SGEngine recovery 1

Last year I started clumsily making the outlines of a far-too-ambitious, graphical-but-text-driven RPG thing which was meant to topple PS:T, Disco Elysium and various versions of Shadowrun all in one stroke of teh pen. giggle. Here's a more scaled-back start, wrested from some really bad code and reconstituted as slightly less-bad code, which centres Hollywood-style "hacking" and the fighting of security countermeasures with magic 'n superior cyberdecking. That's a classic area of gaming that I at once love and am disappointed with... every notable game simply mirrors its offline encounters into neon-coloured more of the same, from Shadowrun Returns to Starcrawlers, etc. etc. Here's more of an attempt to describe hacking battles as their own thing, incorporating investigation and prepared magic, ways to evade encounters which put you in interesting positions, and generally attempting to de-emphasize HACK POW vs HACK DEF. The missions are/will be/could be laid out like text adventures or a single-user MUD area, where you "travel" through cyberspace and discover more locations by pinging the obvious ones, picking up tracking cookies and intercepting other user's perceptable signals and learn about the people using the network. Your ultimate goal isn't to spy on passersby but rather to get some juicy blackmail on some seriously corrupt corpos.

Gonna do a lot of small updates on this as I piece together my old snippets and slowly draw new sprites, etc.