A Song of Warriors
A downloadable game for Windows, macOS, and Linux
1985, Rock City, USA. Ace Lee, lead singer for a local band, the Warriors, is nominated for the Bryson Award for Performer of the Year. But after the ceremony things go awry, and Ace enters into a spiral of rage* that threatens to destroy him--and take half of Rock City with him!
(*As in the first half of the Iliad, this rage largely takes on the form of "sulking," with the occasional screaming fit.)
Can you, as Ace's drummer and boyfriend, Pat Rock, contain Ace's anger and prevent the tragedy?
An answer to the absurd question of "what if Achilles and Hector were rock stars in the 1980s instead of Bronze Age warriors?"
(Unfortunately, the save games from the jam demo will not work in the full version. Sorry about that.)
Meet the Cast:
Features:
- Close to 50,000 words
- A diverse cast
- A rockin' score
- Gorgeous art
- Three endings
CONTENT WARNINGS:
- Co-dependent relationship
- One instance of recounting sexual violence - no descriptive details given
- Some antagonistic characters exhibit period-appropriate attitudes, including racism and homophobia (they are not, in truth, toxic enough to be truly accurate)
- The bad ending is pretty bloody; it's all off-screen blood, but...yeah, it's grim.
- Swearing. Lots and lots of swearing. Ace drops so many f-bombs.
- No on-screen sex. Sorry about that.
Download
Development log
- OST Release! :DJul 01, 2022
- CGs!Feb 05, 2022
- Looking Ahead and Some TipsDec 09, 2021
- Looking Back at What Worked and What Didn'tOct 13, 2021
- An update already...Oct 03, 2021
- The Warriors Unleashed!Sep 30, 2021
- Full Release should be soonSep 25, 2021
- The Warriors' Demo Tape...Aug 31, 2021
Comments
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When I finished playing the demo, it struck me,
the ‘Bryson Award’ is the stand in for ‘Briseis’, the war captive that gets taken from Achilles by Agamemnon, causing him to ‘go on strike’ in the war against Troy. Nice wordplay there!
I hope to see more of this game. Ace kind of scares me a bit, he is like a loose cannon who isn’t shooting around just because of Pat. :)
I'm glad someone got the reference! :) That was also why the award statuette was designed to look like a crying woman. (Although that's not entirely clear in the art of the banner at the theater, due to angles and such. Hopefully, for the full game we'll get the ending CGs made, and one of those will show the statuette more clearly.)
And yes, Pat is definitely functioning to keep Ace more-or-less stable. Or at least mostly harmless. *cough* Achilles in the myths has such a brutal, horrible aspect to him--and some of what Ace does in the bad end is in a way worse, since he's a musician rather than a trained killer--that I wanted Ace to reflect. Though in that regard, having Pat be the narrator is a drawback: he's so smitten that he doesn't really see just how easily Ace could slip completely around the bend.
I'm still cautiously (naively?) optimistic that I can get the rest of the game coded by the end of the month....