The game
NETGODZ.
A single-player hacking-sim roguelike set in the world described across the rest of this site. You play a runner: a contractor with a deck, hired by people who need something out of somebody else's building. You fit a cyberdeck with memory enough for about half of what you want, take a job from a client who keeps their reasons to themselves, and run it. The picture moves through thirteen graphics eras, from a teletype printing in dashes to what 1984 would have called photoreal. Play it in your browser now; coming to iOS and Android.
- In development
- iOS
- Android
- Single player
- Thirteen eras
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 this page will be the first thing to say so when there is a build.
The shape of it
One deck, and a chain of jobs that only you can end.
A raid is one target. A run is the chain of raids until you bank it or die holding it.
Read the job
You get three numbers about a target you have never seen. Turning a job down is a legitimate move, and often the right one.
Fit the deck
No clock runs while you fit the deck, and it is still the hardest part. Memory runs out long before your list of warez does, so you have to decide which ICE you will have no answer for.
Get out under your own power
The haul banks only if you disconnect. If you are traced or your deck fails, you lose the haul and the run. The game never disconnects you for you.
The rules, in full and without marketing Which deck you would run
Thirteen eras
The same net, drawn thirteen ways.
The first campaign is a teletype: one colour, rules made of dashes, bars made of hashes. Finish it and the next one runs on glass. Then amber phosphor with the tube included, then a vector tube, then grey bevelled chrome, then a teal desktop, then brushed metal, then frosted dark, then polygons, then a lit world.
- 00ASCII
- 01Terminal
- 02Terminal II
- 03Vector
- 04Vector II
- 05Raster
- 06Raster II
- 07Raster III
- 08Raster IV
- 093D
- 103D II
- 11Modern 3D
- 12Photoreal
Impressions of each era's chrome, drawn in CSS. Scroll it sideways.
The picture improves because the client on the other end of the line can afford better, and the client can afford better because of the jobs you do.
Why it plays the way it does
Four decisions the whole game is built out of.
Memory is the scarce resource
A Mark I deck gives you six memory. A breaker costs two or three. The program that actually earns you anything costs three. You cannot carry a counter for every kind of ICE and the earner. That is deliberate, and it will not be patched.
Trace is your odds, not your timer
Nothing shoots at you until you are discovered. Every action rolls against your current trace as the chance of being the one that gives you away. At 20 trace that is one in five, and at 60 it is worse than a coin flip every time you act. The way to pay less is to do fewer, better-chosen things.
Surviving and winning cost the same money
Repairs, refits, better warez and the next deck up all come out of the run total, and the run total is your score. Every credit spent on staying alive comes off the final number.
The companies are the same companies
The deck you are financing is a Cybrscape, the benchmark you are being sold against is a Nitrosoft number, and the market you buy warez from is somewhere you can also visit in a browser. The five websites belong to the same companies, and they are still trading when the game is closed.
Era zero is the compatibility floor. Every mechanic has to stay legible in dashes and hashes, so no piece of information can exist only in a later era's art.
Who is paying
Somebody on the other end of the line.
The jobs come from a client who is patient, and better funded every time you hear from them. They don't explain themselves and the game doesn't explain them for you. You work out what they want from what they keep asking for.
This page won't say more than that. The story is the game's to tell, at the pace players earn it.