I didn’t really have a goal set yesterday. I had a few ideas, but nothing concrete. Last night, an hour or two before I went to bed (which was about 2 hours before it started), I decided to create some sort of hacking game where you and a team of people have to achieve a specific end goal for your country before you hit a specific deadline or else. So a cyber war, basically. It would be a bit like uplink, but also quite different. I have a bunch of ideas for the end result, including a realtime office mode, multiple ways of dealing with things, and an interactive world where you are not alone. Lots of stuff, too much for one weekend, but it was fun to think about. Whether it’ll be fun to play, I don’t know, but still.

So today I worked on it for a bit. I’m creating it in WPF (which is .NET), because it’s GUI heavy and I know it well enough to get something done in it. I have a bunch of stuff done, but still a lot to do for it to be a proper game. I’ve created a nice little world, one which is filled with about 20.000 people (each with a name and email address, most with a job in the game world), a few hundred companies (with employees, admins and CEOs), each with one of a dozen server software packages for their websites, each with a dozen possible different versions. All of it randomly generated from lists of names. And you can bypass login screens of email services if they have crap security and you select the right options in the comboboxes, but that’s it.

I still need to do many things. For starters, it needs a goal. I also have to make the websites (they’re just empty templates, but I have to create the templates), some data to gather and abuse (like email addresses, source code, etc), create viruses and worms (to use on the email addresses), make hacking risky, simulate latency (if you want 7 proxies, go ahead, but don’t complain that it takes a minute to load a page), useful teammates, some sort of money system, digital (black) markets, botnets, more ways to hack, news, a living world, and lots of other things. Way too much for one weekend. But we’ll see how far I can get, and after it’s over I’ll decide if it’s worth continuing.

This entry was posted on Saturday, July 30th, 2011 at 3:11 pm and is filed under MiniLD #28. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.