i… don’t know how to feel about this.
Your game is closer to create your own business as a legal entrepreneur,
There is a major issue in the whole directive design about this game, which leads to a very poor gameplay
(if the goal was to simulate hackers activity)
This is a regular placement tycoon, where you have to hire idle NPCs, place them, get a upgrade, and optionally put walls around the place to feels like a actual office. nothing unusual, and this is also a problem,
When you hear about “hackers”, you normally directly leads to think contents such as “illegal”, gouvernment, wanted, secret stuff, hidden, spy, a bit of dark side & the goal of profiting out of innocent people, Honestly, this game feels absolutely none of what i’ve mentionned, at all.
The whole map is bright, a rather dynamic ambiance, fun music, the setup is literally near the road, and the sense of danger “as a hacker” is inexistant.
You might be against my point, like there isn’t much feature to make a “scary themed tycoon”, There are several things you can add that would make the Gameplay much much more interesting.
First of all, how can you apply dark theme in a Tycoon ? the logic question that will make everything works is here, scary isn’t forcely visual, what could potentially lead to that is “Loss”, as a Hacker, being caught by the cops and losing workers/cash due to your misdeed and mistakes in hiding your suspicious activities make a big hit on the player, and that would be a major reason as of why the player would try harder in gathering informations & focus on objectives to progress, because there is no difficulty in the current state of your game, none, it’s all about waiting.
i’m not asking some very advanced mechanics here, but considering the work you’ve done, a alternaltive to the feature mentionned is definitively possibly, you can create these actions as “events” in the game, for example, Quests :
-
Hack the NASA before [deadline]
what to do : just make your workers focus on NASA. COM to receive data from them
-
Someone is trying to infiltrate your base ! (could be a NPC or a Player)
what to do : Change the PC’s Targeted’s Password (it’s just string change lol)
-
The FBI is watching !
what to do : Stop your bad activities for awhile or Change VPN (high level item)
Those just seems missions, but if there is eventually a pack of them, that would be entertaining in alot of ways because you fight for your goals, and really feels like solid progress when you get the hands of it, which will leads to a great extended lifespan overall.
