HACK
Made another UI-centric game for a recent 8-hour game jam that was about being a hacker. I spent way too much time on trying to get the console to behave like an actual console (and still didn't succeed -- the console window doesn't auto-scroll :( ), and the keyboard-mashing, HackerTyper mechanic feels pretty shallow and tacked-on, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. I don't really mind much that it's a crap game, as I'm just happy to be grinding through some small prototype-like things and learning stuff as I go. :)
(I think I like these UI games a lot because you don't have to put yourself inside an "avatar", or see 3D hands that don't belong to you. I like that you are you, with your body, your keyboard and mouse, but you're in a different environment.)
@Mexicanopiumdog took care of all of the audio. Best played with a "clicky" keyboard.
Tried building a WebGL build, but pressing backspace (which is kind of important in a console) makes the webpage go back, and the build is way larger. -_- And the web player's being deprecated in Chrome, but if you can still use it:
http://techartjon.com/unity/hack/webplayer.html (~7MB)
(I think I like these UI games a lot because you don't have to put yourself inside an "avatar", or see 3D hands that don't belong to you. I like that you are you, with your body, your keyboard and mouse, but you're in a different environment.)
@Mexicanopiumdog took care of all of the audio. Best played with a "clicky" keyboard.
Tried building a WebGL build, but pressing backspace (which is kind of important in a console) makes the webpage go back, and the build is way larger. -_- And the web player's being deprecated in Chrome, but if you can still use it:
http://techartjon.com/unity/hack/webplayer.html (~7MB)
Comments
Dude, I seriously love this game. Apart from the scrolling thing, kept losing my place by scrolling. True.
Funny story. So, I'm banging away at the keyboard in the school labs trying to hack into Trump Towers and someone turns to me angrily "WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?" and I'm like "I'm hacking, bro". Found it interesting that I didn't blame it on a game but that I felt like I was really hacking.
That could easily have been a passive thing, like it automatically happens, but the feeling of preparing for the hack wouldn't have been there. (I'd like more of those preparation commands. Maybe that kind of thing could eventually be in a batch file that you customize, if the commands become tedious, and preparing cleverly might be important, as running too many could come at a cost).
I would have loved to have run more commands while hacking. For a jam game the mash the keyboard mechanic is brilliant (and hilarious), but it's a joke that works once or twice, I think. Rad for this context, but I would love to play a big hacking game.
Pretty fun! Trying to hack before the tracer finds you is really exciting! I'm a hacker(kinda)!
I would really like to see more of a mini-game in the button mashing, like getting more speed for mashing with only one hand (one side of the keyboard) or something similar.
Also gosh damn that was difficult. Probably because my keyboard is terrible and only registers 4keys pressed at the same time? I haven't succeeded in hacking yet :( Apparently my infamous rub-the-keyboard-furiously-with-my-sleeve hacking technique couldn't even save me.
There was a knock at the front door shortly afterwards... I unplugged my PC and pretended to be asleep in the bedroom.
Consider it done.
This design could be expanded out quite nicely into a full "simulator" game: Hack Simulator 2015.
On game balance: I think that could be fixed quite easily with servers having some kind of hackability rating, like how many firewalls it has (more is always better), or how many daemons are guarding it (everyone knows daemons guard stuff). And then have a corresponding Keys Per Second (KPS) for that server, you don't have to tell the player what that is though - they could learn to judge it from the ratings.
Upgrades could include things like consumable keypress multipliers. Depending on how obvious you want the parody theme to be.
I played the WebGL version and it ran just fine. I didn't encounter the backspace button triggering the browser back function, but I opened it in a new tab so there was no back to go back to. A quick search revealed that using JavaScript you can block the back function from being triggered by the backspace key.
The only backspace issue I encountered was that quick taps sometimes remove more than one character from text on the prompt.
P.S. Once I saw Veridian Dynamics on the server list, all other targets became meaningless.
@Asbestos: Thanks for the feedback! :) Yeah, I think there's a lot that can be added to this, and I'm keen to explore its potential. Before that though, I still want to do several more jam games and explore some other options first, churn out some a bunch of games before I get to the real gems, make sure that any time I put in is done on the strongest foundation I can get. I also want it to be its own game, and I'm wary of being too influenced by Uplink, which I loved. (And it's difficult for me not to be influenced by Uplink, because I'm hardly a programmer, and don't really know anything about "real" hacking, and there have been pretty much no Uplink-like games in the past decade that I know of.) I've been toying with the idea of potentially making a hacking game MMO(RPG) (I imagine an MMO like this would be significantly easier to do than a "normal" MMO because of being text-based and asynchronous and much less sensitive to lag than other MMOs, and where the data being transferred is arguably much lower), but I'm a little wary of how the game would basically be begging for people to hack it and be a nightmare to maintain as a result... :P
I did notice earlier this week that a new hacking game is coming out next month. I'm pretty keen to see what it does, and how it's received, because I think the fantasy of it is pretty unexplored, and there's definitely demand for something like this. (The views for their trailer are far in excess of the other games offered by the otherwise-pretty-unknown developer and publisher.)
I haven't really looked into it but it's got quite a lot going on. Which made me turn away from it. Would be cool if you got some MMO type thing going but had a low barrier to entry.