This month I’ve been taking a break from Beyond the Chiron Gate so that I come back to it with fresh eyes. As well as my one-page tabletop RPG, Encounter, I’ve been working on a new Twine game: Cyborg Arena.
In a dystopian cyberpunk future, cyborgs have been stripped of human rights and are treated as property. You are one such cyborg, and you find yourself owned by an entertainment company that makes you fight other cyborgs in brutal arena matches.
The game is fairly linear, but with a lot of details changing based on your choices. As well as choosing your badass cyborg body and your ridiculous cyberpunk weapon, there are flashbacks to establish your relationship with your opponent and how you got to this point. In the present day, you face off against your opponent in a stat-based combat system.
I’m going to enter Cyborg Arena into this year’s IFComp, which means it’ll be launched on October 1st along with the competition’s other entries. All comp entries are publicly available to play, so you’ll be able to play it on the IFComp site. After the comp ends on November 15 it’ll move to its final home on itch.io.
Thank you to everyone who playtested Chiron Gate and sent me feedback. The playtest is now closed, and my next task is to compile the feedback to see what the common themes are and make a plan for the last stage of development. I’ll give you another Chiron Gate dev blog at the end of next month.