Martin Ziegler

Project Introduction

Netspectre invites the player to experience life of a hacker in an original cyberpunk universe. The gameplay stands on three pillars, each allowing the player to appreciate a different aspect of this experience:

1/ The heart of Netspectre lies in the metaphorical hacking, taking place through solving netsecurity-themed, procedurally-generated, tactical puzzles. This allows the players to feel like a hacker through feeling smart and resourceful as well as through evocative audiovisual aesthetics.

2/ Inbetween the hacking runs, the players use their resources to upgrade their hacking machine in order to keep up with the increasingly complex security mechanisms. This invites the player to feel like a hacker through interacting hands-on with the technology and hardware.

3/ The hypercapitalist nature of our world means that another important aspect of life for the player is navigating the social currents of their megacity, i.e. the various markets for contracts, components, and other opportunities. To this end, Netspectre incorporates short stories to contextualise the hacking gameplay within a wider narrative framework. This allows the player to experience being a cyberpunk hacker through their relationships to others and the world around them.

Netspectre is a roguelike designed for high-replayability, with a single playthrough taking 30-60 minutes. It is currently in pre-alpha: completely playable from start to finish, thoroughly playtested and iterated to achieve cool and innovative gameplay, and now looking for resources to work on its audiovisual presentation and to scale its narrative content.

About Developer

We came together as a team for the specific mission of creating Netspectre, being fans of roguelikes, cyberpunk, and hacking games. All of us work on Netspectre either in our spare time as a passion project, or as freelancers paid from the modest personal savings invested into Netspectre by the main developer. Right now, we're looking for funding that would allow us to work on Netspectre fulltime in the final stretch of development. The ultimate goal is to release Netspectre to a commercial success that will allow us to continue with development of innovative videogames with a compact team of strong personalities from a position of artistic independence.