Viral Nexus by Nimolas
📖 Introduction
Viral Nexus is a strategy game where players take control of a computer virus as it spreads through a digital system. Starting from an infected node, your mission is to grow in power by drawing paths and sending out Nanites to gather resources from various Processor Nodes. As your network expands, the challenge intensifies: enemy firewalls appear to halt your progress and destroy your Nanites.
With a limited number of resources and increasing threats, you must carefully navigate the system, managing your viral spread to dominate the grid. Can you infect the system and outsmart its defenses, or will your viral nexus be contained?
🎓 How To Play
🎯 The Objective
The aim of the game, is to use your Nanites to collect enough Processing Power from the target system, to gain access to the mainframe - to do this you'll need to gather 2000 power.
The host system will be trying to quarantine you however, avoid the spawning Firewalls as they will destroy your Nanites. If you are left with no Nanites and not enough power to spawn anymore, you will be kicked out of the host and will have to find a new target.
👣 Paths
To create paths, left click on any existing node or path and draw in the direction you want.
To remove paths, right click and drag over the paths you want to delete.
🪲 Nanites
Your Nanites are how you take over the system. At a cost of 3 Processing Power, they are automatically created and sent on any available path. The Nanites are simple in design and will randomly take any path available to them, even if it means certain destruction. A Nanite can be killed either by Firewalls or walking off a empty path.
Nodes
🦠 Virus Base
The Virus Base is the center of the world, this is where your Nanites initially spawn from. Draw paths from here to Processor Nodes to collect Processing Power.
⚡ Processor Nodes
Directing your Nanites to Processor Nodes will award you with Processing Power which is used to spawn more Nanites. Processor Nodes spawn randomly in the world as the game progresses.
📂 File Bases
File Bases will also spawn randomly in the world. They have a counter next to them that represents how many Nanites are needed in order to capture the base.
Once a File Base has been captured, Nanites will spawn from there.
🔥 Firewalls
Firewalls are deployed by the system to stop your Nanites. They are only placed on path tiles and if your Nanites run into they, they will be destroyed.
🕹️ Basic Controls
- Left Mouse Button to draw paths.
- Right Mouse Button to remove paths.
- Middle Mouse Button to pan the camera.
- Scroll Wheel to zoom in and out.
Ratings
| Overall | 484th | 3.609⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 749th | 3.172⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 481th | 3.375⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 576th | 3.641⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 511th | 3.719⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 554th | 3.081⭐ | 33🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 866th | 2.328⭐ | 31🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 828th | 3.172⭐ | 34🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 31🗳️ | 41🗨️ |
Nanites spawn, numbers grow, firewalls block paths, but I still don't understand what's happening. %)
The mechanics work really well - the nanites taking any available path and any adjacent tiles forming a path adds a really good level of complexity to how you need to approach drawing paths. Gets some great depth out of an easy to understand premise!
Need a speedup button.
I beat the system!! the sad part was that I was getting good at it and I had to start over if I wanted to play again.
The only aspect to improve I'd say is that for me the camera was not great: I played with trackpad and it was super difficult to just zoom-out one step, I ended with full-zoom-out all the times. And it would be nice if it was possible to move the camera (sometimes I missed new stuff because I had too much zoom)
GREAT JOB! :)
The game was designed with mouse in mind, so movement and zooming is done with the scroll wheel moving back and forth, and being held down while you move the mouse. We didn't take into account the different type of peripherals when designing the game. That is something we will consider for next time.
We also plan to rework the game and hopefully get a better more usable version up at some point. Stay tuned
I would have liked that arrow keys worked to move in the world. The middle button is not very convenient.
The start button does not work after I played once, but I just had to refresh the page.
It would have been clearer to separate the processing power in 2 distinct variables:
- the resources, used to generate nanites
- the processing power, you need to have 2000 to win.
It's not clear how the resources are generated. I guess we have a little of them regularly, and we can get more each time we send a nanite to a processor node. But I'm not sure of this.
There is no real use to connect to all the processor nodes. You get the same benefit from sending 100 nanites to a processor and from sending 50 nanites to two processor each. A cooldown on the processors, or processor with limited resources, would have added more incentive to connect to more of them.
The file bases are really particular to manage. A captured file base generate nanites, but nanites who goes into it do not walk backward. So, when you capture a file base, it is strongly advised to connect at least 2 paths to it, or nanites will die into it.
File base don't spawn nanites when no paths are connected to them. But if you are unlucky, a firewall spawns just next to a captured file base. Then, nanites spawns from the base and get burnt in the firewall. You can't stop them.
Firewall randowny spawns on existing paths. So I just cheated and created a big zone of useless paths. Then I could chill while creating my real paths. Because the firewalls would all fall in the useless zone. Below is a screenshot of the end of my game.
Overall, the game is a really nice idea. But there are multiple details to improve in the game mechanics, to reduce bad luck, cheating and unfairness.
Creating circuits is a bit awkward because:
- I can't draw a circuit with curves, only straight;
- If I want to go near the firewalls or another circuits, the new build that I create will automatically makes the intersections with those and sometimes I don't want this.
Also, @recher is right about the spawning of firewalls. A solution I would offer you is that to check each circuit for the frequency of passing nanites and pick one of the highest frequency positions to place the firewall. So the player should build another path more often!
Overall, is a great game! Keep developing this, is quite fun!!!