NetGodz · a single-player hacking-sim roguelike
Get in. Find the data,
get out.
A message from E. Starlight: hello. Are you receiving this? Look, I don't have a lot of time. Your references look good. This will be profitable for the both of us. You reply: what should I call you? She answers: call me Starlight. Are you ready?
Coming to iOS and Android. Play NetGodz RUN in your browser today.
Starlight reconnects, 1997
Dialling STARLIGHT NODE 7…
STARLIGHT NODE 7 · 555-0147
Thirteen versions of the net
The picture keeps getting better.
Thirteen eras of computing, one game. Earn your way from a 1969 teletype to 2029 and watch a new world come up around you — same run, same trace, same decisions, drawn by the hardware of each decade.
Starlightonline
Underneath
All of it is a building somewhere.
It is hardware in cages: buildings with a lease, a meter, a cooling bill and a courier who has to be buzzed in. That is what the net is in this world. Racks, owned in pieces, by companies that file tax returns.
And the demand only goes one way. The systems keeping that surface flawless need more capacity every quarter, better routes than the firm across the yard, and floor space in the buildings that matter. There is not enough of any of it, so they compete — as businesses compete, in leases and contracts and procurement rounds, and then in the work that does not go into a contract.
It is a war conducted almost entirely in paperwork. Almost.
Six of those hosts have a mailing address, a service contract and a page you can read. The seventh is the reason anybody in this world is nervous.
What is actually being fought over
Three things, all of them physical.
Compute, memory, and the power to run both
Memory is the scarce resource in every deck ever built, and it is no different two hundred racks up. Nobody in this world has ever had enough of it, and the people who have the most of it got it from somebody who then had less.
Whose wire your traffic crosses
Every route is a commercial arrangement between rivals. Which means somebody you compete with is carrying your traffic, at an agreed rate, and can see exactly how much of it there is.
A rack in the right building
Beats a better rack in the wrong one, every time. Distance is measured in milliseconds and milliseconds are priced, so the whole map is an argument about addresses.
All of it happens in procurement — which is where the work is, because a contract can specify almost anything except the part somebody has to go and do in person.
The part that involves you
Be a runner.
A runner is a contractor with a deck. Somebody with a budget wants something that is inside somebody else's building and is not going to go themselves, so they hire out the trip. You take one job, fit a deck that never has enough memory, and try to get out under your own power before anybody works out who was in there.
You are the freelancer they call when the surface has to stay clean. The first decision is whose deck you run.
Cybrscape
Founded on repair, grew into manufacture, and still prouder of its service department than of its product line. Decks are numbered in Marks, I through V, and every spec sheet admits that memory is the bottleneck.
- Will deal with one person who owns one deck.
- Quotes in credits at the works. The deck is run for four hours against the mark's test card, and the signed card ships with it.
- Thirty-six months of warranty from the date on that card, transferable with the deck.
- Publishes its service turnaround monthly, including the months it missed.
Nitrosoft
Younger, louder, and shipping a new generation faster than most people finish paying for the last one. Claims to waste less of the same memory than anybody else, and publishes the test harness so you can go and check.
- Sells through a yard's supply desk, against a deck code and a quantity.
- Credits settle on the yard account, and they say so up front.
- Benchmarks everything, and states the ceiling on its own headline number.
- Slower to answer the phone, and their support page says exactly how much slower.
Both are catalogues, not shops. Everything on them is priced in credits, which are earned in the game. Choosing a deck means reading two catalogues that disagree with each other and deciding which company you would trust with the only machine you own. Ten minutes, and the only thing it asks you for is an opinion.
The world
Five of these companies have real websites. Go and look.
They are written in character, with product pages, spec sheets, price lists and job listings. They hold that character everywhere except their terms and privacy pages, which break it in the first sentence. All five are fiction, and all five are there to be read.
Founded on repair, grew into manufacture. Decks are numbered in Marks, I through V, and every honest spec sheet on that site admits that memory is the bottleneck — because in this world it always is.
Younger, louder, ships faster, benchmarks everything, slightly worse at answering the phone. The two of them reference each other by name, which is the most realistic thing about either company.
A small, extremely expensive digital art gallery. A dozen works, not a marketplace, run by a dealer with actual taste.
A serious aerospace programme with a mission statement about the future of the species, a launch cadence, and cargo manifests so precise nobody has ever finished reading one.
Racks, routing, colocation — the hardware that is the net rather than a thing on it. The oldest of the five and by far the least visible, which is the usual arrangement for infrastructure. Currently hiring, which tells you what the demand for floor space is doing.
The game being built in it
NETGODZ — a single-player hacking-sim roguelike.
One runner, one deck, one job at a time. A raid is one target; a run is the chain of raids until you bank it or die holding it. Every action you take is a chance of being discovered, so the way through is fewer, better-chosen moves.
Thirteen graphics eras, from a teletype printing in dashes to something 1984 would have called photoreal. The picture improves between campaigns, and it improves for a reason that belongs to the story.
- In development
- iOS
- Android
- Single player
PLAYABLE NOW, IN A BROWSER. NetGodz RUN is the lite build, live at run.netgodz.com. The full game is in development for iOS and Android, and the world around it is up and can be read today.
- 00ASCII
- 01Terminal
- 02Terminal II
- 03Vector
- 04Vector II
- 05Raster
- 06Raster II
- 07Raster III
- 08Raster IV
- 093D
- 103D II
- 11Modern 3D
- 12Photoreal
Thirteen eras, drawn in CSS as impressions of their chrome. Scroll it sideways.
What's next
Later: a hacker role-playing game played across the real web.
The mini game is the first thing out. The whole idea is a net LARP: corporate factions attacking and defending their own take on the internet, played through downloadable browsers that function as actual cyberdecks, on desktop and in your hand. The thirteen eras become versions of the net, and you see and attack the people standing in the same era as you.
Fiction and reality, past and present and future, in the same game: the invented companies have real websites you can read today, the history inside the game maps onto the history of computing, and the eras let you walk backwards into the net's own past and forwards into whatever it becomes.