What romances await you in the wings of a theater?
You are a rising member of the Opera Company in the glittering city of Tristendesande. The Opera’s leaders are determined to stay above the city’s tangled politics, but in the hothouse of the theater, love and politics are always intertwined. Court the woman of your dreams while defending the Opera and the city’s freedoms! Will you find love with the scrappy stage mechanic, the silver-voiced singer who’s your competition for every starring role, the captivating but scandalous star of the rival Electricity Theater company, or the aristocratic lady who’s at the center of every political intrigue? And can you keep the final curtain from falling on the Opera?
F/F candlelight
Directions for beta-testing:
Email beta AT choiceofgames for access. THIS IS A NEW ADDRESS
- Do not send me DMs/PMs through the forum mail system, Discord, text message, carrier pigeon, or anything other method than email.
- When you send your EMAIL, include:
– the game you want to test in the Subject line of the email.
– your forum-name
– your real name (first and last)
— if your family/surname comes first, please indicate that. I will assume that your given name is listed first unless you tell me otherwise. - Do not email me multiple times about joining a beta. If you don’t email me as soon as I post a beta, you go into a queue. As we post new drafts, I admit more people from the queue. Eventually, I will get to you.
When you have been admitted to the beta, I will send you a link, a username, and a password as a reply to your email.
When you have feedback to submit:
- Return feedback to beta at choiceofgames, preferably part of the same email thread/chain, rather than a new one.
- Please send screenshots or copy/pasted quotes as often as you can; it helps us track down whatever observation you’re making. In particular, the author may see things that you don’t, and/or the screenshot may contain more information than you realize.
- if you’re submitting feedback using the Bug/Submit button in the game, make sure you include your handle/name in the body of the email. The Submit button obscures your email address, and I can’t give you credit for feedback if I don’t know who you are.
DO NOT POST ASKING WHAT MY EMAIL ADDRESS IS. The first test to becoming a beta tester is inferring what it is based on the above paragraph.
Lastly, you cannot be testing two games at once. Send feedback on one and you can apply to another.
Tips on How to Give Feedback
I’m looking for “high level” and “low level” feedback. Not mid-level feedback.
Low-level = typos and continuity errors. A continuity error is when a character’s gender flips, or someone comes back from the dead, or you run into a plotline that just doesn’t make sense (because it’s probably a coding error).
For these low-level issues, screenshots are very helpful. If you see a problem, take a screenshot, or copy and paste the text that is in error, and email that.
“High level” feedback has to do with things like plot, pacing, and characters. “Scene A didn’t work for me because x, y, and z,” is useful feedback. “B character was entirely unsympathetic, because u, w, and v,” is also useful feedback.
“Mid-level” feedback describes things like grammar, style, word choice, or the use of commas. As I said above, I do not want mid-level feedback. In particular, DO NOT WRITE TO ME ABOUT COMMAS.
“I had a great time and saw only a few spelling errors,” is not useful feedback. In fact, it’s the sort of thing that results in you not being given access to future betas.
Some examples of useful feedback
In Choice of the Dragon, you get to choose what type of wings you have: leather or scaled. Someone wrote in and asked about having feathered wings. Great suggestion! Done!
In “The Eagle’s Heir,” someone asked about Eugenie. They said that the romance moved too quickly–because she only appeared in the last third of the game–and wished they could have had an opportunity to meet her earlier. So the authors added an opportunity to meet her and start the romance earlier in the game (in a scene that already existed).
In “Demon Mark: A Russian Saga” several people commented on how the PC’s parents were unsympathetic, so the authors added a choice or two to deepen the relationship with the parents in the first chapter, to help better establish their characters.
Similarly, pointing out a specific choice and saying, “this is who I imagined my character was at this particular moment, and none of these options seemed right for me. I would have liked an option to do X instead,” is also really helpful feedback.
Another useful piece of feedback: if you choose an #option and then the results of that #option don’t make sense. Like, if you thought an #option might test one stat, but it seems to have tested a different one.