Hacking game

Every game that has the underdog anarchist hacker rebel must portray him as an early-90's gen-X faggot with mohawk and hoodie. Otherwise, people may get the wrong impression that the game is original and interesting.

So, OP is a faggot, like always.

Maybe. Maybe not. But I'm not brave enough to risk clicking that link to find out.

Yes they are on the LGBTQIA+@ spectrum, how did you know?
For marketing it was either try and be subtle and cool, or be very up front about what the game is. I'm an aspie neet who can't into being cool so trying to convey as much information in the two seconds someone will look at the title/graphic was more important. Its not trying to be subtle, because its a niche game already, being coy and aloof would probably lose more sales than cool points it would gain

flat out walkthroughs lose a lot of people. it's better to simply have the game build on concepts slowly over time.
if a mission/stage has you use a single command to complete the objective and the next has you use that command and one additional command it's much easier to digest.
though maybe you're doing that, if i think of it i'll give your game a play when i finish work.

So, your idea of not being subtle is plastering a vaguely effeminate edgelord with too much makeup and calling it "Hack the FBI"? The image makes the game look like some RPGMaker bundletrash.

The question is, is that enough to turn off people who like hacking games? Its a pretty small genre. And beyond that some people enjoy being a hackerman.

I doubt it will turn off anyone who likes hacking games, but it's an image I would scroll right past if I was looking through a big list of indie games to try. It's like that bearded king with the crown and cape on the cover art of every mobile empire building game. It's just generic and easy to overlook.

I fail to see why a game about hacking requires character art. Hacknet and Uplink don't feature anything of that sort outside some profile pictures in Uplink.

Hence why they play "hacking" games, or even go for stuff like TIS-100. You need to convey to people it's a serious hacking game, not some ghastly visual novel bullshit.

it's shit

I've watched two people play through it, and one person got lightly frustrated at how much handholding there was, while the other person went full cuphead journalist. I agree its best to show rather than tell, and introduce things one at a time through gameplay. The main storyline is supposed to be a drawn out/managed tutorial that supports the open world side that comes later.

Critique noted, thanks

Can you elaborate?

The OP probably should have had the trailer
youtube.com/watch?v=b7uEBgPhtNc

What is there more to say? Your marketing is shit, your idea of a game has been done to death (and much better too) and your game in total sucks dick. It's not fun, it's not engaging and I will forget about it by tomorrow.

That's a tad harsh. OP needs to work on his marketing strategy a little or else he will end with a generic product people will loo over, or attracting tumblr degenerates that think they are welcome. As for the rest, he doesn't necessarily need to reinvent the wheel, there's a few hacking games on the market, all OP needs to do is take what worked there and build a game around it. It's not like he has all that much competition.

Did you actually play it and it sucks? I appreciate the critique of the marketing but what I'm really interested in is the gameplay

Searched "hacking" on Steam. Looks like the purple-haired douchebag is less prevalent than I thought it would be.

user, do you know how there are these talent shows and there is this bong guy that just rips into every talentless hack mercilessly but sometimes praises true talent? He does this because industry is oversaturated with hacks that get told they'll do well, even though they suck at what they do. Have some respect for games and yourself and tell the OP the truth as opposed to sugarcoating it in pretty words and no hard feelings. What he has right now is, as I said, unappealing and not fun. If he had a good game to begin with, there would be appealing elements at least. This just isn't it and game design is not OP's forte. I hope he takes his time developing a new hobby, one he is good or at least better at.

Then you listen to his albums and realize he's just another wannabe lounge singer appealing to over-45, sex-starved housewives like Michael Buble and is, himself, helping to oversaturate the market with crap.

But this isn't about that faggot bong. It's about OP needing to wake up and stopping talentless shit he does before he goes too far up his ass and ends up like Josh and his kiwifarms or something.

"Harsh but fair" is fine, but only one person has downloaded it so its hard to take criticism seriously when it seems like its entirely based on not liking the marketing rather than actually having played the game

You compared yourself with that faggot bong and I'm saying it was an accurate comparison. You are a mediocre faggot, criticizing other mediocre faggots to feel less mediocre.

i'm a lazy bastard which version of .net do i need for this. it just hangs with mono.

...

The vast majority of cracking tool and shit like keygens use .net because .net is just the best for rapid-deployment of these things do to its tools integration with the Windows API. In other words it's the choice library for Pajeets

Sorry about that, I assumed Unity would just take care of dependencies automagically. Are you running in a VM? Or without networking? It tries to get the latest localizations when it loads, but its also supposed to time out after a few seconds if it can't reach the internet, but maybe its broken.

Came in here to say that the person (sic) in the op image is a huge turn off and most people on this board will likely not give the game the time of day because of it
Go back to tumblr with your xirself oc

...

Its not really OC, just part of a character art pack I bought for $20. Holla Forums will probably call it an asset flip now

Whats the current
hacking game out there? I think all of them have big flaws.

Says so in the advertising material

What a waste of $20.

played it, small pieces of advice:
-i realize this is a demo but your spelling is abysmal, make sure to run a spellchecker or get a proofreader before you release. and don't give me some shit like "well the people you're IMing with might not spell properly", c'mon now
-"cd.." with no spaces should also bring you back one directory. i've been using this command for decades and it felt genuinely fucked to have to space
-the sound for incoming IMs needs to have some more bottom end, it's really irritating and shrill
-shorter delays during IMs for the "typing…" waits, it's a little too long

otherwise i'm genuinely stoked, i love commandline typing in games and i think you have a decent start

also the first time the second NPC was explaining what he wanted me to do, the procnow command never came up in conversation. i also, when in the downloads directory, couldn't run any commands at all, even to change directory or open the help menu. had to close that instance of the terminal and reopen

Actually if he changed the hackers to look more like this card then I'd be okay with it, I'll give this a shot later cause why not.

If thats true, maybe the #kodewithkarlie meme is a little unfair. I'll try adding it

good feedback, I'll work on it

If you click somewhere in the window, it should "hurry" the conversation, but thats probably not intuitive. I'll add a hurry button.

Thanks for the critique user, with a gui heavy game things like sound effects and usability/quality of life are more important than normal. I'll have to check on the downloads folder problem, probably a program didn't exit gracefully. Did you try messing with the news headlines or investigate the guy that sent you the ransomware?

I think hackers are too much of a stereotype, one of the messages I want the game to have is that hacking is just a skill you can learn, you don't have to be some crazy character or greybeard elder to use a command line. As retarded as it sounds I hope people playing the game will try and experiment with their own PC, or learn SQL or something. I put off learning to program for years because I thought I wasn't the right kind of person to do it, so maybe if people do it in a game they'll get some confidence or curiosity or at least not feel like they're forbidden from even looking into it.
t. blogposter

I'm a graphist, I can make a new one for you if you want.

hmmm

Just make a modern/better version of Uplink. You don't need NPCs and shit.

Also that name and image in the OP screams "shovelware". If I saw that image on Steam I would pass it by without a further look.

2/10 pacing.

isn't "pink mohawk, black trenchcoat" part of the standard cyberpunk criminal getup?

If your message of the game is that hacking is a skill anyone can pick up, not just "crazy characters", having the main character in the promo art having a tumblr-tier shaved mohawk with purple lipstick and eyebrows undermines it. A more regular looking Joe or Jane in casual business wear would be better for sending that message. You could even go in another direction and not have art for the main character, instead having a shaded silohuette for the player to project onto (or go Strangers in Sword City style and allow the player to use a custom portrait by dropping an image file into a subfolder in the game directory).

I like it well enough, as others have said, less is more. I think the interface looks real bad. Should probably go for a good lightweight shell look. Seems a bit janky about opening multiple terminals and things like that, that's my technical critique.

Some of the characterization is pretty spot on, reminds me of being a noob in 1998 and being half bullied and half encouraged. I think it would almost have worked better as done not near future and more near past. The talking heads are really unnecessary, I know that much. A thing to do, instead of the portraits, would be have more random characterization, like one of them starts to trust you and sends you to their personal server with their personal site in their fashion show cyberpunk cosplay, while most all they do is work on video toaster all day. Old super niche IRC weirdness like that.

It's actually a really good game, you learn some low-level assembly and figure out what operations need to be performed to pull off tasks with a limited number of lines of code. Then they put milestones in there where you learn to do it in the most efficient (or better than what they think is most efficient!) way possible.

The only thing that bothers me about the game is that there's undocumented functions, so when I see someone came up with a better method to do a program, and then it turns out they're using functions I didn't know were available, I wonder how the fuck THEY knew about them.

this always makes me happy, and in a game where your only interaction with your own avatar will be in an IM window there really isn't a good reason not to do it. let us set up a custom email address/IM alias/passwords as well. self-insertion into games always adds sales

I'm well aware of what it's like, I'm just saying that the word is found in the advertising, even if it's not an accurate characterization.
Are there? Shenzhen has them, but I think the only one in TIS-100 is hcf.

It is a fair point, you might want to dial back a little of the camp if you want to genuinely interest normal people in tech.

Thanks for the feedback. It sounds like the marketing draws the most criticism but I'm going to stick with it. Aside from not working with mono (?) it sounds like there weren't any huge bugs, so thats a relief.

Thats a pretty cool idea, bringing a new person on board and teaching them all the techniques you yourself learned, to remind the player how much they now know

Will do, I want to let players dragon drop MP3s into a folder to use as the soundtrack, but how many people have MP3s anymore
CEWY8-BQ62T-NFNBQ
IL5IQ-VJ3V6-QMR6X
59IK5-29NDP-9R25A

It needs to do a better job at teaching people who don't understand this shit though. I wanted to get into TIS because it had some neat looking optimization mechanics but the manuals wording was like any other manual on how to code. Which is to say impossible to read unless you're already familiar with this shit.

I just want Uplink 2 tbh, with more of the same and some new mechanics

you gay-ass motherfucker put your codes into oekaki or type them like
ILfiveIQ-VJthreeV6-QMR6X

Come on man, I need to be able to write my 1337 shell scripts to do shit for me. Also dialog options to say "I've used a fucking terminal before" would help with immersion.

Did you try the text editor?

I did not, thanks for pointing it out, though I'm not sure how/if I can run it as a script.

Thinking about it, wouldn't a realistic hacking game that was good be the single greatest instruction material on hacking?

That's when you take the next step
blogs.cisco.com/cin/building_your_own_hack_lab

My bad, there were a few broken parts. I uploaded a new version just now.

You can write a script in the text editor, but the OS won't recognize it as a script unless you rename it to .bat
However rename is a protected command, so you have to elevate your privileges first with sudo, and the root password ("root"). Its currently broken to try and open a file after running sudo, so once you rename Untitled.txt to whatever.bat, you have to reopen a new terminal and run whatever.bat from there.

Currently its dumb, it just fires off every non-empty line one per second. In the future I promise to have it intelligently wait until the terminal is ready for input before inputting the next line. (For example building malware has several pauses that take longer than a second that would mess things up).
Another cool feature would be to let you use {0} and {1} etc in the script and then plug in those values when you run in the command line, like

Its not trying to be too realistic, only to use realistic terminology and concepts that people can get excited about and google for more. For example a webserver being an executable you can run on your computer and start serving up files, its not magical, maybe someone will download WAMP and try it out. But the game isn't trying to teach, just demystify