Cant wait for the windows build, the one screenshot looks like this will be quite an interesting game!

This looks hella slick, but the interface is really really difficult to get into. It's a given that noone reads - I tried the thing and went back to this page to read the thing twice before getting a clue about what's going on.

The mechanics are really interesting, but the interface is annoying as hell. Separating the base from the panels to set their destinations is annoying. Needing to click each timeslot to set each of them is annoying (clicking and dragging should work).

The "menu" looks so much like it's part of the gameplay that I quit the game thinking I was playing it.

Ultimately though it's an interesting engine to optimise - I found that it feels like given that you can't affect the number of bits you output, there's not much to do other than to drop your "defences" in some parts and to make sure that you're not "wasting" capacity by over-protecting some parts, and direct all of that to try and attain a mainframe to get more firepower.

That's pretty interesting :) I do wonder about the game beyond grasping that initial concept of not wasting resources, then it becomes a matter of watching incoming focussed attacks to counter and then redirecting everything to offence.

Once you take down another mainframe you pretty much push right through everything else - it's a matter of going to your outermost nodes and clicking all the enemy nodes :P

I just wished the interface wasn't so annoying...

Thanks @tuism I pretty much agree with everything you said. I really struggled with the interface design and due to time in the end I had to go with something that wasn't perfect. It caused me to miss out getting other features in such as alerts and multiplayer. 48 hours just wasn't enough time to work out the issues.

This was as fun as it looked from the screenshot last night. I found the gameplay quite entertaining, and it took a couple of attempts to figure out a strategy that worked well. I found the interface for port-forwarding quite intuitive (after reading the instructions on this page) and the only thing I may have changed would be to have a shorter cycle. I found it annoying sometimes to be clicking on 10 little dots if I wanted to focus the output of a node somewhere (which I ended up doing a lot). I really liked the graphics for the map, I found it fairly easy to tell which nodes belonged to which faction, and it felt very well balanced. I did notice a problem with looking at the bottom of the globe, it was sometimes hard to find Jang Bogo. I couldn’t tell, but did the opponents have any strategy or bonuses, or were they just sitting on the default generation and forwarding settings the whole time?

I don’t see what your interpretation of the theme is, as far as I could tell the more of anything (access points, mainframes, data packets) I had the better off I was. The only thing that may have gotten worst in the number of incoming packets spreading my defenses thinner, but it really wasn’t that much of a problem because as soon as I was able to get another mainframe I overwhelmed everyone else.

I had a lot of fun playing this. Great submission!

@smilewood Glad you understood the interface, as @tuism said a drag bar would probably have been better. For the theme I thought you'd be frantically clicking all over the more access points you captured, but it didn't work out like that. To be honest I'm glad, the frantic clicking thing would have been less fun. The AI is limited, that was another thing that I ran out of time before getting it properly into the game.

Once you understand the interface it's great. I can't believe this is a Compo game. One of the best games i played in this jam so far!

Nice game. I grasped the game mechanics pretty quickly, but it took me long to work out a working strategy. Like the others already mentioned: as soon as you get another mainframe, it is rather easy to overtake the whole network.

It would've been nice, if there had been a win screen of some kind. Even if it just was a "You won!". Felt a little bit incomplete this way.

Good job!

Commenting, but haven't left ratings yet, because I really want to play the game properly before I do, but I feel so incredibly thick right now, and I almost feel ashamed posting admitting this instead of just moving on quietly, when evidently others figured it out as seen by the comments but… I just don't get it. I've read the post and the comments and messed around in-game but no luck. Can you help me? /: I'm guessing this makes more sense if you actually know anything about networking, but I don't really. There's so much going on everywhere on the screen that it's hard to really focus on anything in order to try and understand what it does. I'm getting overwhelmed.

@ava-skoog The easiest way to understand it is to forget the whole network/hacking thing. Manchester is your base, it is making dots for you and sending them down the lines. If you click on Manchester you can use the panel in the bottom right to decide where the dots it makes go. If you click all the dots next to Madrid, like the image up top, all the dots made will be sent to Madrid. You can now click Madrid and do the same thing except send all the dots to Dakar. After a few seconds you'll have captured Dakar, and you can repeat the process to capture other places. But remember if you are sending all your dots down one line you are vulnerable to attack down other lines. Happy hacking.

I absolutely love this concept, it's fantasic and I think I just spent about an hour playing it. However, in that hour I never once managed to make any progress. I don't know if I'm missing something, but it seemed any time I tried to focus on taking over anyone else's access points, I started to lose my own. I was never able to take anyone else's mainframe despite tweaking my strategy a lot. Of course, it's possible I'm just stupid but the game seems very hard. I'll probably come back to this soon for another attempt.

This is a good game. It desperetely needs a more advanced tutorial though.

Took a little bit to realize what was going on and how to control, but it's like Risk for network packets which is a fun idea!

@osterzone Try maxing out Madrid>Dakar>Lagos as quickly as possible at the start. But remember to spread your Data Packets back out afterwards.

Oh I love it. It would be awesome if you had multiple maps. I can think of starting with a single building and scaling up in each level, to city, county, state, country, continent, world. Each time only the hubs of that scale are visible.

Instantly reminded me of Galcon :)
However this had a nice twist to it!
I really enjoyed it, but instead of getting harder the more I had I though it turned more and more easy the more cities I took.
The UI could use some tweaks(the reset button was very helpful), two ideas are 1. clicking a city name could switch all ports to that city and 2. click+hold+dragging over several ports could toggle them to prevent a lot of clicking :)

Looks very nice!

Good job!!

Took me a bit to understand how to play but once I did I found it really enjoyable. I think with multiplayer and an in game tutorial could make it even better. Really good job on it.

A good looking, well-functioning and polished video game. I could spend hours figuring our the best strategy for this game. A real gem.

Very fun game. Interface is overloaded particularly the vertical bars which connect town to corresponding port. The AI strategy is not very good (but it's kind of good otherwise it would crush any human rapidly). The text is unreadable on the switch. This is a simulation quite useful to understand influence in the context of networks. It reminded me of dns cache poisoning. What is fun is to watch your clueless opponents getting slowly overcome by an unstoppable wave of reinforcements once you grabbed a few main frames.

To turn it into a business, it can be adapted to model accurately how you can change the opinion of people by turning a few key influencers via their friends on the social graph with ads or specially bot crafted ideas, then once converted they will convince their sheep audience. Then you show your technology to a few lobbyist/brand and show how it can help them at reduced cost achieve their agenda/improve branding.

What's my prize?

Some problems: The AI seems to do quite literally nothing. All their networks set to just the default, at least as far as I could tell. So when I find out a viable strategy I encounter no resistance whatsoever. This would make for a good multiplayer game. I'd really like to be able to click the city name to send all packets there instead of clicking twelve separate hexagons, or clicking and dragging - or both. I restarted once. For some reason I was expecting something like random starting spots but there was not. Would have been a benefit I think. It seems weird that none of the cities you capture apart from "main" cities create any packets. I get that you have to stick to the theme but that strikes me as a bit of a flimsy implementation of the theme and makes the game a little more clumsy as a result. You can redirect packets endlessly between your core and one adjacent city and you'd have as many packets as any other faction, with the added bonus of being invincible.
I enjoyed the process of *trying to figure out* a winnable strategy, even if implementing said strategy was a bit dull. Playing around with what happens if I do X, Y and Z in this system is a lot of fun. Visual style is superb imo.

@players: The strategy is to reroute all packets between two cities in an endless loop. You'll get a huge number of them bouncing between the two of them. You can then use this massive collection of packets to "nuke" an enemy city and very possibly get their central base too. You want to make sure that packets going to these two cities go through a bunch of your other cities too, make sure they don't get captured.

Great looking game, and an interesting strategy. I love the feeling of spreading out my influence across the world. From here, I can imagine capturing a satellite uplink and sending my data packets to another planet.

I think the trouble I had learning to play at first was all the proper nouns (or at least they felt like proper nouns?) in the description. Mainframe? Data Packet? Fire Wall? I just wanted to know where to click. Once I figured that out, the rest can kind of be discovered through play.

This was really cool! I really wish it had any sort of tutorial at all, though, even if it was just a few screenshots with sections highlighted and some text. I had no idea what I should click, or how to do anything. I stuck with it and eventually figured it out and I'm glad I did. It was really well done.

The visuals were good, but some of the text was hard to read, especially the dark text on the light blue background. The packet information was really clearly shown, so you could tell when you were going back and forth on a city.

I don't think it really fits the theme at all. It was definitely better the more cities I controlled. At least more mainframes. I wish there was some sort of factor that made it harder later. Once I had 3 mainframes of packets at my disposal I basically didn't have to do anything. It put all of the interesting gameplay at the beginning. But ultimately it was great!

Great job! :) Initially I thought there was no way to make progress, but I kept trying until I got it.

Just two things: Looks like you have some rebel packets here... :')


And I didn't really like that effect (or whatever it's called) around the globe. Maybe in part because I already think people overuse such Unity effects, but it also caused a little momentary confusion, since enemies are identified by their colors and, you know...


But it was very fun! After a few minutes I noticed there was basically no AI, and I thought it would be easy. Not so much... At least until I had a good idea. Even then, I didn't immediately take over everything. I could see a relation to the theme before I managed to take over another mainframe, but not for long indeed.

With the improvements people have talked about, it would be even better. :)

Edit: I've just discovered I can zoom!

I really like the graphics, but in the source code download did not work.

The graphics is great but the controls are a bit tedious, I'd love to have a button to change from (my) switch to another. Great fun anyways!

@gerox Your right. Added it now. Thanks

Interesting game, but hard to sustain any takeover.

I'm not entirely sure that I'm playing this right. It took me some time to figure out how to actually play this game (Despite reeding your instructions twice).

I'm still not quite sure how to actually play to win, but looking at the bright dots flowing across the wires has a very nice soothing effect. This is probably one of the games I've spent most time with in this LD.

Hello again!

I think I got it in the end, but I wasn't good enough to win. I managed to keep a small but stable network going around Manchester but never succeeded in branching out to any of the other bigger cities, which kept smashing down my attempts to get at the smaller nodes along the way.

Nonetheless, after I finally understood what I was doing, it was a pretty cool game! The graphics are really good and the 3D globe is gorgeous. Too bad there ain't no audio!

I'm guessing you made it primarily for fullscreen but it would've been nice if the text had been a bit bigger so that it were more legible in windowed mode too. c:

And of course the relation to the theme is that it gets worse and more difficult to manage the more nodes one does manage to capture and have to keep track of and defend!

Difficult to say much more! It's very polished and looks very nice. The only issue is the difficulty of getting into it and understanding the gameplay as well as the interface. I'm guessing a full version would have to ease the player into it with some kind of safe tutorial mode rather than throwing one straight into the battle, but for a jam game it's very, very well done!