Ever since he was a young boy Scott McClusky has dreamed of making video games.
While he’s taken a bit of an unconventional route, in January of this year he realized this goal and released Radio Free Europa on Steam. Next to the music and some graphics, he made the entire game on his own over the last four years.
“I’ve had this idea for a game for, it’s been probably 25 years at this point and it’s kind of been brewing,” McClusky, 37, said. “I’ve always enjoyed a ton of board games and video games and I have a ton of ideas I thought would be cool. One of the first guys who tried it was super stoked and told me he got his daughter to try it and she was way better than him. It feels awesome that I helped create this moment between people I’ve never met.”
Born in Williams Lake, McClusky grew up in the 108 Mile Ranch and attended high school at Peter Skene Ogden Secondary School. An avid gamer who loved computers, he recalls taking the info tech classes several times just to get more experience working with computers.
When he graduated high school in 2004 he got a scholarship to attend Thompson Rivers University to get a Bachelor of Science, which he thought could help him become a video game developer. However, a combination of undiagnosed attention deficit disorder and the fact none of his classes really lent themselves to his hopeful career path led to him becoming discouraged. McClusky said he made the “big leap in logic” that if he couldn’t do well at university he couldn’t make video games.
In the following years, McClusky worked at the lumber mill for a year before saving up some money and moving to Vancouver to study filmmaking at the Art Institute of Vancouver. He reasoned that working in the film industry would be akin to working in video games. However, McClusky’s luck with school once again was bad as, while he met great people, he didn’t learn a lot of useful skills.
“After that, I said ok I’m going to make this movie and I had a couple of friends who decided to jump straight into making a movie after film school,” McClusky said. “We filmed it up in the 108 and wrote it over a couple of months, did all the location scouting and then one of the guys who was supposed to be core to our team completely screwed us over. It left the movie in a state where we couldn’t finish it and it really just soured all of us on the experience.”
McClusky said that after this he was lost for a few years and took up a job working for a company that rented out film equipment to filmmakers and projects. While he liked who he was working with, the work was unfulfilling.
When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit in 2020 McClusky, like many, was furloughed due to the lockdowns. Realizing the unique opportunity he had received, he decided to finally pursue his dream and started learning how to program a video game.
To build a video game, developers need an engine to work and create assets in. Most major video gaming companies have their own proprietary engines but certain engines, including Unity and Unreal Engine, are open source, perfect for small-time developers like McClusky. He chose to use Unreal Engine and started learning how to code using C++.
“The beginning was incredible because when you first get something to work, you feel like a god. Then you realize it only works in this very small set of specific conditions and there’s so much more (to do),” McClusky remarked. “There was still a lot of satisfaction in getting a new piece of knowledge but holy crap there were also periods of banging my head against a wall.”
His original idea for the game was a grand galaxy-spanning adventure in the style of the 1996 Macintosh role-playing/space combat game Escape Velocity, a big source of inspiration for McClusky growing up. In Escape Velocity the player is put in charge of a spaceship and through combat and dialogue choices will influence the outcomes of the game with several possible endings.
McClusky planned to make a spiritual successor with updated graphics and controls. As he began to code, however, he realized such a large project was too ambitious for one person, so he decided to scale it down into an “arcade version of the combat systems.”
“My plan was I could finish that in a year and then I could show people and say ‘pay me money for this bigger game I’m going to make,” McClusky chuckled. “I kept thinking I’m so close to being done but there are so many more things that go into making a good game (then I realized).”
It was then that McClusky’s experience in film school paid off. During his classes, he said they taught him about shot composition and how to be a director which lent itself well to making a visually pleasing game.
As he developed the game McClusky said the gameplay evolved into a roguelike manic shooter where players fight their way through swarms of increasingly larger spaceships by upgrading their own ship with bigger guns. The game’s story is set in the future where the player, a poor colonist on Saturn’s outermost moon Iapetus, must fight their way to Earth to let the government know how bad things are.
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While McClusky did the bulk of the work, he did have some help. His friend Leventi Reti, a 100 Mile House resident, created a full 26-track album for the game of fast-paced electronic music in the style of classic arcade games. He also received financial support and encouragement from his backers on Patreon, a website that allows people to support artists and their projects.
“One of the biggest patrons I managed to have was one of the guys who worked on Escape Velocity Nova. It was made by a group of Australian guys who called themselves Atmos and the main guy from Atmos is Dayfdd Williams,” McClusky said, remarking that Williams’ support and advice helped get him through some tough days.
Radio Free Europa is currently available on Steam and McClusky is working to get it on both the X Box and Epic Game storefronts. He’s thinking of doing a more ambitious sequel, in the spirit of his original vision, but admitted this time around he’d like to have a more concrete plan and a team going into it.
“I intend to create a Kickstarter for it at some point so I can pay people to work with me. I need writers at least because for this kind of game you need a couple of different factions,” McClusky remarked. “I do want to (do a sequel) but I want to prepare a lot more.”
McClusky encourages others like him with a dream to pursue it.
“If you put limitations on yourself and tell yourself you can’t do something it’s not good for your mental health. It’s so scary to try and take a chance but, for me, it was worth it.”
