z88.inject

This is my entry to the GMTK 2018 game jam, "Genre without Mechanic". Fair warning, there are some punky jokes that might not be appropriate for children.

I decided to try making an old-school brawler game, without any direct fighting elements. The hacking scene in CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 recent gameplay video completely captivated me recently, so I explored that concept.

Controls:

[A] [D] // Move left and right
[SPACE] // Jump
[ESC] // Restart level

When disconnected:

[J] // Fire jack to hack into enemies. They must be in front of you.

When connected:

[U] // Retract the jack to disconnect from an enemy. This can be dangerous or advantageous, depending on any hacks in progress.

[J] // Select the highlighted menu item
[I] [K] // Scroll up and down through menu

Description:

In z88.inject, you can move and jump to avoid enemy attacks, but you need to jack into them in order to disable or destroy them. There are three vulnerabilities you can exploit to gain their resistance information (higher numbers mean your payloads may not work, and even stun you) and lower their resistances, and three payloads that you can deploy to permanently stun, get all information about the group, or kill the enemy.

It's not nearly as polished as I'd like, but I'm pretty happy with how the hacking mechanics turned out. There's a lot of potential for interesting combinations of stats and enemies, which require using different exploits and payloads to take advantage.

There is no real endgame or working "game over" screen, but you can kill all the enemies on the stage and pretend you got revenge on some supercorp that wronged you :)

Tools:

Unity3D, FL Studio + custom Serum instruments made for this jam, a tape recorder, Audacity, Pickle sprite editor

Font credits

(license information on pages):

http://www.fontspace.com/chequered-ink/rocket-rinder
https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/readme/

Mechanics

Access Hacks:

• optiknrv changes the "?" resistances to their true number on the enemy. The higher the number, the slower the hack will take (and above 2 will cause hacks to fail and stun you). It also enables a floating HUD above the enemy.
• SndbxEscpr0.print will reduce all resistances to 0
• disko requires disconnecting at the right time, but when you reconnect all resistances will be 0 and payloads will deploy immediately rather than uploading.

Payload Hacks:

• c0rrupt stuns the enemy if you remove the jack while another payload hack is uploading
• dD05 will permanently stun the enemy until you use it on another
• meltedghost will effectively deploy optiknrv on all enemies within a group
• Stuxdestruct kills the enemy