[Adeptus]

(Aaricia, nice moderator of the Polish community, suggested that I should publish it here).

I swear, I am not a bot. And the game is completely free, I'm not making any money from it in any way, not even from advertising or patronage. I'm simply a budding creator desperately looking for feedback to share my creation.

"Dominion of Darkness” is a free strategy text game in which the player takes on the role of a Sauron-style Lord of Darkness with the goal of conquering the world. He will carry out his plans by making various decisions. He will build his army and send it into battles, weave intrigues and deceptions, create secret spy networks and sectarian cults, recruit agents and commanders, corrupt representatives of Free Peoples and sow discord among them, collect magical artifacts and perform sinister plots. Note – one game takes about 1 hour, but the premise is that the game can be approached several times, each time making different decisions, getting different results and discovering something new. Feedback is very much welcome. Very, very much.

Here is the game: https://adeptus7.itch.io/dominion
If you are hesitant to play the game, I invite you to watch/listen to the reviews:

• Indie Game Sampler (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM6f4UCEgWU
• [BOKC] BlancoKix (video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lgNpSKToOSg
• Choice Beat (zine, page 30): https://www.flipsnack.com/choicebeat...full-view.html
• Dads Game Review (podcast): https://www.dadsgamereview.com/dgr-7...n-of-darkness/

[DoctorEldritch]

@Adeptus Thank you for this! I am not too good a judge of novel games as I do not play them that often, but one little piece of feedback I do have is that maybe the first visual image that we see could have more grandeur? I mean here:



Later in the game, we get to see more impressive images, but when the game starts, we see a skull in a crown, which is relatively simple. You only get one chance at the first impression, maybe go all out on the first image and make it more impressive as a taste of what is to come. After you start the game, there is a choice of four classes, maybe showing them here visually in an epic form, Horsemen of the Apocalypse, would make it visually more alluring from the get-go:



This is Vasnetsov, just as an example of what I mean. Another little tweak may be that names (like Mahariel), important objects or anything that the player needs to pay attention to may have a different colour in the text as a navigation and reading assist.

On an unrelated note, have you perchance played Space Rangers? It is a very old game by now, more than 20 years old, back then it was made in Russia by 1C studio. It was a space RPG, and very well received for its time back then. The reason why I am mentioning it is because one of the layers of the game that many reviewers praised it for was that, during your adventures, you encountered a lot of standalone story text quests. They looked like this:

Just as an example of how it was done back then, maybe you'll find something useful in it. This is one of the few examples that I played (two decades ago, admittedly, but still) and can vouch for 😉

[DoctorEldritch]

Also, when you say

Originally Posted by Adeptus

the player takes on the role of a Sauron-style Lord of Darkness

do you mean like this:



or like this:



? 😅

[Adeptus]

@DoctorEldritch

Thank You very much for playing and feedback! Yes, more better images definitely would help the game.

Hmm, 4 Horsemen... Well, they actually partially corresponds with the characters types in the game. Conquest can be Tyrant, War - Warmonger, Death - Destroyer.... Hunger could be technically Tempter, but I''d have to find graphic where he is more alluring :)

I played many text-based games, but not Space Rangers. Thanks for recommendation, I will check them.

Type of Sauron... Well, depends on the type of character. E.g. Warmonger character is more like the first one, Tempter more like the second.

[DoctorEldritch]

@Adeptus You could reuse images more, not necessarily have a lot more of them. For example, the choice/stat screen, this one:



This is arguably one of the most common screens that gamers see, but it has no visuals. Having one visual there of a dark hideout or something would already make the game much more visual just because of how often this particular screen appears. So just one image will have a big visual effect. Same for the options there, for Humans, Elves, etc: when you choose them as options, you could have a visual for each race, even one, which would accompany a report after choosing to influence one of them. This way, a relatively small amount of extra drawings would already make the game much more visual.