Download Description
Fuel & Steel is a real-time strategy game set in a desert in the year 2160. It is the author's gift to the kid they used to be: the author grew up with Command & Conquer and spent whole afternoons sending tanks across the map. That kid never asked where the fuel came from. This game does.
Every tank has a real fuel tank and a magazine of eight shells. When the fuel runs out, it stops; when the shells run out, it cannot fight. Trucks bring fuel and ammo, but only when you order them to. Nothing supplies itself. Destroyed trucks drop barrels and cartridges that anyone can pick up, and wrecks stay on the field. A huge army without fuel is just scrap metal waiting. Supply wins wars.
The demo is one complete mission, "Growing Force", about 20 minutes long. You start with two tanks, a fuel truck and an ammo truck. Free captured tanks along a river valley, take fuel from an enemy convoy, storm a guarded plateau, then race a supply column to ten stranded enemy tanks before they are refueled. The radio tells you what is happening, never how to solve it, and an in-game info box explains the controls with short clips recorded from the game itself.
The core systems existed before the event: unit control, the four resources of fuel, steel, ammo and power, seven vehicle types and eight buildings, the rule that trucks act only on orders, enemy AI, fog of war and a first set of Tripo vehicle models, among others. Everything you see in the demo was built during the event: the mission and its map, the story, the spoken radio and intro, the cinematic camera, checkpoints, the info box, the river, and the Tripo-made desert plants, oil ruins and textures that dress the level.
The game was made by one person learning Unity along the way and working with AI: models and textures with Tripo, game code with Claude Code, terrain with Gaea, and voices and sound with ElevenLabs.
How Tripo was used
Tripo is the visual backbone of the game: every vehicle is a Tripo model.
- Vehicles: cleaned up in Blender and rigged with turrets, wheels and a working harvester drum.
- Added during the event: three asset sets (41 desert plants, 35 pipes, and the tanks and pumps of an abandoned oil field), new building models, the steel deposit and textures for all vehicles.
- One texture, many units: the author transfers Tripo's UVs onto the game meshes by script and recolors the same texture for enemy and neutral units.
