Unique: A Sci-fi Romance game

Hosted Games Works In Progress
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Unique.

In the distant future, humanity lives secluded underground after devastating cosmic events.

Try to build a life in the city while hiding from the government.

Features:

Play as male or female.

Play as a Unique, an irradiated government raised soldier with powerful mental abilities.

Romance five different companions along your adventures.

Hide from the government in a large futuristic city.

Use your powers to help free others of your kind and start a resistance.

Fight in a war for limited resources.
This game will be more focused on character building and romance and relationships then anything else.

Romances:

There are five romanceable characters.

Three are gender dependent on the player.

They will always be the opposite of the player’s gender.

Simon is always male, and Madigan is always female.

August/April: Male/Female
24, Unique, Level: Violet: Precog
A mysterious and playful stranger who starts following you around.

Richard/Rebecca: Male/Female
28, Unique, Level: Azure: Telepath
A high level military officer tasked with hunting down rouge Uniques.

Kyle/Kylie: Male/Female
18, Human
A civilian hacker.

Madigan: Female
26, Unique, Level: Scarlet: Telekinesis
An incredibly powerful Scarlet held in high security solitary.

Simon: Male
20, Unique, Level: Gray: Empath
Mc’s childhood friend, grew up in the same batch as kids.

To play the demo, go here: https://dashingdon.com/play/bitterwriter/unique/mygame/
if you have any question visit my Tumblr, I literally just made it: https://bittergamergirl.tumblr.com/

Enjoy, and thank you so much for trying my game.
Any advice or help would be appreciated.

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I absolutely loved the demo so far. I am definitely interested and looking forward to more

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Ahhh. Gotta love having 4 straight romances and only 1 gay romance. Guess Madigan is my only option then. It’s your story obviously, but only having one possible gay RO is quite hard on replay value fo us peeps who’s into our own gender.

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This is A LOT of stats! If you had to boil it down to just three, which three would you say best represent the world you’ve built?

From what I’ve read so far:

The character you are playing has a goal of becoming independent from the government. Could make this into a “progress” stat rather than an opposed pair. Same with rebellious versus obedient — the premise of the story is that you are not playing an obedient person, so this shouldn’t really be a manipulator personality trait. It’s okay — and even preferential in many cases — for the main character to have some elements of their personality that are locked into the given circumstances.

Impulsive vs. Cautious is a great opposed pair for a character that has a great deal of power but needs to lay low. Those sorts of conflicting needs make for fun, juicy, dramatic characters to play.

Friendly versus intimidating is an okay opposed pair, although I’d argue they aren’t mutually exclusive. Look at Terry Crews, who can be both simultaneously. I’d also worry that these traits don’t obviously tie into the premise of the story.

The others — social, talkative, emotional, sarcastic — feel more like personality quiz stuff than traits that would help describe a superpowered sci-fi fugitive. I was hoping to see stuff like HUMANITY go down when you sacrifice your morals or engage in transhumanism, stuff like COLLECTIVIST/INDIVIDUALIST to lean into the political aspect of the story, or stuff like FOLK HERO/VIGILANTE to represent how they wish to be perceived by the general public.

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Thank you so much for commenting on my game.
It is my first game, and I am excited to already be getting feedback.

About the stats. This game is primarily a relationship and romance game.

I wanted to allow you to play as whatever personality you wanted. The stats represent more of the personality you are building as you play and our measured to adjusted how other character will interact with you.

My game with not be quiet the standard for most of its genre. I have a lot of other hidden measures for some of the harder motivations in the game that have not come up yet.

I will be removing and adjusting the stats quiet a bit before it is finished. Thank you so much for you advice. It has given me a lot to think about going forward.

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Thank you so much for your feedback.

So far I have plans to consider allowing the player to romance the three gender dependent character, as the same gender.
As well as added a non-binary option, but for now everything will be heterosexual.

When I add such options into the game I really want to do it justice rather then just tag it one there.
I wanted gender and romance to have more weight then just changing the pronouns.

This is my first game and I don’t want to get to overly ambitious.
I’ll do best to consider this going forward.
Thank you so much.

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Wait, so there’s not even one gay romance? I assume so based on you saying it’ll all be straight relationships. And if that’s the case, then I’ll have to pass on your story until/if you decide to go through with your decision to make gay relationships possible, because I don’t see the point in playing a romance focused game, with no characters for me to actually romance at all. Hope your project works out well though.

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First off, this is a promising demo and I’m curious to see where it goes! I like the style so far, and it did a decent job of getting me invested in the world and the characters.

I totally get where you’re coming from with this - I’ve seen plenty of attempts at writing gay romances fall flat because the author wasn’t educated or comfortable enough to handle them right, and I appreciate you not wanting to just include one as a selling point - but if that’s the case I would recommend sticking with fixed gender characters. IMO making gender changable but most/all romances hetero locked gives a bad impression, since one of the main benefits of making characters gender customizable is to provide a sort of means for any player of any kind to get with any character without having to worry about that stuff. I agree it’s perhaps better to not include a gay option at all rather than include one just to say you did, and if you just aren’t comfortable writing them then perhaps it is for the best to not go there. But I also think in a game that’s specifically designated as romance, not having gay options is going to exclude a lot of people, especially in CoG where inclusion is a big part of the culture.

tldr it’s your story and you can do what you want, but my advice on this for now is either make both gender and sexuality fixed for NPCs or make them both changable.

Aaand finally, I found one little typo if you want to check up on it. This was when I picked the “ambush” option early on.

un1

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Thank you so much. I will edit the typo out as quickly as I can. I will also take your opinion into consideration. While at the moment the game will remain straight, I will see what I can do.

Thank you so much!

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I think you may be over-thinking this. Unless you are going in to the sexual mechanics of who sticks what where, there is no real difference between gay and straight relationships. Same joking, flirting, feelings etc. especially if you are already going through the trouble of making gender flippable characters. And be wary of giving gender any sort of “weight” beyond physical character descriptions … you may be going into gender tropes or stereotypes that could be off-putting to readers. That being said, write the story you want to write but I hope you consider this. Cheers.

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Agree with this. Gay people are the same as straight people, we are not hard to write and dont require massive amounts of research to write about (will do if you’re writing a coming of age romance story like Love Simon because the focus is about being gay and the experiance of coming out and thats not really a story you should make anyway if youre not lgbqi+). Just treat us like a normal romance and dont add stereotypes. And if you have an idea that youre not sure about, ask the Forum. Theres lots of threads about how to respectfully write Trans/ NB characters and this is defiantly the place where you can ask about whether something might be a stereotype or seen as insulting. Dont be scared of us or of making a mistake, just ask for feedback.

Your characters personality doesn’t need to change. You’ve already made genderflippable versions of them. Maybe mention at some point in the romance that: Maybe that they havent dated a person of the MCs gender before, or that they have a ex of the same sex or something. Just treat them like you would if they were straight. And not all of them have to be accessible.

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OMG, lol, I thought so too. Guess, I will mostly focus on Madigan and maybe I will also try out other ROs if they pique my interest.

Also, I haven’t played it yet, but is there any glossary or any way to know more about power levels? What scarlet and azure power levels mean? Are they important in the game? What is our power level and etc.

Edit: So I just finished the demo and I liked it. It was interesting. There’s no need to explain about the power levels, you already did it in the demo, yet I’m still curious about our MC’s power level. Also, it would be great to include same sex relationships too. However, it’s your game and your decision, I’m not here to put any pressure on you. I’m just saying that it will diversify the game and give people more options. Good luck with your game :+1:

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Particularly because this is a WIP and you are getting feedback early on in the process, this is the best possible time to make mistakes. I can say I would much rather you try and make a mistake and need to adjust a line here or there (because that is really all it comes down to if you aren’t writing sex scenes) than not try at all.

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It is incredibly discouraging to new writers to have a large group of people essential dogpile them over an aspect of their book. I understand you all want there to be a same sex option, but commenting with no criticism, praise, or even comments about the writing itself and just focusing on this one aspect is not constructive.

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The criticism is that the writing is not inclusive without a compelling narrative reason to be exclusive. I saw a lot of friendly encouragement to be inclusive, particularly given the coding already done so I’m not sure how that is not constructive. As with any constructive feedback, author can take it or leave it.

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Some positive feedback,
I will do everything possible to keep Simon safe. He is my little brother. I enjoy the character dialogue and the choices the MC has to answer with.

But theres a bug for Kylie’s pronouns. “She” and “Her” are being spelt with capital letters in the middle of sentences.

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Thank you so much I will make sure to correct those errors.

I love Simon, I’m so glad you enjoyed him. He is a sweet cinnamon roll and I will do everything in my power to protect him. It will be a rocky road, but its worthy it!

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Gave it another quick run through since I have a minute, and I noticed something that may or may not be intentional so I figured I’d ask.

When I got to the part where it asks me about what I excelled at in training, there are six options. I picked the leadership one, and afterwards there were only four options left for my off-specialty when I would have expected five. Does one of them vanish on purpose? When I played before, I picked physical strength as my main, and there were five options for my off-spec afterward, so I just wanted to double check if that was on purpose.

(also seconding that Simon seems like a sweetie)

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There are five skills in total, but two in the scene. Persuasion is split into two.

Leadership and Manipulation.
Two different ways to use the same stat.

I wanted to combine deceit and persuasion as they seemed to similar to separate, so any MC that specialized in Persuasion will be able to switch between both dialogues as they see fit.

In that particular scene I wanted to allow the reader to decide whether they used their charm in the garden to encourage others or manipulated them.

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Oh, I see! I didn’t think about that. So if you pick one, the other gets removed so you don’t get to double up your boost on Persuasion. Thanks for the explanation. :slight_smile:

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