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Hello, Commander
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About the game
Hello, Commander is a small turn-based tactics game with its tongue firmly in its cheek. Your boss is a large bunny behind a desk, the radios are down, and the woods between your bunker and the next one are crawling with "elves", little green men nobody has bothered to deal with. Your job is not to fight them: it is to get the mail through.
Each mission is a new stretch of terrain, with trees and changes of height, and a bunker somewhere ahead. Your soldiers start the round with ten action points each. Walking spends points according to the ground, while shooting, ducking behind cover and reloading cost five; shooting also ends that soldier's turn. When every soldier has acted, the elves take theirs, and they shoot back.
Getting one soldier into the bunker delivers the message. Along the way, every hit on an elf gives experience: soldiers level up, earn perks and grow from rookies into heavies, assault troops or snipers, depending on their temper. New recruits, each with a randomly drawn face and name, join as the missions go on. There are no saves and no second chances, though: a soldier who falls is gone for good, and if the whole squad is lost, the bunny is not impressed.
Playing it here
This is a homebrew game made for the Arduboy, the open, credit-card-sized handheld with a tiny black-and-white screen: a new game by an independent developer, not a commercial release. It was made in 2017 for a game jam of the Arduboy community, and its author released it as is, admitting that the balance could use more work. It runs here in Ardens, an Arduboy emulator. Click Play now and press Z to move through the briefing, then Z again to begin the mission.
The game itself never saves, on purpose. F2 still saves the complete state of the emulator at any moment, and F4 brings it back, if you want to keep a squad. A gamepad works too.
Controls
| Key | Arduboy button | Action |
|---|---|---|
| Z | A | next line of dialogue; begin the mission; walk; confirm |
| X | B | open the orders menu (walk, shoot, duck, reload, end turn); cancel |
| Left / right | D-pad | switch soldier; switch target when shooting |
| Arrows | D-pad | while walking, choose the next square (Z moves there) |
| Up / down | D-pad | move through the orders menu; on the squad screen, look at each soldier |
| F2 / F4 | — | save / load the state |
A few things worth knowing
Move one square at a time. Walking shows the cost of the square you point at; press Z to step there and keep going while you have points. On the bunker's door the message reads ENTER BUNKER, and Z takes that soldier off the map with the mail.
Cover matters. A shot that passes through trees or other obstacles does only a quarter of the damage, for you and for the elves alike, so end your moves behind something.
Duck when you are exposed. Ducking spends the rest of the soldier's turn but halves the damage of the shots that hit them during the elves' turn. END TURN in the orders menu hands the turn to the elves for the whole squad.
Count your bullets. Every soldier starts a mission with three shots. Reloading takes five points, so plan it for a quiet moment.
Credits and licence
Hello, Commander was made by Felipe Manga in December 2017, code and graphics included; version 0.7, from the end of that month, is the one that runs here. It is free software under the MIT licence and uses the Arduboy2 library by Scott Allen (BSD). The licence texts are linked from this page.