There’s some unique information about this particular beta included below the description - please read the full post!
Master the paths of sorcery to defeat a dragon in this fantasy adventure! Explore mysterious caverns, gain sorcerous power, and find allies to save your town from the dragon’s wrath. In this sequel to Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate, carry on your heroic legacy in a new generation.
Stronghold: Caverns of Sorcery is a 360,000-word interactive fantasy novel by Amy Griswold, where your choices control the story. It’s entirely text-based—without graphics or sound effects—and fueled by the vast, unstoppable power of your imagination.
You’re the grandchild of your town’s leader, and everyone’s always expected great things from you. When you set out to study sorcery, you intended to prove them right. But when your magical experiments disturb a sleeping dragon in the depths of the mountain caves, you’ll have to discover the secrets of sorcery to save your town and your friends.
Explore the caverns to find resources to fuel your sorcery. Study alchemy, the magic of your ancestors, or the enchanted knot-work of goblins and spiders. Earn the respect of your grandparent, or gain the confidence to defy authority. Build fortified camps underground, trade with goblin allies, or protect the fragile wonders of the caverns. Raise an army to slay the dragon, learn powerful sorcery to turn aside its wrath, or somehow bargain with your deadliest adversary.
Will you master sorcery before the dragon rises?
This game is set a few generations after Stronghold: A Hero’s Fate - you play a new PC in the same stronghold you built in the first game. Currently, this game starts with options to fill out a quiz about your decisions in the first game or choose a preset background. We’re planning on adding an option to import saves directly from the first game, but it isn’t there yet. (You also won’t find an option to create save files at the end of the first game yet.) Making changes to the first game after the save option has been added can lead to bugged save files, so we want to wait until after the first rounds of testing to add that in. If you’re testing the game before the save option is added, feel free to let us know if there’s anything from A Hero’s Fate not currently being referenced in Caverns of Sorcery that you’d like to see. And once we’ve added the save option, go ahead and create save files in A Hero’s Fate to transfer to the beta so that we can test those as well.
Directions for beta testing:
Email us, beta AT choiceofgames for access.
DO NOT POST ASKING WHAT THE BETA EMAIL ADDRESS IS. The first test to becoming a beta tester is inferring what it is based on how we describe it above.
Do not send DMs/PMs through the forum mail system, Discord, text message, carrier pigeon, or any 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). Please indicate if your family/surname comes first as well. Beta testers’ names are listed in the game’s credits, which are accessed with the “About” link you’ll see within the game. If you don’t want to appear in the credits, or you want to be credited under a name other than your real one, please let us know.
Do not email us multiple times about joining a beta. If you don’t email us as soon as we post a beta, you go into a queue. As we post new drafts, we admit more people from the queue. Eventually, we will get to you. Some beta processes last longer than others, and it may take up to a few weeks to reach the front of the queue.
When you have been admitted to the beta, we will send you a link, a username, and a password as a reply to your email.
When you have feedback to submit:
- Return feedback as part of the same email thread where you were admitted. Copying beta@choiceofgames on that email is the best way to make sure your comments are seen as soon as possible.
- Please send screenshots or copy/pasted quotes whenever 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.
A few more notes:
- You cannot be testing two games at once. If you are already testing one game, send in feedback on that game before you apply to another. If you apply for multiple games at the same time, you will likely be admitted first to whichever game has testing slots open up first, and we won’t be able to admit you to the other one until you send in your comments for that one. (From an admin standpoint, it’s easiest if you don’t apply to more than one game at once – applying to multiple games makes it more likely that we’ll miss admitting you to one of them.)
- If you’re admitted as a tester but realize you won’t be able to send in feedback for that game, please let us know! You won’t be penalized in any way - we’ll just take you off the list of testers for that game. But if you sign up to test a game and don’t send comments or withdraw, it will affect your chances of being admitted to future betas.
- There’s no standard length of time for a beta testing period to last, and we usually don’t know exactly how long a game will be in beta when it opens. The best way to know how long a beta will be open is to follow the thread for updates.
- It’s fine to send multiple feedback emails, but if you have a lot of quick comments, it’s easier to keep track of them if you bundle them into one email.
Tips on How to Give Feedback
We’re 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.
- 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.
- 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.