My hacking minigame

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DDentonas
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My hacking minigame

Post by DDentonas »

So i thought up about a system of hacking for games like Deus ex, system shock, etc

You can read it here

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dbf ... YY8JrM/pub


It's written more for myself, so be prepered for broken english, and not well explained ideas, so if you have any questions, write them here, along with ideas, criticism or whatever else you want.
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G-Flex
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Re: My hacking minigame

Post by G-Flex »

The only clear nitpick I have at the moment is that, the way cryptography actually works, finding an individual letter from a password (and knowing its length, in most cases) is a thing that pretty much doesn't/can't happen.
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DDentonas
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Re: My hacking minigame

Post by DDentonas »

But.. But... NANOMACHINES! :shock:

But seriusly, i'm more concerned about gameplay, than realism. I just wan't to make a fun to play hacking mini game, that gives the player the fantasy that he is an uber smart hacker!
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Jonas
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Re: My hacking minigame

Post by Jonas »

Maybe I've misunderstood, but this sounds less like a "minigame" than an entire parallel game.
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Jaedar
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Re: My hacking minigame

Post by Jaedar »

Jonas wrote:Maybe I've misunderstood, but this sounds less like a "minigame" than an entire parallel game.
That's the best kind of minigame :)
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DDentonas
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Re: My hacking minigame

Post by DDentonas »

Well keep in mind that this is for Deus Ex style games.

You can always find a datacube with the code, ignore most computers, threaten a guard to type in the password, load up on viruses and other hacking tools.

Also i think you overestimate the time it will take to finish the hacking. Sure if you want to collect all the letters, it would take you 1-2 minutes. But in most cases the password would be prety simple to guess after finding only some of them. Of course high security computers would take a lot more time, but this challenge is meant for those that like the fantasy of being a hacker. If they don't enjoy that, they could ignore the computer hacking minigame, and go with one of the ways to access the computer that i described above. I mean what is the point of having the option to play as a hacker (by giving you a computer skill), when the game does not play into the fantasy (by making hacking automatic). Did you feel like a badass hacker spy when you played the original?

Now you'll tell me, what about us that want to read every email in the world. Wouldn't it get boring after a while to play a minigame that takes half a minute at best? Well, if you are the kind of guy who likes to read emails, you should invest heavily on the computers skills. With the password characters that you would get for free, and some extra powers in the cyberspace, the hacking of a non critical computer could be as short as 10 seconds.
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DDL
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Re: My hacking minigame

Post by DDL »

I have to say, by the end of Human Revolution I was piss-tired of the hacking minigame to the point where even though you get more exp for hacking (and I am an exp whore) I just used passwords or large applications of firepower wherever possible.

One problem any minigame is going to have is that it is going to be played a LOT, and if it's not engaging enough to make you happy playing it repeatedly, this is a problem.

Also, you ideally want it to somehow work within both the fiction AND the gameplay, since nothing makes you go WTF quite so much as stopping in the middle of a randian apocalypse to play pipe dream, and nothing interrupts your flow of thought quite so much as...well, yeah: it's pipe dream again.

Deus ex handled it pretty well in that it was out of your hands (so computer skill was worth investing in, rather than just 'getting better at hacking as a player') yet it was tedious enough (and the benefits brief enough) at low skill to make computer skill something you WANTED to invest in, so you had more time to read emails and less time staring at a "HACKING" window.

Thinking about it, I think the one thing most hacking minigames need to do is minimise dissociation. DX had its problems with you turning magically indetectable as soon as you started using a computer, and HR was better in that respect (you could get shot right the fuck to death mid-hack), but I think ideally you want to retain some sense of your real-world situation while hacking. So something like a game-within-a-game on an in-world UI (like doom3's consoles) would be great. I realise that "playing a guy, playing a hacking game" is a tad meta, but it would allow you to both remember that essentially you ARE playing a guy playing a hacking game, and also afford some peripheral awareness so that you'd know exactly how much time you have left to finish your hack before the dude walking toward you spots you, etc etc.
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Re: My hacking minigame

Post by G-Flex »

[quote="DDL"DX had its problems with you turning magically indetectable as soon as you started using a computer, and HR was better in that respect (you could get shot right the fuck to death mid-hack)[/quote]

Ha! I don't think I even knew this. I wonder if it's trivially changed.
but I think ideally you want to retain some sense of your real-world situation while hacking. So something like a game-within-a-game on an in-world UI (like doom3's consoles) would be great. I realise that "playing a guy, playing a hacking game" is a tad meta, but it would allow you to both remember that essentially you ARE playing a guy playing a hacking game, and also afford some peripheral awareness so that you'd know exactly how much time you have left to finish your hack before the dude walking toward you spots you, etc etc.
I think System Shock 2's method worked pretty well as far as this is concerned.
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Re: My hacking minigame

Post by Zireael »

Thinking about it, I think the one thing most hacking minigames need to do is minimise dissociation. DX had its problems with you turning magically indetectable as soon as you started using a computer, and HR was better in that respect (you could get shot right the fuck to death mid-hack), but I think ideally you want to retain some sense of your real-world situation while hacking. So something like a game-within-a-game on an in-world UI (like doom3's consoles) would be great. I realise that "playing a guy, playing a hacking game" is a tad meta, but it would allow you to both remember that essentially you ARE playing a guy playing a hacking game, and also afford some peripheral awareness so that you'd know exactly how much time you have left to finish your hack before the dude walking toward you spots you, etc etc.
That's a good idea. Although the minigame would have to be good, as I got really bored with DX HR hacking game...
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