The Last General Dev on Drones, Delays and Doing It All Alone (Ep.98)

Al and Nuno sit down with solo developer Alejandro Nunez to discuss The Last General, an ambitiously scoped modern-warfare RTS built almost entirely by one person, covering everything from procedurally generated islands and FPV drone warfare to the delayed 2027 early access timeline and why he’s kept marketing deliberately quiet.

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This interview features Alejandro Nunez, solo developer behind The Last General, a large-scale procedurally generated modern warfare RTS that lets players command thousands of units while retaining the option to personally control any individual tank, plane, or soldier. The conversation traces the project’s evolution from an early chess-variant concept into an ambitious 15-year development plan, Alejandro’s background bringing together decades of scattered technical skills (3D modeling, audio editing, Facebook-honed performance optimization) into a single solo endeavor, and the game’s explosive growth to over 158,000 Steam wishlists following viral social media traction. Extensive discussion covers the game’s real-world inspired modern warfare systems including FPV drones, its procedurally generated map scale ranging from hour-long skirmishes to multi-day persistent battles, and its planned four-campaign narrative structure across twelve fictional nations designed to avoid direct real-world parallels.

Critical Moves Podcast – Episode 98 Show Notes

Episode Title: The Last General Developer Interview with Alejandro Nunez
Hosts: Al, Nuno
Guest: Alejandro Nunez, solo developer of The Last General

Episode Length: ~46 minutes

Episode Summary

This interview revisits The Last General roughly two years after Nuno first covered the project in episode 9, when it was among the most anticipated titles of 2025. Solo developer Alejandro Nunez discusses the game’s evolution from a modest chess-variant concept into an ambitiously scoped, procedurally generated modern warfare RTS supporting thousands of units, first/third-person control of any individual unit, and battlefields ranging from small hour-long skirmishes to persistent multi-day conflicts. The conversation covers the technical and design challenges of solo development at this scale, the game’s grounding in current real-world military technology like FPV drones, its planned four-campaign narrative across twelve fictional nations, and the newly revised early access target of May 2027.

From a Failed Teenage RTS to a Chess Variant to The Last General

Alejandro traces his path to The Last General back to a failed attempt at building a basic 2D tank RTS at age 15, followed by a decade-long chess-variant concept involving abstract arrow-based army management that he ultimately found uninspiring. He credits years of accumulated, seemingly unrelated skills, including band-related audio and video editing, early 3D modeling for Counter-Strike maps, and performance optimization experience gained while working at Facebook, with giving him the confidence to attempt a project of this scale as a solo developer roughly three and a half years ago.

Scope Creep and the 15-Year Plan

What began as an intended two-year project targeting a 2025 release has expanded into a planned 15-year development arc spanning initial release and a decade of post-launch updates, driven by unexpectedly strong community reception that convinced Alejandro the project could sustain itself commercially long-term.

Explosive Wishlist Growth and a Discord “Raid”

Alejandro describes the game’s wishlist count growing from roughly 400-500 six months into development to over 158,000 currently, with a recent viral clip (700,000 views) driving 7,000 new wishlists in two weeks and triggering Discord’s automated raid-protection system due to the sudden surge in new members.

Inspirations: Age of Empires, Empire Earth, and Shooters

Alejandro cites Age of Empires II and Empire Earth as his formative strategy game influences, combined with a lifelong love of first-person shooters, explaining his goal of merging classic base-building, economy, and unit production RTS mechanics with direct, first-person unit control rather than pursuing more tactical or deck-building design approaches currently popular in the genre.

FPV Drones and Real-World Military Technology

Alejandro explains his design philosophy of incorporating any technology currently seeing significant real-world combat use, including FPV drones, one-way attack drones, and high-altitude reconnaissance drones, directly inspired by their prominence in the war in Ukraine and other current conflicts. He confirms electronic warfare and jamming mechanics are planned for future updates, alongside a functioning recon-to-strike drone loop already implemented in the alpha, where reconnaissance drones spot targets that artillery and infantry-deployed FPV drones then engage automatically.

Preventing Drone Overload

To avoid drones dominating gameplay, Alejandro limits each squad to one or two drones with no resupply, ensuring vehicles and infantry remain viable without being overwhelmed, while planning to introduce vehicle-mounted counter-drone systems (likely automated guns) as real-world countermeasures mature, at which point drone prevalence in-game would scale up accordingly.

Match Length and Scale

Match duration varies dramatically based on procedurally generated map size, from roughly one hour on the smallest 3.5km alpha maps to multiple hours on the largest current 10km-by-14km maps, with an even larger 20km option planned that could extend play across multiple sessions using persistent, saveable battlefields.

Balancing Strategic and Tactical Pacing

Alejandro explains that players can operate entirely at a slow, general’s-eye strategic level by drawing arrows and defensive zones on a zoomed-out map without ever selecting individual units, or zoom in for more granular company-level micromanagement similar to Broken Arrow or WARNO, or drop into full first-person control of any individual unit, allowing players to choose their preferred pace and involvement level at any time.

Designing for Future Hardware

Alejandro confirms the game’s procedural generation system allows map scale to be increased simply by adjusting generation parameters rather than requiring manual redesign, meaning significantly larger maps (potentially 25 times the current largest size) could become viable as average hardware improves over time. He is currently dedicating several weeks purely to CPU optimization, particularly around physics-heavy destruction systems, ahead of implementing multiplayer.

Buying Models to Move Faster as a Solo Developer

Alejandro explains that purchasing pre-made 3D vehicle models rather than building each from scratch (which would take roughly two weeks per model manually) allows him to focus his limited time on coding and gameplay systems rather than asset creation, a practical necessity given the game’s roster of 200+ vehicles.

Timeline: From 2025 to May 2027

Acknowledging the original 2025 early access target has slipped to a currently planned May 2027 release, Alejandro attributes the extended timeline to iterative priority-shifting based on continuous alpha tester feedback, moving sequentially through crash fixes, core gameplay refinement, and now CPU performance optimization, with building destruction and further gameplay polish still to come.

The Role of Alpha Testers

Alejandro credits alpha testers as invaluable for surfacing hardware-specific bugs and crashes across GPU/CPU configurations he cannot personally test, as well as providing direct feedback on confusing or unintuitive gameplay systems that has directly shaped development priorities.

Twelve Fictional Nations and Asymmetric Design

The game will feature twelve entirely fictional nations, deliberately avoiding direct real-world parallels (no nation will map cleanly onto the US, Russia, etc.) and mixing equipment types unconventionally within each faction’s roster to prevent easy real-world identification. Alejandro confirms significant asymmetry is planned, with differing tech levels, morale systems, and core unit doctrines between nations, alongside a future map/army editor allowing players to create custom nations and scenarios via Steam Workshop.

Modding and Procedural Map Sharing

Alejandro explains that procedural generation was chosen partly to enable extremely lightweight, easy map sharing: players will be able to paint a simple island outline and city placements in an editor, generating a full detailed map from a file potentially as small as one megabyte.

The Deliberately Quiet Marketing Strategy

Alejandro explains his cautious approach to publicly sharing early footage, driven by concern that outdated alpha clips will persist online indefinitely and mislead future viewers about the game’s current state, while acknowledging this restraint has also fueled curiosity and anticipation among the community.

Will There Be PvP

Confirming that PvP is planned alongside the current PvE-focused alpha, Alejandro cites both the roughly 20% of RTS players who prefer competitive multiplayer and the unique appeal of mixed friend groups, where an RTS-focused player could act as “general” while friends control individual units in first-person as a cooperative team experience. He confirms an internal large-scale stress test has already validated the feasibility of multiplayer at the game’s intended scale, with implementation planned for the coming year.

Campaign Narrative Structure

The four planned campaigns (one per selectable nation) will be interconnected, with events in one campaign influencing how the parallel campaigns for other nations unfold, alongside a separate non-narrative “dynamic campaign” mode allowing free-form conquest across all twelve nations on the full archipelago map. Campaign missions themselves are entirely hand-crafted, using a variety of mission types (assassination, insurgency, amphibious assault, rescue, and standard skirmish) to avoid the risk of a campaign feeling like a simple string of repetitive skirmish battles, and Alejandro confirms that not every mission is designed to end in outright victory, with setbacks intended to meaningfully shape subsequent story missions.

Will There Be Nukes

Responding to what he describes as a frequently asked community question, Alejandro says the answer has shifted from a firm no to a likely yes for low-yield tactical nuclear weapons, calibrated to avoid disproportionately destroying the game’s 20km-scale maps entirely.

How to Access the Alpha

The alpha is currently accessible via The Last General’s Discord server to members who reach “activity level two,” achievable through roughly a minute or two of chat participation.

Contact & Links

About | Contact | Meet the Team | Get Involved | Forum | Episodes
Discord | Reddit | Twitter / X | Facebook
Instagram | Twitch | Steam Group | Steam Curator
YouTube | Spotify | Apple | Amazon
Email: [email protected]

Episode Verdict

This interview succeeds in conveying both the genuine ambition and the grounded, methodical execution behind a project that could easily read as overreach on paper. Alejandro’s candor about scope creep, his iterative, tester-feedback-driven development priorities, and his specific technical explanations (procedural generation enabling future scale increases, purchased models freeing time for coding) give the conversation real substance beyond typical indie developer enthusiasm. The hosts’ probing questions about balancing strategic and tactical pacing, avoiding a drone-dominated meta, and preventing campaigns from feeling like repetitive skirmish strings demonstrate genuine strategy-genre literacy that pushes the conversation past surface-level feature description. The playful but ultimately unanswered questions about favorite factions and nuclear weapons provide levity without undercutting the episode’s substantive technical depth, and the clear, actionable pathway to alpha access gives listeners an immediate way to engage with the project discussed.