GUTSHOT (Cyberpunk, Mercenary) [95k words]

Hosted Games Works In Progress
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It seemed a job like any other. Nine months of routine with the new company had you feeling prepared, lax. You’d tick another job as complete, have another drink at the bar, share another story with the others.

Certain third parties had other plans.

Now you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place, management still up your ass on the “mission objective”. Quick thinking and quicker reflexes are your only hope. But hey, this happens. You finish the job, get back to base, maybe get some hazard pay.

Little did you know what the company and the future had in store for you.

Features:

  • An unexpected promotion
  • A series of missions that will push your skills: extraction, assassination, espionage, brutal firefights
  • A massive leap in technology after decades of stagnation
  • Two giants of bureaucracy fighting from the shadows, your team in the middle.
  • A (relatively) comfy home base with colorful characters
  • 4 romance options-the new hacker girl, the kind hearted nurse, the socially inept quartermaster and the middle manager whose tired of all this (don’t let management catch you)
  • The chance to achieve greatness
  • The chance to colossally fuck up

PLAY NOW

NOTE: All the romance options are locked to female.

64 Likes
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Good to finally see the thread up, I’ll play it later again, but what I read from alpha testing was very peak.

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Peak

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Excited for this, choomba! Want to go out with a bang.

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A scattering of typos, but fun overall! Big fan of the Haitian Homie.

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Havent fully played through it yet ive noticed when playing as a quick nimble main far as ability go going across the roof scenes. There were several issues where success and failure happened in ways that should not have been showing. I suspect its coding issues so far havent seen any other issues.

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Hello there

I love cyberpunk, so when I saw “Gutshot” I was excited. Reading it was a real pleasure, especially because a corporation isn’t presented as pure villainy but simply a part of a morally gray dystopia.

Thoughts and suggestions

Equipment

It would be great to describe what kind of gear and clothes the MC (and team) wears: materials, quality, purpose, how the pistol slides into its holster and what sound it makes — maybe a little squeak — and what that feels like, the weight and the quiet comfort of it. List the devices/items the MC carries and which pocket or pouch holds each one.

During prep and combat, weave in sensations of handling weapons: the texture of the grip, the fore-end, the stock. Show how the weapon feels in the hand, whether it’s heavy or light, the recoil, the character of the shot. Describe how weather affects the weapon, for example the hiss of an overheated barrel in the rain and the steam rising from it, smoke curling from the muzzle. Describe the sounds of the slide, the trigger and other moving parts as the MC interacts with them. During or after a fight, describe the sound of spent casings hitting the ground and the faint smoke that rises from them.

Describe the effect bullets, rounds, grenades and so on have on opponents and the environment. How a round impacts clothing, armor and flesh. The sound of the hit, a metallic ring, a crack. The level of brutality and the amount of detail is up to your vision.

Lore

Add tabs accessible via show stat that explain the world the MC lives in: the corporations, the geopolitics, living conditions of citizens, technologies, conflicts, who is competing with whom and why. Give the relative power and influence of global players — states and corporations — and include corporate valuations.

I’d really love to know all of this

P.S. Of course these are just suggestions, no pressure. My thanks to you for your work, I’ll be waiting for the next update. Have a great day!

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You defenitely got the cyberpunk style down. Characters are nice, and the genre feels like an action movie - a suprising rarity among the IFs. Eagerly awiting more.

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Why are the romance options locked to female in a Cyberpunk world?

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Nice love me some good cyberpunk.

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thank you for the suggestions regarding weapon prose. im still trying to work on that and action scenes in particular are a bane. probably not going to rewrite old stuff because rewrites are a dangerous trap to fall into but i will definitely use this for the future combat scenes.

as for the lore i will probably put them in tabs. eventually. 99% of my projects have this thing where i focus too much on the lore and world building instead of actually writing. this is the 1% where i made shit up as i went along. wasnt until the end of the demo that i actually started trying to thread them all together.

this was the vibe i was going for so i am glad it landed with some. i just took the prose i saw in similar books and movies and rolled with it.

i dont feel like writing gay romances. so i wont.

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You’re very welcome, glad something came in handy.

Yeah, that’s all totally understandable. I think you’re doing the right thing by focusing on writing the story itself (lore has a way of pulling the author in). The plot itself might even help build the lore — it’s tricky, but it could actually work.

3 Likes