Roadwork

You are not in the fight. You are what walks into it.

Roadwork is a fighting-career game about the three months before the bell. A week is five action points: train an art, spar, take a camp, hire a corner, buy the gloves, work the job that pays the rent. Then the fight runs itself off what you built, and the only thing you touch after the bell is the corner between rounds -- a tempo, and one item.

Nothing refills between rounds. Three bars, STR, AGI and END, and everything thrown costs one of them. The bell gives none of it back. So a build is not a list of the best techniques; it is a plan for how a fight ends. A body that can throw its best punch nine times has already decided what round nine looks like.

A career runs a few hundred weeks. Thirteen arts, thirty schools, a hundred and twenty techniques, fourteen rulesets, and four rooms to fight in -- a ring, a cage, a mat, and a yard behind a warehouse at night. It ends when you retire into the hall of fame, and the fighter after you starts with your records to beat.

This is a beta, and an honest one. The art and the sound are placeholders. Some of the balance is still being measured, and the game says so where it knows. What it is not is a demo: a career runs from the first week to retirement, and everything in it works.

Read HOW TO PLAY on the front door first. It is one page.