art direction

Why my RTS is stickmen drawn on graph paper

The obvious way to make a retro strategy game is to make it look like 1995. I think that is a trap, and the way out of it was sitting in the back of my old maths book.

Posted 20 August 2026 · 4 min read

When you decide to make a retro real-time strategy game, there is a very obvious visual answer waiting for you, and it is a trap.

The obvious answer is: make it look like 1995. Chunky pixel sprites, khaki and olive, a slab-serif HUD with rivets on it, a grainy green terminal font. Everybody knows this language and it signals your intentions instantly.

The problem is that it puts you in a direct comparison you cannot win. If my game looks like Command & Conquer, then every second somebody spends with it, they are comparing it to Command & Conquer — a game with a budget, a soundtrack by Frank Klepacki, and twenty-five years of accumulated affection. I am one person. I am going to lose that comparison in about nine seconds.

The other place these games happened

Here is the thing I remembered. I did not only play these games on a computer. I played them in the back of my exercise books.

Everybody I knew did this. You would get home, play Red Alert for two hours, and then the next morning in double maths you would draw the battle again in biro — tanks as a rectangle with a line coming off it, soldiers as stickmen, explosions as a scribble, bases as boxes with labels. The squared paper was already a grid, so it did the tile map for you. If you were feeling committed you would draw a little sidebar down the right-hand side with the costs written in.

That is the second image of this nostalgia and almost nobody has used it. And crucially, it is not competing with 1995. It is competing with a fourteen-year-old with a leaky pen, which I feel much better about.

What the material gives you for free

Once I committed to it, a run of design problems solved themselves, which is usually the sign that an art direction is doing real work rather than just decoration.

The grid was already there

Every tile-based strategy game has a grid it is slightly embarrassed about and tries to hide under terrain textures. Graph paper is a grid. The thing I would normally be concealing became the paper the game is printed on.

Construction became an animation instead of a fade

A building under construction does not fade in from transparent, which is what every engine does by default and which means nothing. It draws itself in — the outline inks over the build time, faint at first, then filled. It is the same idea as a progress bar, except it is the actual object telling you.

Death got an answer

This was the one that convinced me. Explosions are hard: a good explosion is particles, light, physics and a budget. On paper, a thing does not explode. It gets scribbled out — four or five fast strokes drawn straight over it in about a third of a second — and then the whole thing shrinks and fades as if erased. It cost me almost nothing to draw and it is far more satisfying than a mediocre fireball. It is also, and this matters, funny, in the way the subject matter deserves.

Damage became legible

A damaged unit has thinner, more broken ink. Smoke is a spiral scribble. You can read a tank’s health from across the map without a health bar, because a dying tank is literally drawn worse.

The wobble

One technical decision carries more of the effect than any other. Nothing in the game is drawn twice the same way, because every entity has its own random seed, and every line is a wobbling path generated from it rather than a straight one.

So no two tanks on the screen have the same outline. Twelve tanks look like twelve tanks somebody drew, with a hand that got tired, rather than twelve copies of one sprite. It is the difference between a photocopy and a page of drawings, and it turns out your eye catches it immediately even though you could not say what you were noticing.

The seed is stable per unit, so a given tank wobbles the same way every frame and does not vibrate. That sounds obvious. It was not the first thing I implemented, and the version where every line was re-randomised every frame was genuinely unpleasant to look at.

The one thing I would not compromise

Underneath all of this, the simulation is completely straight. There is nothing whimsical about the rules. Ore fields run dry. The power penalty is arithmetic — production runs at supply divided by demand, down to a floor of a quarter. Rockets do double to armour and half to infantry. A harvester is 700 credits and dies like a 700-credit thing.

That contrast is the whole game, really. It looks like something a bored child drew, and then it turns out to have a proper economy, a tech tree and an opponent that raids your harvesters while you are looking somewhere else. The drawing is the joke. The game underneath it is not a joke at all.

You can play it here, free, in your browser. Or read about the twelve-mission campaign, which ends with a commando, thirty tesla coils, and one door out.

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