The Luminous Underground - BETA CLOSED

Blast spirits in a subterranean war! Gear up, get your team, and zap the angry specters haunting the subway. Can you prove to everyone that you’re the best daemon-hunter in town?

You’ve been a daemon dissipator for years, carrying a rainbow blaster and learning the ins and outs of magic to zap electromagnetic monsters into static. After following the jobs from one end of Septenland to the other, you’ve settled down here in Barrington: an old city. A weird city. A city boiling with daemons. It’s the perfect place to start a company of your own.

Your team is just you and McCowan, your friend and business partner, but it’s hard for two people to run an operation like this. When you applied for a contract with the Barrington Transit Commission, you didn’t expect anything but a flat rejection. But you got it! And now you’ve got to find more teammates, sharpen your skills, and put a dent in the daemon population while staying well clear of the electrified rail…but that’s not even getting into the secret war you stumble into once you’re in the darkness beneath the city streets.

Are you ready to patrol your patch of subway, or will you stand by and let it crumble?


Directions for beta-testing:
Email us, beta AT choiceofgames for access. (THIS HAS CHANGED.)

  • Do not send me 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) — 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 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.

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 to beta@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 THE BETA 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.

21 Likes

New draft! No major story edits; a lot of stat recalibration. It should now be easier to pass all stat tests, and much easier to succeed at everything in the Giant Alice sequence.

A couple other specific notes:

  • McGowan is genderfluid, and therefore will have pronouns that change between scenes. Please don’t report McGowan’s changing pronouns as a typo or continuity error.
  • At the end of Ch 7, one or more characters can potentially die. Please pay extra attention to the continuity after Ch 7 to make sure that the character(s) who died stay dead, and that characters who did not die are not treated as dead.

This is version 21195.

7 Likes

New draft!

Lots of typos fixed, missing words filled in, and exposed code concealed.

Also, fixed a continuity bug in Ch 2 where you could do really well AND really terribly AND mediocrely at the interview all at the same time.

This is version 21223.

3 Likes

UPDATE! One more new draft! Fixed a rare but game-breaking multireplace bug during the romantic dinner in Ch 8. Never fear; your romantic dinner can now proceed smoothly.

This is version 21224

3 Likes

New draft! Changelog includes:

  • Fixed continuity in Ch 5 so that you can now talk to everybody you want to later on
  • Fixed the Kennedy/Woodbine and Reputation stats
  • Raised the amount of damage you can do to the statue in Ch 12 in the fight in front of the station, thus making it easier to win the fight.

This is version 21253

5 Likes

New draft! Lots of continuity fixes in this one. Major changes include:

  • You no longer work with Woodbine if you have not chosen to work with Woodbine.
  • Burrard can no longer be dead and mostly dead at the same time.
  • The phone conversation in Ch 11 no longer gets skipped.

We’re working on doing a thorough check to make sure that all plot threads get followed through on all playthroughs, so please pay extra attention in the last few chapters and report any plots that seem to disappear at the end.

Also, many players have requested a glossary, so we’re putting one together! When you send your feedback, please let us know what you’d like to see in a glossary - either specific things like “I didn’t know what X meant” or more general things like “I’d like to see a full list of all the different types of daemons.” Please give this info IN YOUR BETA FEEDBACK EMAIL; not in this thread. Thank you!

This is version 21302

3 Likes

New draft! Continuity and typo fixes galore. Most of them are too small to mention, but the game will now remember much better if you’ve expressed interest in a romantic partner.

We’re still especially interested in the following kinds of feedback:

  • What terms would be helpful to see in a glossary?
  • What plot threads do you want to see more thorough wrapups for in the epilogue?

This is version 21337

1 Like

New draft!

Changelog includes:

  • Lots of recalibration to make checks easier
  • Lots of clarification, including what exactly your job is and what happens when Thorne touches the artifact in Ch 1
  • No more discussion of the political situation before you’ve learned about it
  • Achievements!

This is version 21357

New draft!

Changelog includes

  • fixed a rare but confusing pronoun-variable bug
  • added a new scene in Ch 4 elaborating on the political situation
  • thoroughly ensured pie-eating continuity
  • clarified continuity in Ch 6 about who’s at the school when

This is the last call for beta testers! You must submit your feedback by Friday October 9 in order for it to be incorporated into the final draft.

This is version 21382

This beta is now CLOSED. Thank you to all who played! Stay tuned for the release of this game in December!

2 Likes