- August progress update! 375 alpha testers! - 7 September 2026
Hi Generals!! I was pretty busy in August releasing 5 new versions of the alpha (0.1.18 to 0.1.22). Those updates improved TLG's alpha gameplay and stability, fixed a ton of crashes and brought a lot of new features and quality of life, some new units and a much more enjoyable experience for new testers. The alpha is now open to Discord members with activity level 2 or more (which is just sending 75 messages in the server or getting 15 likes), so a lot of new testers are joining the alpha every day!Here are some videos and images from the alpha testers as usual, and at the bottom is the ridiculously long list of changes I made in August! August Alpha changes:Changed initial company placement to place a similar number of companies for every player. This will make Dalmino map a bit less brutal.Made infantry not die so easily from explosions nearbyMade FPV drones explosions more powerfulFi…
- July Progress Update! Alpha is expanding! - 3 August 2026
Hi generals!! Another month has passed and here is the summary of everything that happened with The Last General!ALPHA EXPANDINGDuring July I released multiple new versions of the alpha and also expanded it to 110 players with levels of activity 5 or more on the Discord! By the end of August that will increase to everyone with level of activity 2 or more, which is a few hundred more. That allows me to detect and fix crashes or bugs that show up in different hardware from my test devices on Windows, Mac and Linux. Here is a video I made in Alpha 0.1.16 explaining how the game works and showing the longest uninterrupted gameplay to date. This is still very early but it's starting to take shape!SCREENSHOTS FROM ALPHA TESTERSTONS OF CHANGESAutomated supply systemAdded capacities and resource types to the supply trucksMade them pick up resources from factories and carry them to the frontline…
- June Progress Recap! - 5 July 2026
Hello generals! June was awesome and I made a ton of progress on the alpha (uploaded 0.1.12, 0.1.13, 0.1.14 and 0.1.15 a few days ago). The alpha playtest also expanded to a lot more testers in the Discord server, TLG hit 140.000 wishlists on Steam, and some of the Instagram videos finally starting to go a little viral! (follow there if you haven't yet!) I also published some videos showing the progress on the different alpha versions:And here are a lot of images from the Alpha, captured during the month (by me and by alpha testers): Here are most of the changes in the alpha during June (probably forgetting a bunch of stuff that I didn't write down):Brutal improvements on pathfinding. Way better performance and very few path finding failures.Added ability to convert factories to produce a different resource or unit. Improved the factory panels to show the type of factory and show retool…
- May Progress Recap! Alpha started on Discord! - 5 June 2026
Hello hello hello generals! May was a really cool month with a ton of progress. TLG hit 133.333 wishlists on Steam and the alpha finally starting expanding beyond my family and friends to some of the most active Discord members! Here is some of the stuff I worked on during May:COMBINED PATHFINDINGA long time ago I made a very efficient road based pathfinding to let units navigate the islands taking advantage of the roads network. About 6 months ago I also implemented a detailed navigation mesh based pathfinding algorithm based on Polyanya. Now I finally combined both, letting units navigate complex obstacles nearby and then continue their journey using the road system for longer distances. QUEUING ORDERSBesides hand drawing strategic orders which acts like a very detailed queue of orders for companies, now you can also queue specific orders for units and they will execute those orders s…
- April Progress Recap! - 4 May 2026
Hello generals! This is the classic monthly recap compiling all the little progress updates I do on Discord weekly (or more often).April started with an April Fools joke where I switched to working on The Last Mayor (a city builder) instead of The Last General, causing mass panic and a few people to leave the Discord (almost everyone finally realized it was a joke and came back now). We also reached 125000 wishlists on Steam, it's wild how fast it's growing! Here is a bunch of stuff I have been working on, besides fixing little things here and there all the time: ECONOMYNew panel showing income and expenses (screenshot).When running out of money your entire economy throttles down, including construction, unit production and salary payments. Operational costs now increase faster as your army grows, representing inefficiencies in a larger organization.CONSTRUCTIONConstruction panel now sh…
- 3 years of development of TLG! - 15 March 2026
Today it's the 3rd anniversary since I started developing The Last General! Here is a pretty long video compiling some of the videos I captured during those 3 years (some never seen before and some new ones from yesterday and today). What's your favorite part?
- February Progress Recap - 2 March 2026
Hi generals! February was a veeeery busy month preparing the game to start the first alpha playtest!NEW VEHICLESAdded the NAFT4 fuel truck and TM-21 Volley MULTIPLE NAVIGATION MESHESI worked quite a bit on navigation mesh generation to reduce edge cases that were causing some tiles not to generate, then started generating multiple version of the navigation meshes for different unit sizes (infantry, small vehicles, large vehicles) NEW DETAILS SYSTEMMade a new details system and got rid of the previous slow grass system. This new system has tile caching and optimizes updates to keep entities in fixed positions when possible and skipping updates on entire chunks early for super fast performance. The system also works for any details near the camera, not just grass, so I am also able to add a ton of little rocks, debris and other objects when needed. I also replaced all the grass for much f…
- January Progress Recap - 2 February 2026
January was a very productive month! Here is some of the stuff I worked on: INFANTRY WEAPONS, FIRST PERSON CONTROL AND MOREAdded a better rifle (R4A), a machinegun (Fermin), anti-tank missile launcher (NPAT), anti-aircraft missile launcher (Scorpion) and a shoulder fired rocket propelled grenade (SFRPG)Implemented weapon switching so soldiers can carry two different weapons and switch between them according to their target. Added first person view for infantry so you can aim better from the point of view of the weapon instead of third personMade soldiers grab their weapons much better, using IK for hands and fingers for a more realistic grip.Made soldiers drop their weapons when they die. Later other soldiers will be able to pick them up and also use any remaining ammo.Finally added recoil when soldiers are shooting!Here are several images showing all those infantry changes:AIR DEFENSES…
- December Progress Recap - 6 January 2026
Happy New Year Generals!! December was a really crazy month, hitting 100,000 wishlists on Steam and also 100,000 subscribers on Youtube! What a way to close the year! This month I continued working on the navigation mesh rework, which took way longer than anticipated, but it's a huge improvement for unit navigation in between all sorts of obstacles, as you can see in the video below. That one also shows the destruction of bushes and trees, that can fall down when hit by heavy vehicles.I also changed how map generation works so they don't need to be square anymore. This means we can fight in longer rectangular maps like the one below (10km x 40km): The rest of December was pretty low productivity with all the holidays stuff, airline delays (don't fly with Alaska Airlines) and then getting sick after the trip, but now I am back in full force and January will be pretty awesome getting thin…
- November progress recap! - 5 December 2025
November was a busy month! I worked on a ton of different things, getting stuff ready for the alpha to start with family and friends in just 90 days (fingers crossed!): PLAYER COUNTS AND ALLIANCESSome parts of the game were limiting the maximum number of potential players to 4, which was my original intention with the game (to keep armies large enough to feel like a general), but there was no technical reason to actually limit this, so I removed those limitations, allowing me to support more than 4 players in the future too. I also implemented alliances support, so that players can share their spotted units information, and units obviously don't attack each other if they are allied.LINE OF SIGHTI implemented a new line of sight system that is much faster and more precise than before, taking into account partial obstructions, unit distances, sizes and speed and camo levels. This is a deb…
- October Progress Update! - 8 November 2025
Hi! Here I am reporting for another monthly update! Last month I added direct control for all vehicles in the game (yes, that includes helicopters, airplanes, tanks, APCs, AAs, IFVs, Transport vehicles, trucks, everything!). I also implemented some new systems for camera placement, allowing players to aim vehicle weapons basically in first person! Here is a video showing all that: Other news since the last update is that TLG has now over 90000 wishlists, and almost 50000 subscribers on Youtube! And I also had a great interview with "NoiceGuy" also known as "The Autistic Armchair General", here it is if you want to hear a lot more details about The Last General:
- September Update! - 13 October 2025
After working on performance optimizations for a while and learning a ton of new stuff. I took the leap and worked on my own water and terrain shaders, which enable much better performance and support a lot of extra features I couldn't implement with the previous out of the box solutions I was using.Now we have much better water and rivers shaders which don't impact CPU performance at all, nicer screen space reflections and way more detailed terrain, including road lanes markings, side markings, crosswalks, farm patterns, sidewalk textures and wet or dirty roads near the curbs. The visual impact is pretty cool and it's only getting started! I also did some tests for realtime terrain modification and performance was good enough, which will enable impact terrain deformation (craters) and also proper trenches! Lastly, I worked on some visual effects improvements, navigation, AI and added a…
- The Last General - August recap! - 5 September 2025
August was a fun month for my nerdy and performance obsessed side. Spent days after days profiling, finding the worst offenders and optimizing them, reorganizing systems, read/write dependencies, parallelizing some more things, unparallelizing some other things, caching a ton of calculations, applying spatial partitioning, rearranging entities and prefabs, compounding physics bodies, etc, and the resulting performance improvements were epic. Now the game runs about three times faster than at the end of July, and got a long list of future performance improvements to implement too in future optimization months. Dedicating the whole month only to performance was really nice and productive compared to optimizing smaller things here and there while developing features, so I will probably repeat it with another 2 performance months next year, before the demo and then before early access. As I…
- The Last General - July Recap - 8 August 2025
July is over and completely forgot to post my monthly update, so here I am!! Before recapping what happened in July, the big news are that The Last General just hit 75,000 wishlists on Steam yesterday!! Thanks everyone for that, it's incredible!! Ok, back to July! The month started with the aftermath of the last trailer video going viral, so I spent a lot time answering comments and messages all over the place until things calmed down a bit. In the first few days I also implemented and improved some gameplay features around the dominant force criteria for conquering towns and cities, making it much more robust and enabling small forces to hold a city for a while against a surrounding larger enemy force.I also worked on the consequences of towns/cities changing hands, and the population support for the different nations changing over time and affecting production levels for factories nea…
- The Last General - June Update! - 3 July 2025
What a month! After releasing the new trailer video it went a little viral (170k views so far!) and a lot of new players got to know about TLG! It recently hit the 60000 wishlists and 2000 discord members milestones! I want to thank you all for all the kind messages about it, it's been really motivating! In case you missed it, here is that trailer video again! The video also shows many of the features I worked on at the beginning of the month, like soldiers boarding/unboarding vehicles or garrisoning into buildings, and direct control of soldiers and vehicles. Now that this video is out and the TLG family is growing way faster, all my efforts are going into the next big step in the development: the alpha test! My focus in the next few months will be mostly on AI (for both NPCs and your own troops) and performance work. My goal is to have a nice single player alpha around the end of this…
- Progress Update (May recap) - 1 June 2025
Another month went by and we reached another great milestone: The Last General has hit 45,000 wishlists! It was a pretty busy month with a ton of nice progress, and rounding up some stuff for the new official video that will be coming out in about two weeks! Here are some of the new features and improvements: FIGHTER JETS Fighter jets have much better trails and jet engine plumes, with heat distorsion and nicer looking effects. They are also shooting guided missiles now and hitting "Bomb target" strategic actions better than ever. GUIDED MISSILES Artillery can also shoot guided missiles now and hit targets with great accuracy and also use different rocket flight patterns to get those valuable top hits on armored vehicles. UNIT PRODUCTION Newly created units now come out from inside the factories and drive away to join the companies that need them or head to the reserves deployment areas…
- Progress Update (April recap) - 2 May 2025
Hi everyone! April was a crazy month, with The Last General reaching 40,000 wishlists and 4,000 followers on Steam. Thanks a lot to everyone for supporting my dream project, it really means a lot to me! Here is a small recap of what happened in The Last General since the last month's progress update: APRIL FOOLS GAMEPLAY VIDEO I started the month with a joke gameplay video for April Fools showing some of the progress I made in March (mostly related to some basic soldier animations, truck logistics and strategic actions). If you haven't watched it yet, I recommend it! CONSTRUCTION I developed a new construction system that animates the construction process while they are being built, in addition to the placement system to select where they should be constructed, and the construction panel with all the options (for now, will change a lot). You can watch a video of the animated constructio…
- The Last General - Progress update! - 17 March 2025
After 2 years of development and 6 months since the last trailer video I recorded for the game, let's go over all the new stuff I've been busy working on! UPDATED VISUALS Soon after recording the video I upgraded the project to Unity 6 and HDRP (was using Unity 2022 and URP in the trailer video). This allows much better post processing, some nice optimizations and fading for shadow cascades, object motion blur, local volumetrics, auto-exposure, etc. NEW VEHICLES Added some new units that weren't available at the time of the last trailer video, like APCs, Artillery and light transport vehicles. AIR SUPPORT As promised, you will be able to request air support from your allies (if your reputation is good enough and you still have allies). That may be in the form of missile strikes or planes, so I added those planes too! UNIT HIERARCHY The Last General is all about the big picture of a mass…
