Review: The Hacker Project

Seldom is it that a game can capture me to the point that I spend hours on it plotting out my moves. Even more seldom are these games free. But despite these odds I seem to have found a quite fun a interesting game to play. The game is The Hacker Project(THP).

THP is a browser game where you play as a hacker. You start off with crappy hardware and software, and so it is your job to make your way up in the world. Now this is where the game gets a bit interesting. At the very beginning of the game you could theoretically get the best software ever created for nothing. To do this you just have to go onto, or hack some computer with the software and download it off of there. What prevents a person from doing this is the fact that every piece of software costs a certain amount of CPU cycles, memory, and Bandwidth to use, and at the start of the game your computer can't handle the software, as well as the fact that to download software of extremely high ranking(version) you must wait literally days in real world time.

So this structure forces the player to take missions to build up their income and therefor build up there computer's hardware. As the player increases their hardware he or she builds up their software library. Which in turn allows them to take on more difficult missions which award the player more money on their successful completion. All this is a self feeding loop that keeps the player going till he or she gets bored.

At this point you may be asking yourself why a player would subject themselves to what sounds like boring, monotonous work for nothing? This is where the game get especially clever; there is a high-score bored that lists the top 10 best hackers in the game. For each position on the bored that player will receive some money. So for example the 10th place player will get 10 dollars, but the 1st place player will get 60 dollars. This causes the players of the game to have real motivation for their work. But then on top of this there is the fact that for these player's names to be written to the high-score board and for them to receive their money they must activate an in-game virus on 10 different servers, that takes 24 hours to complete its run. In this time the virus can be stopped by an anti-virus also applied by players.

So this generates a real rivalry between the top 10 players wanting to activate the virus to get their money, and the other players who are not in the top 10. This generates a combat between players that ranges from deleting another player's software, to installing a virus on their computer to steal their money.

The result of this is an addicting game, much like gambling. Accept for the fact that the players themselves control their own destiny, and there is always the chance that you may be the one to rise to the top and make your money.

Competition Blog 1 [The Beginning]

As you can see in the below screen shot I have made some progress on my game since my first post on the 25th. I have player movement and sprite rotation in for the player. Most of the image elements are not functional yet. But did write a primitive AI for the virus (orange box), so that it moves towards the host computer in a non straight path. I figure it cold be a badly coded virus so it makes sense. I hope to get some major coding done this week end. Also I need to figure out how to add onto my engine with more attributes and ways to manipulate these attributes. All the art in the screen shot is original. I plan on getting some more art done for this game and as well as on the rpg project I am working on with some friends. So pretty much my week-end is booked. I will update again next week or the week after.

Failure never tasted so sweet

As you have probably guessed from the title of this post I have failed to deliver once again. My Christmas game fell through because my personal library decided to stop working. So by the time I debugged it, rewrote the faulty functions, and implemented them into my game it was Christmas eve.

Yet I am still happy. In my rewriting of my engine I made it more organised, added more safety checks, and overall made it more easily read and used. I feel as the phoenix; how it dies in flames, but is yet reborn into something that can be better.

As to my current project I am creating a game for a competition. The boundaries are that it must be a survival horror game, without zombies, and it must do something with lighting. Lighting could be like using a flash light to see in the dark, or making it so enemies can not see when you hide in shadow.

For this project I want to fix a problem within myself. Several people have told me that I am a good game designer/programmer, but I lack the ability to set goal and there for get side tracked and/or "lost" once I reach a certain point. To combat this flaw I plan to use the calendar evolution to make a goal scheduled for myself and try and reach each goal individually. This way I can have a sense of progress while getting stuff done without loosing sight of what I am truly working on.

For my entry to the project I plan on making a Top down shooter based on the theme of you being a program inside a computer. Game play would consist of you(an anti-virus program) combating many foes with computerized weaponry in order to protect your host machine. Your host machine will have a thin barrier of firewalls that will only keep the opposing forces at bay for a short time.

The graphic style will consist of a green cyber-esc background, with dark-toned squares for walls. The actual game objects will have a glowing neon effect to emulate that of the movie "hackers" computer scenes. I may use more simple shapes to give the feeling that this is what computer warfare really looks like.

I shall try this time to keep a updated log of this project on a weekly or biweekly basis, but I make no promises.

Its been a while.....

Where has the time gone? We are almost to Christmas! But you don't care about that, you just want to hear what has been going on. Well for starters I am no longer working my top down shooter project. I abandoned the project because I lost interest. But I haven't been relaxing these past two months. On the contrary I have been working quite hard.

After I stopped working on my top down shooter I started to create my own library of functions. In my libraries current state I have basic game functionality, a system where I can add in game objects and images, and the functionality to easily add sounds and music. Also I have developed and published a puzzle game, based on the classic 15 puzzle. Then after that I made my own level editor. All using my new library. Currently I am working on a Christmas themed space invaders clone called Jingle Bells. I will be developing it for Linux, and possibly windows if I can get it to work in time.

So other interesting news is I am doing art for an rpg called The Eternal Quest. I am making tiles and some npcs. I hope to update my blog more with my projects and such. I will make a post once my Christmas game is done. Till then, have a happy holiday.

Its been a while.....

Where has the time gone? We are almost to Christmas! But you don't care about that, you just want to hear what has been going on. Well for starters I am no longer working my top down shooter project. I abandoned the project because I lost interest. But I haven't been relaxing these past two months. On the contrary I have been working quite hard.

After I stopped working on my top down shooter I started to create my own library of functions. In my libraries current state I have basic game functionality, a system where I can add in game objects and images, and the functionality to easily add sounds and music. Also I have developed and published a puzzle game, based on the classic 15 puzzle. Then after that I made my own level editor. All using my new library. Currently I am working on a Christmas themed space invaders clone called Jingle Bells. I will be developing it for Linux, and possibly windows if I can get it to work in time.

So other interesting news is I am doing art for an rpg called The Eternal Quest. I am making tiles and some npcs. I hope to update my blog more with my projects and such. I will make a post once my Christmas game is done. Till then, have a happy holiday.

When Robots Attack. Part 2

It has been about a month since my last posting on my project. I feel that I got a lot of things done that I shouldn't, and a few things that should have been done, but didn't get done.

For starters I didn't get AI functioning or camera system working. I didn't get the AI working because I greatly under estimated the difficulty of it. I didn't get a camera system working because I just plain forgot about it. I know I should have at least implemented a camera system, but I feel that what I got done in these item's placing is greatly better.

As you can see in the picture to the right I have greatly improved the game. The red cross package will give the player health. The Pac-Man ghost things are the enemies for now. And the person with the mini-gun and the blue hair is the player. The player can spin 360 degrees in accordance to the mouse location.

Some other unseen improvements are that the game performance has been boosted and enemies now come from the four sides of the screen.

The project at the moment is at about 600 lines of code and the project is about 4 megabytes (including recourses, .exe, and dlls). One of the hardest parts of the project was making the code so the player to face the courser. It required me to learn some trigonometry and use some logical puzzle solving to make it work.

One time consuming task on this project was the fact that I had to rewrite the classes to be inheritance based. I made it so variables such as x,y,w,h, alive, and visible were available to every object in the game. I also centralized the drawing function so I just have to pass a the screen location and image to draw, were as before you had to do that and include x,y,w, and h.

As to the future of this project I hope to get a lot more done on it within the next month. I want to get some form of AI working. As well as the dreaded camera system. Then I want to put in some more power ups like: EMP bombs, score bonus, and other game modifiers. Then maybe I can look to getting some more weapons in like pistole, AK-47, SMG, and grenades. If I am on the ball I maybe able to get some more enemy types added in.

I will see in November!

When Robots Attack. Part 1

I am going to do something different tonight. I have been working on making a engine in c++ for a Top down shooter game. Like i made a game with zombies in it or Robotron 2084. I was originally create my master piece, but I decided to make something less ambitious so I can get my feet wet in the genera. As stated this project will be programmed in C++ and I will work on it in my free time.

I don't plan on making regular blogs about this, but more or less of showing off what I get done as I progress with the creation of it. Anyway you probably want to know what type of game I am making. All I know about the game so far is the enemies will be robots and you will have a gun with upgradeable rate of fire. Beyond that this game is a blank slate ready to be filled.

As for programming I have done quite a bit of work on the core element of the engine. So far I have a player(red square), who shoots bullets(not shown), walls(dark grey, and enemies(dark tanish brown color). These are all displayed in the picture below.

Now please don't leave comments saying that the graphics look like crap. I know that they are just place holder graphics till I can make or find good ones.

Now I shall explain what you see. The player can move up,down,left, and right. The enemies automatically run towards the player. By pressing the mouse button the player can shoot a bullet. One thing I am proud of is that about 3 times every second a new enemy is created and yet there is no slow down. Even though I am doing some very heavy lifting for the enemy AI (floating points, and division every frame) the frame rate so far has not hiccuped on my middle end laptop.

What I hope to get done within the next few weeks is get stats like health and score. More entry points for the robots. Improved AI so perhaps the enemies can go around obstacles and perhaps camera functions for larger levels.