Domina

Domina is a gladiator management game. The graphics are definitely stylish (a type of pixel art that was very popular at the time) and the music mixes modern rhythms with ancient sounds in an extraordinary way. The game system is based on limited time and resources. Each day passes quite quickly and the player can play only a few activities. Training your fighters is important, as is winning in the arena and collecting prizes and resources with which we can better equip our gladiators and gain favor with the authorities. The fights are always risky, since no result is completely guaranteed and losing your best fighters is a tragedy from which you'll have a hard time recovering, especially if you're defeated in fights between teams of gladiators. As time goes by, your Ludus will become more and more famous (in case of success) and we'll be able to compete with increasingly complex challenges, including participating in tournaments in different parts of Italy with increasing difficulty against other opponents. Last but not least, there are the touches of class as gladiators get drunk in the arena (if you insist on rewarding them with wine during training), weapons fired from the audience to help a fighter, severed limbs and the possibility of posting replays of duels on Facebook and Twitter. But Domina also impresses with an aspect other than pure gameplay or production values. Domina is, in fact, a title designed to be played in a stream, offering several moments of meaningful interaction with viewers. First of all, once the Twitch mode is activated, the game collects the names of the stream viewers and uses them for the different gladiators that the streamer controls during the game; both the first group of fighters and all subsequent newcomers will be identifiable as stream viewers. This alone takes Domina to a new level of audience interaction and thus entertainment. Viewers will follow their character's story, request training, new equipment, and call for action in the arena. What already happened in games like X-Com in an unstructured way (the streamer created the characters according to the viewers' ideas and wishes) also happens in Domina in a structured and automatic way. But that's not all. In Domina, viewers vote in the different multi-choice events that the game proposes, using a similar mechanism to other "stream-based" games. And then you enter the arena and the fun is multiplied, because not only can spectators participate by shouting cheers and insults (thus determining other game statistics), but if a gladiator gives up without being killed, they can vote for death or life with the classic thumbs up/down.