It's a cool idea, but a little confusing. Nice job though

@Crawler Studios: Yeah there seemed to be no avoiding it... I tried to keep all the menus fairly self explanatory but until you understand the whole system by using the menus a bit I can imagine people get a bit lost!

An interesting take on the theme. The monospace font wasn't working for me, seeing Times.

I think I would really enjoy a more fleshed-out version of this - cool idea! I wanted a little more involvement during the "combat" system though - even just a timing mechanic or choosing whether to use some super-resource would be good.

Very well done. I especially like the scrambled effect when you lose the game.

At first I was a little unsure of what to do, but even making choices semi-randomly was still fun. I get the feeling that if I put some more time into playing this one I would enjoy it even more.

I think I'll come back to it after I rate some more games!

It'd be better if the player had a bit more control over the story, but interesting idea :)

@winmac32: Investigating now, thanks for the heads up!

@ManicMiner There are "Exploits" and "ZeroDay" powerups that can nude battles in your favour. In hindsight the game should have scripted events where this is introduced so people can play around with it!

nudge*

@winmac32 Fixed a conformed bug where the webfonts weren't being loaded properly. I'm going to add a message to the main submission about this, but it should be within the spirit of the rules! http://ludumdare.com/compo/rules/

Many apologies.

@ViliX64 Have to agree. The plan was to have all the "unscripted" things that are in now as random events, along with more central events that fire at static points with choices, branching paths etc. Those would have had a more major impact allowing the player more decisions. The systems are in place for this but I left the content generation time too short hehe

Confused myself when I rejected the initial dialogue and had to refresh the page to continue.
Once I got past that though I played this for way too long! Couldn't work out if there was a way of requesting more jobs other than continue. But managed to stockpile a fair bit of cash. I really like the take on the theme. Love the corruption effects when you're losing a takedown etc...

Nice game. I enjoyed playing and got to 135 days...not sure if that is good?

@SpoutingShite that's impressive!

@pixelballoon: That's valid: should have at the very least explained that, if not added a "reset terminal" command. Glad you enjoyed!

Simple but addictive. After hitting accept for that first hire the screen went black in IE11, consistently. Worked fine in Chrome tho.

@Interface: unfortunately for me it didn't even load on IE. I'm not sure what the problem is: might look into it after the judging period!

I will tweet you with a gameplay and review video soon.

Not my cup of tea and a little confusing but original idea.

Nice! Cool idea but there should be tutorial or something like that.

It was pretty cool. I felt like I was interacting with a mainframe computer and then when I found my target I felt like I was downloading a virus on my machine :P The look and feel was great!

I really like the whole concept and setting. but... I felt like I was just clicking forward in a story - not enough different actions or paths: continue, continue, new target, takedown target, continue... and now this attack is going on for minutes and minutes and there's nothing I can do :/

Nice effect when you're losing, but a couple of bugs: I couldn't use ZeroDay -pressing Enter did nothing - and the game ended abruptly with a black screen, I couldn't understand why

Nicely done!

Game over effect is nice.

You should work on this and add more options/mini-games. Maybe something like a Candybox?

@f7f5: Unfortunately I spoke to a colleague at work who experienced the same bugs - ZeroDays were supposed to provide instant wins in the fights and don't seem to be working correctly. The "crash" is because you were "too good" - having more than 50 approval (which was supposed to be the max it can get to) crashes the game. Think of it as though you won ;)

I'm going to document these bugs to the game's description but I think it's against the spirit of LD to patch them just yet :(

Lack of content is a major problem - I ran out of time to add interesting "plot" stuff, so right now it's just some sample random events.

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@Awpteamoose It seems enough people like the aesthetic that it might be worth doing! I have ideas for improving the combat system and adding lots more content, so if I get some time I may just do that.

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Thanks for the valuable feedback so far folks, your comments mean a lot!

Interesting game. The discovery part is really nice and worked well for me. After that, the game becomes a little repetitive, trying to reach a winning condition. Very enjoyable anyway, for a game without sound of graphics.

Always fun to see hacking-style interfaces in games. I agree with the others that it was a bit unclear what the choices meant in terms of gameplay, but the overall presentation felt like it had a lot of depth to it. Nice work overall.

Loved the theme, and the terminal display was awesome. I appreciate that you have to explore the game to figure out how it works, though I didn't really have much opportunity to do so my first run due to what I think is bad luck - I added the only two targets I received to my botnet, but still lost the game by going broke. The second run was much more enjoyable.

I think I got the hang of what was going on, but it was hard to see what effect your actions had on your performance. I can see that going into a hack you have odds for or against you and you can get boosts with exploits, but it was unclear how adding team members helped. ZeroDays never worked for me. I pressed Enter on them during a hack and nothing happened.

The mood is lovely. The execution of the terminal UI is very good, with a draw rate that makes it feel like it's coming over a modem and some screen color flicker and garbled characters when things get tense. The text and terms were pretty legitimate, too. Maybe not important to the game, but more than placeholder sci-fi jargon.

It took me a bit to realize I had to move the cursor down to the bottom area to inspect the sitrep and hosts.

Sometimes the same job would show up twice in a day, and it would add the same host to my hosts list twice. I only had to take down one of them, so I guess that's a bug.

I refused the opening offer the first time I played just to see what happened, and I'm glad you made that an option.

I lost after 40 days.

great concept... like matrix... a little confusing if watch too long..

I'm a hacker and that's exactly how my life looks like. 10/10

Lasted 26 days :D

MAN that's cool. Harkens back to the Uplink days. I really really really wanted to play a decent hacker game ever since realising how flawed Uplink was. And now I play Netrunner.

This feels pretty awesome, I enjoyed the streamlining of the process so it's not a huge chore (I'm sure real hacking is). I enjoyed the seemingly super variety in things to do. I enjoyed the way it presents both obfuscation and simplicity (the credit system is a long string but you only really look at the first number before the decimal, and the percentages during attacks is all you need to know, though the "flavour" to the side is great.

there are a few problems though:
I don't feel like I have enough agency - that is, I don't feel in control. All I'm doing is saying yes and no to things without context.
Too little knowledge/info on things - for example I have no idea what Zeroday is when I bought it, and have no idea what it would do when I use it.
The "hack" is just watching a meter go up and down - again, no agency.
Losing the game here felt just like losing the game in Uplink. I have no idea what went wrong.

But it's such a polished and complete experience, rad :)

Oh btw the controls are a little off - the keystrokes probably should not repeat, holding the key a split second too long made me lose my orientation in the UI.

After pressing target, for example, the cursor should auto-move to one of the targets? Especially since during the screen refresh you no longer see your cursor. It's a bit confusing.

Amazing concept!
If you make a polished version i feel i'l play the s%%t out of it !

Nice terminal emulator. As a Ubuntu user I can't look at apt with the same eyes again :D

Really neat concept! I included it in part 8 of my Ludum Dare 32 compilation video series, if you would like to take a look :) https://youtu.be/Fg_0-yj__pU