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[vestigialdev]

About
Its a lot harder to write this than I thought! At heart its a hacking sim, but there are also additional layers like a city overworld, and location-dependent building maps that your agents on the ground can navigate. There is also a stronger emphasis on implicit exposition than I think hacking games are traditionally expected to have. I'm also aiming to make the hacking more intuitive and interactive than what a player might be expecting.



Example mission
The most recently scripted mission is to acquire an unreleased song for a pirate to put on their site. The music store youtune.com has a copy of it, but since it isn't released yet, the "buy" button on the website is disabled. However, you can initiate the buying process on a different song, then switch the songId parameter in the browser bar (the ?topic=51008 part of this page, for example) to point to the id of the song you want. Or you can snoop around the artists personal site and maybe find a copy in an unlisted directory. Or email the artist directly and beg for a copy because of what a huge fan you are! Or send an agent to break into the artists house and access his computer so you can SSH in and look through his hard drive for the file you want. My approach to mission completion is very driven by Deus Ex and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, where there is usually a mechanical way to solve something, a violent way, a dialogue way, an exploratory way, etc.

Influences
Uplink, Deus Ex, Hacknet, Hacker Evolution, Syndicate, Uplink, Uplink, and Uplink
Enemy of the state, The Matrix, Syriana, Homeland, Body of Lies, Mr. Robot, X-Files
The Global War on Terror, Wikileaks/Snowden, the rise (and future) of China, other real world current events



Tone
It definitely aims for serious, rather than goofy or campy. I think there is a lot happening in the world of cybercrime and international espionage right now, and part of my goal (aside from giving players an awesome software toy to play with) is to present current events in a fictional context, so players can realize just how amazing the real world is. I think technological progress in reality gets discounted because it doesn't "look" the way it was presented in sci-fi.

Message
I don't want to push a specific message or bash one particular group, but I do think the overarching feel of the game is corruption, cynicism, and manipulation. For example, reading the public statements from in-game political figures, then breaking into their unsecured personal email accounts and finding out their true motivations. And of course, using that info to blackmail them into taking policy positions you want.. or to "leverage your inside knowledge to become their trusted subject matter expert", if you prefer
But really, I don't want to alienate anyone, so even certain cryptography-centered national intelligence agencies will have their viewpoints presented without an inherently negative bias. It will probably be a distilled and caricatured viewpoint, since its a videogame and all, but I want to avoid labeling anyone as wrong, or "the enemy".



Story
While there are random/one-off missions to earn money, there is a grand campaign story I'd like to tell, through multiple story arcs. Where you might be playing as a cog in the Big Brother domestic surveillance machine and see one side of the story, you will get different pieces of the puzzle when playing as an anonymous hacktivist fighting corruption, a freelance hacker/private investigator just trying to scrape by, or a cadet in the newly formed military branch designed for cyberspace warfare. I really dont like good/evil storylines, so I really want to make the player squirm when it comes to deciding what to do or who to side with. No villain wakes up and says to themselves "muahaha, today I will be eeevil!" so there will be a lot of grey area and simply different points of view rather than objective +1 Karma rewards. On the other hand, I don't like quests that "might" reward you later if you pick one choice over another, ie a character showing up later to help you. So rewards will be unambiguous, to help with decisionmaking.

Example story: (Spoilers!) One of the locations in the city is an airport, and there are various airport-related systems you can explore (cancel flights, send bags to the wrong destination, other ideas?) and missions to do. For Nov 8th I'm hoping to have the following ready:

Protect my privacy from the TSA porno scanners!!1 Help me smuggle my bong through security, man Get me off the no-fly list so I can attend my brothers wedding in India

So you go through completing the contracts, and after completing the final one, your news reader lights up with a new headline. There was an explosion at the airport, and a plane was destroyed as it was taking off. The linked article talks about how "multiple layers" of security were bypassed, and whoever was responsible must have had "help from inside". Now, I'm hoping this will provide replay value, because an astute player might realize what they've done, or notice that all the payments from the different missions came from the same account. Hopefully they'll replay the mission, this time trying to find out who is trying to manipulate them, by researching the emails that sent you instructions, or the bank account you were paid from. Account numbers are randomized each playthrough, so the player will have to complete SOME missions to draw the terrorists out. It'll be up to the player to decide how far they want to take things before swooping in to make an arrest. But, if you take things right up to the line, and the bomber goes to the airport, you can post an agent there to intercept him and take possession of the bomb (assuming you've owned their computers hard enough to know their secret phrases). Or sit back and simply redirect the bag onto the private jet of a politician you don't like. Or let the bag be detected by security and kicked out of the system, saving lives and leaving your relationship with the terrorists intact so you can watch them panic, maybe revealing their backers in the process.

Timeline
Uhhhhhhhh.

Some funny bugs (trigger warning, violence/terrorism)
Since the game was originally about being an intelligence analyst during the Iraq War, there was a bug where one AI that was supposed to do a suicide bombing was busy with something else, so they tried to ask another AI to do the suicide bombing for them. A good case of ambition going off the rails. Another bug was after I'd completed a mission, I wasn't getting paid by the employer. The culprit? The employer was out to lunch and hadn't heard the "new email" event on their home computer, so they didn't didn't know I'd completed the mission. An example of trying to be too realistic with mechanics.

[Juskelis]

I've always wanted to be a hacker 
I really hope Snoop Dogg makes an appearance in this so the title can have a double meaning

[vestigialdev]

I've always wanted to be a hacker 
I really hope Snoop Dogg makes an appearance in this so the title can have a double meaning

Is there any particular aspect of hacking you really like? Is it more the typing in a terminal, or running around inside systems you're not supposed to be in?

Snoop-em-up is just a working title, it gives a little more idea what the game is about. The real name will be something more buzzwordy like Proxy. Proxy is a good name because it has the double meaning of the technology term, but also its someone who does something on someone elses behalf, and a lot of the story is the player getting used by higher powers to do their bidding.
Fo' rizzle, there ought to be a Snoop Dogg-inspired character. Maybe he'll be the artist you hack to pirate their album

[lithander]

If you could fuse "realistic hacking" with "accessibility" that would be amazing. I hate hacking minigames and the fake way hacking computers is illustrated in movies. I think I would enjoy playing a hacking game most when it is plausible and "make sense". So I'd rather have to apply hacking gadgets (hardware & maybe software) that does the hacking in some plausible black-box fashion then a hacking minigame as in Deus Ex: Human Revolution.

I personally wouldn't mind typing shell commands if the game does a good job at teaching me how to but I can see how that could allienate many players.

[Mr Speaker]

This game looks great! Following along! (Also, lithander - have you seen "else Heart.Break()"... very good balance between movie and "real" hacking)

[Juskelis]

Is there any particular aspect of hacking you really like? Is it more the typing in a terminal, or running around inside systems you're not supposed to be in?

I've never hacked anything so I don't know what exactly I'd enjoy from the process itself, but when I think the idea of figuring out this weird bug to get through a wall or get into a system you're not supposed to be in is really cool. It's almost like a puzzle game in my head, with the reward being exploration in a system.

If you have the movie trope of counter-hacking, that was always interesting because there was an element of strategy to it; though I've never seen a "hack fight" hit Yomi, which would be super badass if you accomplished it.

[vestigialdev]

If you could fuse "realistic hacking" with "accessibility" that would be amazing.

Can you point me to any examples that do this well? Or alternatively if there are any specific minigames out there you think would make sense with a hacking skin? I'm thinking about using Jezzball for some kind of "trap the password in a specific memory address" game and of course mastermind. The more I think about it the less I think I'm going to stick with realism. Its just a black hole of having to get things exactly correct. I agree that the hacking in Deus Ex felt... not like hacking. But on the other hand, I'm worried that without clear instances of mechanics (like the minigames) the game will feel too directionless.

This game looks great!

Thanks for the kind words man.

I think the idea of figuring out this weird bug to get through a wall or get into a system you're not supposed to be in is really cool. It's almost like a puzzle game in my head, with the reward being exploration in a system.

I understand what you're saying. Something you notice yourself and get to exploit how you want to? If thats what you're saying, how does this strike you: one of the vulnerabilities in the game is that the security settings for certain (insecure) websites are contained in the address string up at the top of the browser. So while you're going through a checkout, or accessing your account, you can change the variables up at the top and set price to 0 (or even negative if you want to try and steal) or access someone elses account page by changing the user id. Or do you mean something else? Could you give an example in your own way?

counter-hacking, that was always interesting because there was an element of strategy to it

The only counter hacking I've thought about is botnet-vs-botnet. Hacknet has this really great counterhacking moment that I won't spoil, but if you've played it you know what I'm talking about with Naix taking revenge on you. I'd like to do my own version of that, maybe where if you haven't purchased antivirus and download some warez versions of cracks instead of buying them, you get a cryptolocker virus. In fact I just added a hardware usage visualizer to let the player know when their data is being exfiltrated (another use might be when the federal police are making a remote copy of their hard drive for later prosecution). As for "countering" another hackers specific actions, I don't think I'd be able to pull it off because of the lack of feedback about whats going on at the processor or OS level. I'll try to think of some way to give that experience, though.

[Juskelis]

I don't know what lithander was going for with realistic vs accessible, but I think one thing that would help is to make sure the game makes sense to people who have zero hacking/computer experience. One example I can think of is that I have very little idea of what you mean by data exfiltration. It might help to have the system be simplified so that you maintain the higher levels of hacking and nix some of the details, or to just use longer (but more plain english) names for hacking techniques.

I think the website example is a good entry level idea of what I was thinking of, where the thought process could be where the player

• notices address bar
• realizes variables within address
• recognizes common word variable (such as "balance")
• changes values

You could honestly have a whole experience wrapped around address bar nonsense, where the first levels have really simple "balance=x" scenarios, and by the end they are extracting hashed data from URLs, but I'm getting ahead of myself. The step that is important is the step between recognition and change. In puzzler terms, its the step where the player knows the problem space entirely (goals included) and the step where the player teases out the path to the goal.

If I knew more about hacking, or really anything at all about hacking, I would give an extra example, but the URL example is pretty spot on. I guess another one would be like how Heartbleed (?) worked, where it would do array overflow to access someone's stuff, but that's much more high skill.

The main reason I brought up the versus thing is because I'm doing a project about competitive gameplay and the concept of Yomi (basically three thoughts ahead) is super ingrained in my mind right now.

[lithander]

If you could fuse "realistic hacking" with "accessibility" that would be amazing.

Can you point me to any examples that do this well?

No amazing hacking games that I know of.

An idea would be to invest acquiring hacking hardware and software, intell and maybe contacts to specialists and then you just have to apply the right tool for the job. The player wouldn't concern himself about the nitty gritty details and so you wouldn't have to model them. That approach applied to a "kill your enemies" setting would mean it becomes more a strategy game then a first-person-shooter.

Another idea is to make the minigames more reality like... for example stepping through assembler code, comparing memory patterns, using the commandline to a combination of tools. of course the real thing wouldn't be accessible and fun but maybe you can capture the essence of it. :/
There are games that have cool lockpicking mechanics (e.g Thief 4) that emulate real lock picking even though it's much simpler to pick locks ingame then in real life.