Developer updates Thread - PWN - Combat Hacking

Hi! Figured I'd kick this off with a quick overview of my vision for the game. It's inspired by those hacking scenes in movies where characters are 'breaking into the mainframe' or some other such business. The 'hack' involves a bunch of boxes flying around the screen, the character types a few keystrokes, and is suddenly given access codes. It's complete garbage, but is enormously entertaining, and I wanted to design a game that gave players the sensation of being a bad-ass hacker, capturing a network and fending off an opponent, and sending weaponized hunks of code at each other.

I decided to use real-world concepts like firewalls, encryption, viruses, etc. and wrap them in analogous strategy elements. Encryption makes nodes harder to capture, viruses can infect enemy nodes, and firewalls can keep viruses out. I've seen hacking mini-games in various other games, but felt they were all lacking and that a game dedicated to abstract hacking could involve some really interesting and exciting real-time strategy.

I know there are several hacking-themed games out there - but most of them are asymmetrical, meaning you are a single player using various computer tools to break into some anonymous system, or maybe it's more like a puzzle game where you're the intruder and some AI is trying to stop you. But my goal with this was to make it a competitive, head-to-head hacking simulator, where you and another player have the same tools and the same objectives, and are trying to outsmart each other.

Here's a few more details on the specific abilities given to players as they compete against each other. You can see they generally mimic their real-life counterpart, and that some really interesting strategic considerations emerge just from this small set of abilities.

ENCRYPT: This is a defensive power that you apply to nodes under your control. It will force the enemy to decrypt the node before capturing them, which slows down their progress. It can be very helpful if used at critical choke points in the network. They are, however, suceptible to Spikes, which allows the encryption to break faster. Therefore it is helpful to protect them with a Firewall.

FIREWALL: Constructing a firewall will prevent special attacks such as Spikes and Viruses from infiltrating past protected nodes. The range of the firewall's protection is 1 node in every direction.

SPIKE: This offsenive power will allow you to temporarily disbable a swath of your opponent's network. It must be launched directly onto a node that is controlled by an enemy, and will transmit to several nearby enemy nodes. It can also be used to interrupt an enemy's attempt to capture one of your nodes. Nodes affected by the spike will be unable to upgrade or attack adjacent nodes. Spiked nodes are also more succeptible to capture, and encryption is less effective when spiked. A spike will not spread beyond firewalls.

VIRUS: An insidious special attack that will spread among your enemy's entire network. Most unprotected nodes will become infected, and the virus will slowly convert enemy nodes to your side. The enemy will be forced to clean the virus on each node individually. Viruses are an effective way to get past encrypted nodes, since encryption only slows down direct capture attempts. Viruses are blocked by firewalls.

OVERCLOCK: Combatants can use this power to give their bandwidth an additional boost. With higher bandwidth, capture actions occur faster and special powers charge faster. However, overclocked nodes are likely to be high-priority capture targets for the enemy. You can counteract this by implanting a trojan on the node.

TROJAN: This is a trap that you can install on friendly nodes. It will remain hidden to the enemy, and if they attempt to capture the node it will backfire and instead capture any of the nodes involved in the attack. Trojans can be detected with a scanner, and if spotted the trojan will be erased upon capture.

BACKDOOR: Using a backdoor will grant you instant access to any of the nodes under enemy control, even those hidden behind firewalls. Once you have access, you can capture the node at any time, and after that you can launch devastating viruses or spikes to demolish the enemy network from within. Backdoors are hidden from view, but can be detected and cleaned if the enemy has a nearby Scanner.

SCANNER: This is an essential tool for spotting and cleaning insidious traps such as trojans and backdoors. If you decide to attack blindly without the benefit of scanners, you run great risk of hitting these nasty traps and losing a lot of progress. The scanner has a range of two nodes in every direction.

***** UPDATE 30 OCT 2012

I've changed the 'special ability' mechanics around a bit. Encrypted nodes are no longer susceptible to spikes. However, if you can separate an encrypted node from the rest of the network ('powering it down'), then you can bypass the encryption entirely and capture the node much more easily.

I felt that firewalls were too overpowered, given that a player could spam them and basically be invulnerable to special attacks. So now, firewalls do NOT protect against spike attacks. In fact, if a spike attack hits a node with a firewall, it will actually destroy the firewall entirely. To prevent spikes from being too overpowered, I made sure that spiked nodes can not be used by either player. This means spikes can no longer be used to 'soften' the network for brute force capture, but it is instead an effective anti-firewall tool and is still a way to kick opponents off of control nodes.

I'm also building in some new behavior for the 'scanner' tool. It previously only was useful against hidden traps like backdoors and trojans, but that limited their use a bit. So I'll make sure that scanners are also an effective countermeasure for viruses. It'll basically slow down the rate at which they spread and capture other friendly nodes.

Speaking of which, since most players tried to clean viruses by quickly tapping on the infected nodes, instead of holding down the cursor until the clean is complete, I decided to adjust their mechanics to match players' actions. So now, a single tap will quickly remove viruses from any infected nodes. However, viruses now capture much faster, and have the ability to spread to nearby nodes if not cleaned quickly enough.

Edited by: 82apps