Week 4: An incremental game - CyberClicker

Oh. Already? Alright, I learned a lot from my last game, it can't go wrong again. Especially when I'm working with a team now right?

...right?

I was put in a respectable team of 5 and I immediately took upon an artist role. Even if I am not a fan of clicker game, my head was boiling with crazy ambitious ideas(instincts). Now that I do not have to worry about spending several days in a row learning a code I do not know of...

I can spend several days in a row learning... Shaders that I never had any knowledge of!🤡

haha.. ha. This lockdown definitely made me thirsty for good challenges.

So my first idea was to make an incremental game, inspired by Deus Ex hacking system:

A clicker game where you are the hacker, spreading the virus, which as you click, collects people's files and user data until you take over their computer.

After spamming the targets drive, you keep traveling down the line infecting all the drives in your way.

Score: Collected bytes of data/Clicks per second

Randomized Enemy: Antivirus, fight by clicking faster

Goal: After certain amounts of collected data you can reach the computers of bigger corporations.

The idea *clicked* fast, however, after this discussion, we received some updates from our programmers of the team, that either a busy weekend or a hard week is waiting for them, which might pull them away from the project.

Not the greatest thing to hear when a tight deadline is approaching but..

Hey! I can have an entire weekend to learn shaders until everyone is back for work! 🤡

And so my research begun

I was desperate to learn how to work with Unreal shaders system after I saw shapes like these:

I did start playing around in Unreal, and the process seemed to be smooth until I realized that I do not have hexagon texture. So I got convinced that I need to create an animation and shader-ready 3D hexagon from scratch first, but since our project was supposed to take place in the Unity engine, I decided to devote all my fate to Houdini software and extract the shape into Unity.

Spoiler alert: this was definitely not the quickest way out.

I started by creating a shape in the Houdini engine, adding a facet(pipeline to change geometry in stages) and UV cords to debug the Mapping,

Then I created an attribute to store Position Coords with v@StorePos = @P; before moving vertices to take the UV Cords as Position Coords with VEXpression of @P = v@uv;

(All the codes are hand-picked with love from the internet)

After working around a couple more geometry nodes and making UV relax, I popped ROP_FBX1 output in, to make my cube ready for extraction to Unity.

ROP_FBX1?

More like

RIP_fbx1...

As it was already Sunday, I could not afford to spend another evening figuring out why won't Houdini like me.

Trust issues? Abusive past relationships? Jealousy?

Probably needs some space...

So I left Houdini alone and came back to my old-time loyal friend Photoshop, to accumulate another concept that will be strictly in 2D. This way our other artist will be able to contribute much more freely as well.

And this is where I put together the latest version of the Cyber clickers interface.

Cyber Clicker v2

Concept art:

The goal of the design was to mimic the classic, stereotypical hacker screen filled with cmd consoles. And of course, color 2 turned on.

The PNG file of the first interface layer was immediately put into Unity, and I collaborated with the second artist to put together buttons and update icons.

The main mechanic

Sped up gameplay example:

The core gameplay of CyberClicker revolves around hitting the button to watch the bar load up more and more with every click until it hits 100% and a red dot in the map appears(signifying infected computers location), pumping up your collected data score.

Updates available:

Each update costs a certain amount of data, but it lets the loading bar slowly start filling by itself when the game is left on idle. However without the spamming, hitting 100% at least once is still gonna take a long time, with the goal of making the player engaged.

Potential danger:

Uw~ what are these Christmas lights?

As the player keeps filling up the loading bar and watching the infected computers appear on the map, they still need to watch out! Because the Antivirus for a hacker in this game is the biggest enemy.

To escape being traced, the player is supposed to click even faster and be sure to have enough data to buy a whole set of upgrades because during this stage it becomes really hard to fill up the bar by yourself.

The console

Oh this was just fun times smashing my keyboard at https://hackertyper.net/

The fall of CyberClicker

The CyberClicker, I'd say, was a definition of an overly ambitious project. I am guilty of drowning and dreaming of shaders and 3D assets that I barely touched before to be done in 2 days. After I settled on creating a 2D UI, the lack of discipline has got the worst of all of us. The miscommunication between coders caused several mechanics to be done twice, and with a lack of experience on the Unity collaboration system, we all ended up on different versions of the game. However, this experience was vital for the further success of my upcoming projects where we finally agreed on an official leader and a strict agile working ethic.