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Watch trailer on Steam ↗Capesong
Pheefus · Published by Pheefus
Last updated 28 Sept 2026
A plan-and-clash strategy game for buildcrafters and matchup theorists. Create original superheroes and send them into simultaneous turn-based combat where the right read can be the difference between life and death.
About this game
CAPESONG IS IN EARLY DEVELOPMENT -- STAY TUNED FOR UPDATES!
Wishlist to follow along as new features, art, and content are added.
Capesong is a superheroic plan-and-clash strategy game where you create original characters and send them into battle, aiming to build the ultimate squad. Every hero wields a unique combination of elemental affinities and superhuman traits that defines their style. Use post-battle rewards to enhance their strengths, but push your luck too far and you'll lose them forever.
Every run starts with a new hero, created with a personality and a powerset. Lay out their combat sequence firsthand or simply set their autobattle tactics and watch as they make their way through an increasingly challenging gauntlet of enemies. Between fights, spend shards to deepen their strengths or branch into new abilities. But be aware, every shard spent on growth is a shard not spent on healing. Heroes who survive long enough can earn a permanent spot on the Global Defenders, your ultimate squad of five. Heroes who don't are gone for good.
Battles play out on a shared timeline. Each round, you and your opponent strategize your playbooks, making reads and counter-reads to gain an advantage. Plans are revealed simultaneously and collide tick by tick. Set up a jab to stagger their timing. Siphon momentum before they can afford a big move. Then draw out their attack with a feint in order to punish them with your finisher underneath.
Placement is the key to victory. Different powers can react to your opponent's, boost elemental effectiveness, disrupt the enemy's timing, or set other conditions that shift the flow of battle in your favor. Arrange your sequence so that each power makes the next one more dangerous while dismantling whatever your opponent has lined up. The ability to execute your plan, and to thwart your enemy's, is at the heart of every encounter.
The ultimate goal is the Global Defenders, your permanent squad of five. Heroes who survive long enough can earn a spot on the roster, but each new addition means retiring an existing member. The squad auto-battles are where thoughtful composition beats raw power, as a well-balanced team built with intention will often outperform a mismatched collection of individually strong heroes.
I've always loved the idea of creating my own superheroes and watching them come to life. I'm also a huge fan of tactical card games, strategy battlers, and squad builders. Capesong is my attempt to combine the joy of creating original characters with the strategic depth of a satisfying deckbuilder or combat roguelike. Every hero is born with their own identity, personality, and abilities, granting different strengths and weaknesses to manage on each run. The goal is a game where your creativity and your strategy matter equally, and where every decision carries real weight.
Though it may be hard to believe, our world has recently seen the emergence of actual flesh-and-blood superheroes. Flashy costumes. Fantastic powers. The whole nine yards. At first, most dismissed it as some kind of social media publicity stunt. But when the Global Defenders arrived in the nick of time to thwart a monster invasion off the coast of California, the truth could no longer be denied. Earth had entered a new age.
But what prompted this sudden transformation, and what mysterious force is guiding the superpower-granting shards to find their unsuspecting hosts? In Capesong, you take control of ordinary people whose lives are upended the moment a shard chooses them. Guide them through their first uncertain battles as they struggle to understand their new abilities, develop new powers from the remnants of defeated enemies, and grow strong enough to protect the universe.
The ranks of the Global Defenders are constantly in flux, and your heroes can earn a place among them. But the choice is yours: accept a hard-earned spot on the roster and secure your hero's legacy, or keep pushing deeper into danger to build them even stronger. Every additional battle is a chance to make your hero more powerful, but losses are final, and those who fail are gone for good.
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PLEASE NOTE: Capesong is a text-description-heavy game, and at this time, only English language support is being developed. Thanks for your understanding!
System Requirements
Will my PC run this? →Minimum
- OS: Windows 10
- Processor: Any dual-core processor, 2.0 GHz
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Any GPU with OpenGL 3.3 support
- Storage: 500 MB available space
Supported Languages
Latest news
Patch NotesOfficial
Capesong Development Update #3
Capesong Development Update #3 _ Combat OverhaulLast time, I said that I needed to focus on combat legibility and on nailing down the underlying math. So I spent a lot of time the past month or two trying to figure out what wasn't feeling right, and after an almost-total overhaul of the combat system, Capesong is finally taking shape the way I originally intended. The big problem I was having was that even when I knew all the rules, I still couldn't figure out why different numbers were happening. That was a major problem when the game's whole premise is supposed to be that reading and countering your opponent should beat just having more powerful stats. My first instinct was that it was a tuning problem, so I spent a good chunk of time messing with the values of different powers. When that didn't make any difference, I started to think it must be a board problem, so I started trying to think up alternatives. I came up with a few different ideas for grid-like systems where you'd lay your powers down to take territory. The one I liked the most was inspired by a DAW. Basically a mixing board. Both fighters would place chips onto a single shared space that read left-to-right and up-and-down across multiple tracks, carrying the damage across the wires that lay in between the chips. These were cool ideas, and they were fun to sketch out, but ultimately I realized that they were moving things in the wrong direction. I like logic puzzles... a lot... but claiming space on a board and bidding on cells was feeling less and less like a combat game about buildcrafting superheroes. I'll probably keep the idea on the backburner for my next game though! Eventually, it occurred to me that the problem was the 'middleman'. From the very first designs for Capesong, I'd had it where power A would drop a substrate into a shared pool and power B would read that substrate two turns later. Power C might modify that pool in a different way. By the time damage was being dealt, the pool had b...Read full article on Community Announcements (pheefus)Patch NotesOfficial
Capesong Development Update #2
Capesong Development Update #2: Systems Coming TogetherIt's been about a month since the last post. I'm terrible at documenting my progress, but I'll aim to make monthly(ish) updates to keep track of development.Run Loop The biggest effort has been getting the core run loop working end-to-end. A hero can now be generated, sent into a sequence of battles with scaling difficulty, earn shards between fights, and eventually be promoted to the Global Defenders roster. There's also a post-battle screen where you make the healing vs growth decisions that I talked about in the game description. It's all rough, but the skeleton is there and playable.Combat CPU and Autobattle The autobattle system has gotten a lot of attention. Each hero now has an Emphasis Triangle on their hero card that lets you influence whether they lean offensive, defensive, or tactical in auto-battles. Their personality already gives them a natural temperament, but you can nudge it. The goal is to make autobattle really feel like it’s reflecting your instructions, but it’s still not working right. The CPU weighs things weird and certain powers that I know should be used frequently never get cast. But that’s fine for now. I’m still iterating on the actual RPS system and figuring out where multipliers come from, etc. So I need to get that stuff nailed down before trying to fine-tune how the CPU makes its decisions. I’m pivoting away from this for a while and I’ll come back to it once the game itself is more built out.Hero Card and Portraits The more I build the game, the more I realize it actually has a lot of similarities with a sports management sim. You make your player (hero), you assign them attributes and a position (element/trait), you guide them through their career, and your goal isn’t just to max everything, but to build towards a specialty that works well as part of a team. So I actually went and looked at a few games like 2K and FIFA, trying to draw inspiration from their player modes for the...Read full article on Community Announcements (pheefus)Patch NotesOfficial
Capesong Development Update #1
Hi, and thanks for checking out Capesong! A lot of work has already gone into building the skeleton for this game, but there’s still a long long way to go, so I really appreciate you being here early.I wanted to use this first post to give a quick snapshot of where development is at and to write down what I’ve built so far.As of today, the foundation is in place. The core game loop is functional: hero generation, combat, shard healing, and squad promotion/retirement all work. The enemy logic is serviceable (though there’s still a lot to do there). It’s rough around the edges, but the PvE skeleton is playable and allows for a very basic preview of what I hope the game will eventually become. Most of my effort so far has been on getting the backend solid enough that I can start layering content and polish on top, while adding depth to the powers, synergies, and combat.Sprites and Character Creation:I’ve been using Aseprite to build layered sprites, with base bodies, outfits, and hairstyles as separate bits that stack and animate together. I’ve also built a system that is supposed to ensure that heroes from different parts of the world are generated within accurate skintone/hair color ranges, and that their default stances and battle tendencies are a reflection of their inherent personalities (which are scored according to five sliders). This is, I hope, what will eventually let every hero look and feel distinct. I’m trying to give players a chance to create OCs with unique looks and personalities, while staying within the boundaries of the game’s lore.Powers (Art and Math):300+ powers have been designed and roughly balanced so far. 10 elements and 7 traits, with about 15-25 powers each. Each family of powers is meant to have a basic ‘hook’ for how it interacts with the game’s HP and momentum systems, while avoiding soft-locking different archetypes out of certain crucial battle mechanics.As with the sprites, I’ve put in a lot of effort to design the power icons pixel-...Read full article on Community Announcements (pheefus)
