Neon Spectre – cyberpunk hacker roguelite

[MZ|One]

I wanted to share a little about what I'm working on at the moment:

Neon Spectre is a cyberpunk hacker roguelite. You roam around the cyberspace and hack into procedurally-generated networks either to complete contracted missions or just to explore what else is out there. You can build relationships with random characters in the world and purchase better consoles/chips/modules/kernels over time to build the ultimate deck that no network will be able to keep out.



I still have so much work to do in order to make this what I want it to be, but wanted at least to start sharing some development news. I would like to release a demo with the core mechanics sketched out quite soon, because I would love to hear what other people think.

Some screenshots in the meantime>



I'll be back soon with more news!

======================================================
UPDATE 2015/08/01> Uploaded v0.1 demo

[qubodup]

- Can't wait to play and hear it!
-- In case you were going to use sfxr, here's something better / more unique http://labbed.net/software.php?id=labchirp
-- If there's no music, I will probably be listening to https://sites.google.com/site/maxstack/ ... ingularity
- Those smoothly (based on non-monospace font text width) growing progress bars boxes tickle my brain in a good way.
- I'd rather have an unfamiliar or more modern colorset (based on the deus ex human revolution minigame for example?) to play in but if you want to pull the uplink crowd, bluescreen blue is probably the way to go
-- pool of inspiration if anybody cares: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... ngMinigame
-- the best colors are http://kippura.org/zenburnpage/ and http://google.com/search?q=vim+desert+color+scheme
-- Perhaps you could have some background effects without pulling too much performance as well... fake 3d with paralax meshes for example?

Wow, I hope this will work on Touchscreen...

[SiENcE]

Looks really nice!

I also want to play it. Keep on!

[CaptainMaelstrom]

Looks very cool. I'm a big fan of rogue-like games so I'll be keeping tabs on this.

[raingloom]

This seems interesting. How realistic will the technological side be and how does the approach to hacking compare to what we've seen in games like Uplink or Watchdogs?

[bakpakin]

Screenshots look beautiful, and gameplay sounds promising. +1 from me.
I've never played Uplink, but this looks a lot like it...

[zorg]

All my yes.

Btw, did you consider how you'd get music for the game? Because if you go the ask-around route, and want 1-1 tracks from many musicians, i'd volunteer for one track. (Like how uplink had it)

[MZ|One]

Thank you, everyone; I am excited to see such positive reactions. In response to the questions/comments:

Visuals - All the current visuals and UI are placeholders. The network visuals demonstrate the basic idea though: abstract minimalistic shapes representing the network structure combined with a specific and much bolder and more distinct GFX for each executable module. I plan to team up with someone to help me make this look super kickass, once I stabilise the design and the mechanics some more. I want the entire UI to be skinnable (which it is even now to the extent that all the colors are extracted to an XML).

Realism – The design intention is to make the cool hacker experience accessible even to people who are not real Unix-rank coders. For me, the essence of that is smart problem-solving within a clear and deterministic ruleset, so that's core. I certainly abstract the actual hacker mechanisms a lot in order to make it possible to run on a dozen networks in an hour, but all the rules should still represent some actual real concept at least in spirit. On the 'terminal console <-> click-to-win' spectrum, I aim to land in a similar ballpark as Uplink.

Sound/music – So there's still no sound :| At the moment, I use some tracks that VoHo originally made for another game of mine.

Touchscreen – I'll keep this in mind. Awesome idea.

I am still hard at work on the publishable demo; I hope to have that here within a week or two.

[MZ|One]

Yooo, so the demo is now uploaded to the head post! I am super curious about any opinions and comments. And I hope it works .)

[qubodup]

Amazing! Awesome!

- On a 27" 1080p screen I first thought it'd be unreadable because of font colors type and size but then I just leaned closer.
- I was confused long enough to pick the last tutorial first by the order being bottom to top. Not a problem. A fun/memorable(?) surprise
- The tutorial made me think I was prepared. Little did I know one can't just regenerate T all the time in story mode.
- This is hard. As a lazy player (both reading and thinking) I'm overwhelmed but I might try to focus more in the future even if the learning curve stays this way since the atmosphere is amazing even without sound effects.
- Some subroutines say "break results in alert" I think. I'm not sure "break" applies to subroutines as well or if in that case it only applies to the node. I might simply not have paid attention to a text.
- I seem to select modules and then somehow lose selection (pressing lmb? pressing lmb in empty space? not sure.) It was repeatedly noticeably slow for me to notice that the module was not selected any more. Although I am tired right now. Changing the cursor would be useful on desktop, but there's no cursor on touchscreens so making the indicator what routine is selected more noticeable might help (if you plan to support both).


http://youtu.be/3N9fmIDl67Y

http://youtu.be/atLArWKnViE