The eras

Thirteen versions of the net.

An era is the whole net at one point in its life: what it can draw, what it can carry, and what anyone standing in it is able to do. In NETGODZ, the single-player mini game, an era is the look of a campaign: twenty-eight targets played end to end on one machine. In the larger game it becomes somewhere you live, with its own population.

Either way, the picture only changes between campaigns, never in the middle of a raid.

Why it matters

Why the picture gets better.

When you finish a campaign, the next one is drawn at the best fidelity your client can now pay for. The client can pay for more because of the jobs you did in the last campaign, so a better picture is a record of how much work you have done for them.

The look changes and the tone does not. Gibson and Stephenson hold at every era. The ground stays near-black, the accent stays warm amber, and the language stays clipped and commercial whether it is printing on paper or rendering in a lit 3D scene.

All thirteen

Teletype to photoreal.

Vector comes before raster, which is also the true order: Battlezone is 1980 and Windows 3.0 is 1990, so a vector tube really does predate the grey GUI. The swatches below are impressions of each era's chrome, drawn in CSS.

Era 00

ASCII

A teletype: one colour on paper, rules made of dashes, bars made of hashes, icons three characters wide. A glass screen would be a luxury here.

Where you start

Era 01

Terminal

Amber phosphor with the tube included: scanlines, bloom, and a barrel vignette pulling the corners in.

Campaign 1 cleared

Era 02

Terminal II

The glass teletype. Monospace, no colour past the amber, and nothing on screen that a serial line could not have sent.

Campaign 2 cleared

Era 03

Vector

Battlezone. A beam draws lines and nothing is filled. Vector really did come before the grey GUI that follows it.

Campaign 3 cleared

Era 04

Vector II

The beam learns to fill. Flat-shaded polygons, still glowing, still lit from nowhere in particular.

Campaign 4 cleared

Era 05

Raster

Early Windows. Grey chrome, one-step bevels, black text on #C0C0C0. Each raster era is drawn as the operating system of its years.

Campaign 5 cleared

Era 06

Raster II

Windows 95. Teal desktop, two-step bevels, gradient title bars, and more icons than text.

Campaign 6 cleared

Era 07

Raster III

Snow Leopard. Brushed metal, pinstripes, glossy buttons and soft drop shadows, from the years when software wanted to look like an appliance.

Campaign 7 cleared

Era 08

Raster IV

Modern macOS. Frosted vibrancy, hairline borders, generous radii, dark by default. The era that thinks it has stopped having a style.

Campaign 8 cleared

Era 09

3D

A perspective grid floor and flat faces standing on it, with the affine wobble of a console that could not afford to correct for it.

Campaign 9 cleared

Era 10

3D II

The same geometry, textured. A specular sweep across the surfaces and depth fog swallowing the back of the grid.

Campaign 10 cleared

Era 11

Modern 3D

A cyan grid and ribbons of light: the net drawn as the inside of a machine.

Campaign 11 cleared

Era 12

Photoreal

The same world, lit red. It is what 1984 imagined photoreal would look like, closer to a paperback cover than a tech demo.

Campaign 12 cleared

The rules

Three rules for eras.

Eras unlock, never replace
Reaching Vector adds Vector to a menu that still contains ASCII, Terminal and Terminal II. If you want to play all twenty-eight targets on the glass teletype forever, that is a supported way to play.
Era zero is the compatibility floor
Every mechanic has to stay legible in dashes and hashes, so no information can exist only in a later era's art. That constraint is why the ASCII era is a full way to play.
Each era fails the way its machines failed
Losing a run looks like the generation you are losing it in. A teletype does not crash the way Windows 95 crashes, and neither of them crashes the way a lit 3D scene falls apart.

Finishing a campaign ends the run. Clearing the final target banks the score and stops, so the renderer never changes partway through a chain, and a win gets its own screen.

Where this is going

Later, an era stops being a look and starts being an address.

The reason thirteen eras were worth building before anything else is that in the larger game they are the map. An era becomes a version of the net that players inhabit and progress through, and you can only see and attack other players in your own era.

A teletype net and a lit 3D net then run at the same time, occupied by different people who cannot reach each other, each with its own ceiling on what is technically possible. Moving forward is a trade: it changes who can find you and who you can no longer find.

None of this is announced, and there is no date and nothing to sign up to. What's next says how far along it is (not far).

The mini game The five websites