1. Building Construction process

Construction "effects" in RTS games are often as varied as are the games themselves. Age of Empires 3 uses scaffolds and construction "frames", where the building gets built part by part; Empire Earth's buildings just rise out of the ground; etc. For DoC, I decided to create a hybrid of these two methods: Scaffolds surround a growing building while dust clouds add a "construction" effect. The overall appearance of this method is quite amazing:

I plan to have the dust clouds be optional, as they do detract from the framerate a bit.

2. My tools: Crafting Buildings, People, and Worlds.

My primary tool in making DoC is, of course, Game Maker. But in addition to that, I use another tool - a model creation program of my own design. It is already quite powerful, and it grows as I work - for I put in any features I think it needs, thus causing the program to expand and grow more complex with time. I call it Modeler 2. (Omicron Modeler was the first one, released on the GMC a while ago) It features a lot of advanced functions, including the ability to add lighting and normals to a model; switch culling sides of individual polygons; work with multiple "Materials", or with individual polygons; rotate parts of a model along any axis; make models with multiple textures; make several models in one "solution", all with the same texture set; export models to GM's native format (with multiple textures), etc. Unfortunately for you people, it isn't publicly available yet. (There are still a few bugs, and a lot of features that it wouldn't hurt to add; as well as an alarming lack of documentation)

It looks like this: