
The game will be single and multi player, with four campaigns and individual missions like skirmishes, insurrections, assassinations, rescue, escape, and survival missions. The Last General is also fully physics based and features destructible environments.
What was your inspiration for The Last General?
The Last General started as a single line in my list of ideas about 10 years ago: «pixel territory war with push arrows». Originally, it was intended to be a very simple mobile RTS game, with a limited number of push arrows available, and a bit of a Chess feel. Although I thought it was a nice idea, and it combined certain aspects of my favorite types of games, it wasn’t really something complex to build, so I kept working on other ideas from my list for several years.
In March 2023, I finally decided to focus on that game idea again and think how I could keep its essence while turning it into a fun and really hard challenge where I could put all my skills to use. So the 2D game became a 3D game, the «pixel territory» turned into massive 400km2 procedurally generated terrains with dozens of towns and cities, and the «push arrows» became a set of hand-drawn actions to design the strategy. The new concept for the game was way more exciting to build for me, and after refining all the details and planning for a few weeks I went all in to build the game full time.
People who will love this game, what other games do you think they like?
Based on what I’ve seen in the game’s Discord channel and some other comments online, I think they like Hearts of Iron 4, World In Conflict, Warno and Broken Arrow.
Which development tools do you use, and what are the advantages and disadvantages of using them?
I am using Unity 6 with DOTS for the game itself, and Blender for 3D modeling. Unity DOTS is a set of tools that allow games to handle millions of in-game objects with an efficiency that wasn’t really possible before. It allows easy parallelization and full CPU utilization with way more efficient memory access and a lot of performance critical code getting compiled to extremely performant native code. At the scale of The Last General, this is key to enabling armies of thousands of physics based units, projectiles, complex environment destruction, debris flying everywhere, and more.
As for disadvantages, DOTS is really new, and was just coming out of the experimental phase when I started the game, so there are many missing pieces and gaps in functionality where I still have to mix some of the «old» Unity techniques, create my custom solutions, and use parts of other developers’ solutions like the open source Latios Framework.
How do you keep your scope manageable?
The main way I do this is by prioritizing what’s essential for the next milestone, which right now is releasing a new trailer video focused on gameplay and then doing a small alpha playtest. Anything that won’t significantly contribute to that milestone can be kicked to the next ones until some day they become the next top priority. Some examples are game mechanics like ships, medics, towing and repairs, which are not essential for the game to work and be fun, but still pretty high priority and will be implemented during early access or after the 1.0 release.
Do you use any tools to keep track of your ideas/tasks?
I started using Jira but quickly realized it’s too slow and cumbersome being a solo developer. I ended up switching to use Notion lists and sub-lists, to organize milestones, month by month high level and day by day detail tasks. It makes it much easier to move groups of tasks around as needed, and easily access all the details.
How much time do you spend in Unity compared to Blender?
Probably 70% of my time programming in Rider, 20% in Unity and 10% in Blender. The time in Blender will probably increase quite a bit later, when I start adding more variety to the units, weapons and buildings.
Did you start learning Blender by following the donut tutorial?
100%! Isn’t it mandatory? You have to add those sprinkles before you can do anything else!
When do you expect to have a playable demo ready, and when do you think the game will be finished?
My current plan is to have a closed alpha in the third quarter of 2025, a demo in early 2026 and Early Access in late 2026. A 1.0 release would probably come about a year after early access, in 2027. After that I will keep updating the game and adding more content and features for several more years.
Thanks for your time!
The Last General is slated for release in 2026. You can follow the game on Steam. Here is a trailer:
Article by Retrogamingpappa.