I have spent the last few months developing a practice tool for the hacking mini-game and am confident in its ability to replicate all the features you would find in game.
Dynamic Icon Legend that shows all the nodes you will find in the current difficulty along with their adjusted stats
A help menu to explain the rules of the game and all the features of the tool
Loadouts to automatically adjust your coherence and strength based on some common fits as well as the ability to make your own custom one or just adjust the values directly
Helping Hand: An option with 3 levels of helpfulness! Stage 1 stops the distance hints from fading out. Stage 2 highlights in purple the possible locations the hints are pointing to. Stage 3 holds your hand by directly telling you what to do with each click
God Mode: One-shot defenses and take no damage, great for practicing!
All 5 board difficulties available
Playable on mobile!!!
Whether you are a seasoned explorer or new to the game everyone can benefit from practicing their skills or warming up before heading out into space!
Quite a concidence, first we have no hacking minigame online for well over a decade and suddenly we have two after I very recently published my version. Any chance you (or any AI) took some inspiration? Not that I mind, go ahead! But crediting would be nice if that was the case.
And if it was totally independent (which easily is possible as it is a nice project to build on), what a fun coincidence.
That said, I like how your version works well in the browser, I played a few rounds and it seems to run smooth!
There were a couple of spawn rules I initially missed that I see you’re missing as well, you might want to update those:
Rule of 6 applies to non-defence nodes too. I saw some utility spawn surrounded by 6 nodes, which should not be possible. (This applies to defence nodes too, but I haven’t seen yet if this is incorrect in your game.)
Data Caches shouldn’t spawn with too many neighbour nodes either, but their max neighbours seems to be 3 instead of 5.
Also you have a nice list of Virus stats for players to use, but miss one of the most popular configurations (60/90) from blackglass + Zeugma that anyone more invested in this minigame will run. May be worth adding!
Can’t believe I’ve never noticed that- game is updated so utilities follow the rule of 6 now too. Damn I really thought I had gotten all the rules.
I chose not to include zeugma + blackglass in the preset loadouts for 2 reasons, first is that I didn’t want to include these options in the loadout builder for implants, and second is that I figured anyone exploring with a 600m module and has taken the time to train all the required skills already knows their coherence and strength and can just adjust the value manually.
I will look to add this loadout in the future if there is quite some demand for it.
I figured, I noticed later your itch.io account was made in November already. Fun coincidence!
@Uriel_the_Flame you were looking for a browser-based version of the hacking minigame playable on the phone?
Haha yea, I had the same feeling when someone gave me that feedback. I had never consciously noticed it, but when I started paying attention it made sense that these too don’t show up on fully surrounded nodes.
Also the repair node values have some randomness, I haven’t fully figured out how that works.
Yes that is when a Repair Utility is discovered from a data cache it gets a bonus from +5-+10 (from what I can tell though saying this I think im incorrectly modellig +1-+10, will check and update). Similarly Anti-Virus and Firewalls found in a data cache get a flat +10 to their coherence. So many strange little rules in this game!
