Conquer The Island (alpha)

Capture The Island is a first-person realtime strategy game. You have been deployed on a 25km2 island as commander of six squads, and your mission is to find and destroy the enemy base.

Use your mobile headquarters (or MHQ for short) to build structures such as barracks, vehicle factories and a command center to grow your army. Protect the base at all costs, because if it is destoryed your game will be over!

You only have limited resources, though, and each building, soldier and tank you build drains resources. Earn more resources by capturing and holding towns.

Note from the developer

This game is a prototype - it's intended to be a casual and light hearted strategy game, and obviously isn't to AAA game studio quality. I've built this game alone in my spare time over the space of a couple of weeks, using assets I had laying around from other projects.

I'm releasing it to the public for people to try it out and give feedback at an early stage in the development. The gameplay and artwork are not entirely final and I'll be working on a lot of additions and changes depending on what kind of feedback I get. Interested in giving it a go? Read on..!

STARTING OUT

Once you have deployed, you can move around using WASD and the mouse. Right click aims your gun, and left click fires. You're only equiped with a pistol, though, so don't be to hasty.  Holding B allows you to look through your binoculars.

Holding down TAB opens the command menu. From here you can instruct your squads - it's best to get them to "Take Towns" at the start so you can build up cash reserves.

GROWING YOUR ARMY

To grow your army, you need to build structures. Aim at where you want the structure to be placed and open the command menu. You can select from Barracks, light tank factory, heavy tank factory or control center.

Squad leaders will buy subordinates automatically depending on their resources, unless you set their "Buy Units" value to "None". You can also change this to make squad leaders buy light or heavy tanks once you have built the relevent factories. Each purchase gets added to a queue - one unit is built at once, taking sometime from 20 seconds to 60 seconds depending on the unit type.

Squad leaders and the commander respawn freely, but subordinate units are gone forever once they are killed - it takes more resources to buy new units to replace them.

FINDING THE ENEMY

Pressing M opens a map, and you can see your squad leaders and their units (use WASD to pan and scroll to zoom). If any unit spots an enemy, you'll be alerted in the bottom left of the screen and you'll see icons on the map showing where the enemy was spotted. Once you build a control center you can order a drone to fly over the map (using the command menu). The drone flys in the direction that you are facing when you call it up, so some careful planning is essential here.

DESTROY THE ENEMY BASE

If you think you know where the base is, you can decide when to attack. The best time to attack is when you think you have a bigger army than the enemy, enough resources to last the war, and your base is well defended. Using the map (press M), move your cursor using WASD to where you think the base is, and select "Set commander WP" (waypoint). Then you can instruct the squads to "Go to commander WP". They will engage as soon as they see an enemy structure or unit.

DEFEND YOUR BASE

Don't forget to defend your base. You can instruct individual squads to defend the base. It's best to leave a squad or two hanging around the base if you think the enemy base isn't far away.

GIVE ME FEEDBACK

I'd like to hear all feedback - good or bad. Leave a comment and I'll try to reply to them all!