Domestique

You are nineteen. A steel bike, fifteen spanners, no contract, and a peloton above you that does not know you exist yet.

Domestique is a cycling manager where the racing is played, not watched. A pro career goes a week at a time: train, rest, or ride a race your programme and your sponsors allow. Race day runs in real time. Sit in the draft and save everything, take a turn on the front and pay for it, bridge across to the break, or go alone and find out whether you had the legs. Your energy bar is the whole race.

What you do

• Ride every race in real time: draft, pull, bridge, attack, follow a rival's move or let it go
• Spend energy you cannot get back, and learn what it costs to spend it early
• Commit a season you cannot ride all of: 52 weeks, 40+ races, nowhere near enough race days
• Build form on a real fitness and fatigue model, and peak for the race you chose months ago
• Earn contracts: results move ranking points, points move divisions, divisions decide who invites you
• Race a living peloton of named riders who age, improve, retire, and remember what you did
• Meet the sport's dark side, and pay what it costs
• Ride the Weekly Legend Stage: one seeded time trial, the same for every player

A career that outlives one rider
Local club to Continental to ProTeam to WorldTour, one contract at a time. Then retire and start again with what your predecessor left you, or move into the team car as a directeur sportif and win from behind the wheel. The record book keeps every season either way.

A peloton that remembers
Around two hundred riders with their own careers, form curves and opinions of you. Take a win off someone, or say the wrong thing in the press tent, and he marks your every attack for years. Share the work in a break and you make an ally who tows you back when you puncture.

A sport with a history
Somebody will eventually offer you something, at the worst week of your worst season, and phrase it as help. You can say no: a clean career is fully playable, and the game keeps a record of the fact. Or you can find out what the other road costs. Everything you buy creates a person who could talk about it, and the record book remembers all of it.

Every rider, team and race in this game is invented. None of them are real.

The itch.io edition
The full game. No ads, no purchases, nothing locked. Plays offline, no account. Keyboard shortcuts in races: 1 / 2 / 3 / SPACE / G / C / T.

Credits

Made with Godot Engine.