Hey everyone! I’ve been working on the opening chapters of a game for a little while now, and it feels like the right time to let other people see it.
Let me know what you think!
Summary:
CYBERGLADIATOR
You are a gladiator in the fallen city of Dumat. Enslaved by the Merchant Lords, your servitude is ensured by the slave-chip that could end you at a moment’s notice. Your body is property to be manipulated and altered by chemicals and metal. But powers are shifting in the waste-city. Your master is making strange moves in the underworld, and your fellow gladiators yearn for freedom. You may yet find a way out, either as a gift for your loyalty to power or through more subversive means.
Explore the strange and ruined city of Dumat, full of secrets and forgotten technology.
Create a character, choosing your weapons, appearance, and background.
Be an agent in the city’s brutal politics, choose your side, or serve yourself.
Fight, kill, survive if you can.
Augment yourself with chemicals and cybernetics and become truly monstrous.
The list is a little aspirational at the moment, but you can indeed be a cyborg, and you can indeed fight lots of things as a gladiator.
Seems like an interesting project!
I’ve started playing it, but either there is some issue with the game, or with Dashington itself - loading is hellish - it takes forever to go from the game to the stat screen and back - I ended up getting actually stuck going back to the game and I’m a bit lazy to restart right now. Would be easier with a save system, if you’d wish to include it - not only it’s easier to test out branches, but you can roll back to various points in the story if it bugs out, instead of restarting.
I might try again later anyway.
Still, I like the concept so far, and the characters seem interesting, though I haven’t seen much of them at the moment.
If I may suggest something though - well, aside from the save system - it would be to tell in the original post of the thread if the game features romance or not. With such a concept, it’s very hard to tell, and a lot of people check that out. I’m one of them, though I’m interested in your game in any case, so far. But it’s good to know beforehand.
Also, I have noticed some issues, so I’ll report them here:
If you select to help Alder:
Once the MC tells so to their companions, you get this line:
“Az and Chara each nod as they rush off to one end of the arena, as you sprint off to the other.”
But it should be Az and Delara, since Chara is one of the two people in trouble, and they rush to help her.
After that, if using strenght to beat the gladiator:
So, if helping Alder and using strenght once facing the gladiator that was threatening Alder, I got this error message:
“chap1 line 441: invalid indent, expected at least one line in ‘if’ true block”
Keep in mind strenght is my weakest stat and I was trying to see if this would check my strenght or allow me to raise it. If it was a check, it’s possible that there is an error if you fail.
After exiting the arena, same issue as earlier with Delara/Chara:
“A moment passes before Chara speaks in a whisper, respectful but sharp. “Do we need to be lectured right now? Can we do something about Chara before we get into this?” Alder stands with Chara still in his hands, his face unreadable.”
Got a weird symbol appearing after the customization part:
Hi I’ve seen a couple issues that @Konoi already brought up but I also had this part pop up after I decided to help Alder and chose to do a dating feint
Hi, also noticed a bug when you get ambushed by the other group of scrappers, who’ve beaten Hadrik up. I didn’t think to get a screen shot (sorry) but if you try to fight him and subdue him with your fists it comes up with an error. Don’t remember exactly what it was but it mentioned something about missing weapon ident, I think, and then locks to that page. Other than that, the game looks great so far
Thank you all so much for your responses! The zombie chara issue is fixed. Funny the kinds of things that you miss after reading something so many times.
The issues with helping alder ought to be fixed as well. @Graham_Eyre The issue coming into the fist-fight is also fixed, but your troubles have only begun if you go that route…
@Konoi I’m not sure about the issue with dashingdon. My internet is very slow at home, so every website is slow for me, but I’ll try see if I’ve made some mistake. You are very right about the save feature though.
And as for RO’s, the intention is that they will be available, but not core to the game.
I like it so far, depending on some choices (I assume being on the slavers sides or other choices that could end up making a character not good) is redeeming an option? It could be an interesting choice
You’ll need to work for your masters, whether you want to or not. How far you go for them is up to you, and whether you use their favor to betray them is also your choice.
Interesting WIP. Though I wonder if there any romance in this game? Also, can we save Chara or she dies anyways? I just replayed the game several times but still didn’t manage to save her. Anyways, good luck
I think there could be a bit more balance when it comes to the grace stat because of you don’t spec into it I feel like I can barely win a fight simply because the enemy dodges everything and options that take advantage of strength, like tackling the opponent are only available once and after that it’s just like good luck. Then again I could be missing something so Anyway that aside I like the premise of the story and enjoy your writing and haven’t noticed any obvious typos or grammatical errors. Looking forward to more in the future, best wishes
Well, in the end I got stuck not so far from the end of the current demo.
I didn’t encounter any more issues.
As I said before, the story is very interesting so far - I’m curious as to what it holds for the future.
I’d like to ask one more thing. Will we have the opportunity to further train our stats? I mean, I’m sure we will but will we have “sessions” that would allow us to gain a couple of points here and there, or will it be one occasional point to one stat?
Right now I have a very unbalanced character - 4 in grace, 1 in power, and 2 in the other stats, and well, I’d like to raise my strenght, but I wouldn’t want to change my choices since I like them as they are.
@Nick_Miller Yes, grace is quite strong at the moment. It’s also quite frustrating to constantly miss lol. I think I’ll add an extra move that will be useful for low grace gladiators. But I also don’t mind an imbalance in abilities, so long as none are useless or overwhelmingly superior.
@Konoi A huge part of the game will be building a powerful character and managing their progression. Training will let you improve your stats somewhat, but gene-editing and cybernetics will provide much more dramatic results. The intent is that your character can be massively improved by the game’s end, with inhuman abilities.
A bug that I found is if you successfully defeat the leader of the group when you’re with the scavengers, If you check the stats of the machete ,if you decide to pick it up, it comes up as an error
@q_riley Hadn’t thought about that, thank you. Fixed.
Just added an update to chapter 2. I’ve added the ability to choose stances that allow your character to fight more or less aggressively. This allows players to increase their hit chance, while also increasing that of the enemy’s. I’ve also made it so that particularly damaging attacks on enemies daze them, meaning they are less likely to hit you back.
These two changes should make life easier for high-power, low grace characters, who can now rush enemies with staggering blows to keep them off balance. I’m also pretty happy with the number of verbs that combat has with these additions.
The only other thing I’d want to do for combat is give more flavor text to have more variety each turn, but I’m largely happy with the state of things now.
I’ve also got saves working on Dashingdon. Surprisingly easy! With the randomness of the game as it stands though, I’m hesitant about always having this feature available. I think I’ll try and mess with the save system when I can and do something that lets the player save at specific points, just to deter save-scumming a little. But that’s a concern for the future.
And as for the future of the game, I’m beginning to work on the next chapter. It’s intended to be a bit more complicated and open ended than the two I’ve worked on so far, a little in the style of The War for the West, but I’m hoping to work faster on this one.
Once again, I’m so glad people are interested in the game, please let me know if you have any suggestions, ideas or bugs, I’m trying to check the thread regularly.
Honestly, I think save scumming isn’t bad when the game is still a WIP. Preventing it is something to do if you want to implement a save system in the full game, but don’t want to make it too easy for the players, in my opinion.
I get little to no patience with WIPs that don’t have save systems, because not only crashes will force me to restart from the very beginning, but also, I love exploring various options and reload to see different outcomes, and that also allows me to give better feedback.
I’m mostly save scumming for testing purposes than for actual use of the saves to get the best outcomes.
100% agree. I speak as someone who save-scums in a lot games that I play, at the expense of a story’s suspense. I guess I’m cautious about it because it’s a habit that I indulge in too much myself.
Just to give a bit of an update, I’ve been pretty busy the last week or so. The WIP has doubled in size to 40k words now! There’s still quite a bit of work to do until I’m comfortable releasing an update though. A lot of what I’ve done is build the infrastructure of a larger game, so I still need to fill all of that.
Also I gotta say that I’m definitely pushing ChoiceScript a little past its intended use at this point. We’ll see if it actually works, but here is a snippet of the code I’m working on atm…
Anyway that aside I like the premise of the story and enjoy your writing and haven’t noticed any obvious typos or grammatical errors. Looking forward to more in the future, best wishes 
