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. Thirteen graphics eras, from a teletype printing in dashes to something 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, one job, and a chain 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. Every roll in the run is honest in both directions: the dice owe you nothing and they are out for nothing either.
Read the job
Three numbers about a target you have never seen. Deciding a job is not worth taking is a legitimate move, and often the correct one.
Fit the deck
Free, unhurried, and the hardest part. Memory runs out long before your wishlist does, so every raid begins by naming what you are prepared to be unable to answer.
Get out under your own power
The haul banks only if you disconnect. Traced or burned out, you lose it and the run with it — and leaving is always a decision you make, never one the game makes 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 thing on the other end of the line can afford better — and it can afford better because of what you keep doing for it. Era twelve is a receipt, and it has your name on it.
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 still carry the earner — and that is the game, not a balance bug waiting to be patched out.
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; at 60 it is a coin flip you keep taking. So 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 also your score. Spending on staying alive is spending on not winning. The whole economy exists to make that decision hurt.
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 are not tie-in material. They are where the world lives when the game is closed.
Era zero is the compatibility floor, and that is a design constraint rather than a novelty. Every mechanic has to stay fully legible in dashes and hashes, which means no piece of information is ever allowed to exist only in a later era's art.
Who is paying
Somebody on the other end of the line.
The jobs arrive from a client. The client is patient, precise, and better funded every time you talk to it. It does not explain itself and the game does not explain it for you — what it wants is something you work out by noticing what it keeps asking for.
That is as much as this page is going to say, and deliberately so. The world is open for reading; the story is the game's to tell, at the pace players earn it.