The Hacker was known as the best of the best, delving into dark servers no one else could penetrate and returning with glittering data to sell on the black market.
Nobody knows why they quit. Some say their will was broken by the dark secrets at the heart of the Mainframe. Some say they simply retired to a penthouse suite in Low Earth Orbit.
But when you leave the world of high-stakes cybercrime, it's hard to stay gone. With a call from an old enemy in need of help..
I'm making a new game in the 868-HACK series. If you've played the original: welcome back; you'll find a lot has changed around here. If you're new to the series: welcome, here's a good place for you to start!
I'm aiming for a release mid-2025. It's developed in Godot engine, and will be released on Windows, MacOS, Linux, iOS and Android (and I'm open to other platforms if the opportunity shows up). I'm working on multiple UI layouts so it's native on any hardware, including a luxurious wide-screen PC version and a tight mobile portrait mode.
(Note that the game is a work in progress. I'm less than halfway through my estimated development time. None of the images shown here represent the final graphics of the game. There's a lot of work left to do!)
868-BACK, like 868-HACK, is inspired by roguelike dungeon crawlers — but the dungeons are computer servers, and your weapons are illicit software tools.
It's a game of taking risks to steal valuable data. Every nasty situation you find yourself in is your own fault. When you succeed, you know you’ve gotten away with something.
Your hacking "progs" have modular effects that can be chained in sequence to make complex combos. It's not computer programming, but it has a similar brainfeel (with less hard work).
It's a new game built from the ground up. I've freely reused design elements and concepts from the original, and the core gameplay of siphoning / progging / fighting is similar, but what I'm building on that foundation is something else.
Most progs are either completely new or substantially remixed. Some old favourites return, but you'll be playing with a lot of new possibilities - cunning tactics like .TROJAN and .LAG; big bold effects like .SPAM and .FORK; and distinctive programming-esque abilities like .BIND and .LOOP.
There's a much bigger world to explore. You can carefully plan your route across the network, researching what countermeasures a server is harbouring — or risk everything by going in blind. You'll encounter returning 'favourites' like Virus motion improved! and terrifying new challenges like AI-enhanced progs!
There are also new rewards to be gained: high-tech devices that let you rewrite the rules of the game. Craft your build with quirky combinations — /glitch through walls, /echo your prog effects, /widen your siphons, /bank your credits, and much more!
Trade with the cyborg gulls.
The graphics and sound are all new. I'm aiming for a higher level of audiovisual aesthetics than I've yet achieved in my games. While it's using a pixel-art style, it's not a "retro game", and I'm using modern shader tech to make it shine.
There may be new secrets and mysteries to explore.
"Michael Brough is the greatest living game designer" - Frank Lantz (Chair Emeritus of the NYU Game Center). Honestly this quote is a bit much but if people are gonna say things like that I should probably use them.
My games have been nominated for a bunch of awards, regularly cited as an influence by other designers, taught in game studies courses, etc. More importantly, they're fun games that people like to play!
If you've been following me, you'll know that I haven't released anything new for a few years. I've had to learn how to pace myself to live with chronic illness. I'm still affected by it but I've recovered a lot. Now I'm in good health and I'm able to work consistently and creatively again. I'm not going to jam out a dozen bangers in a year like I could in my 20s, but I've already done that. I'm going to do something different. I've travelled to the underworld and returned with fire and wisdom and I'm going to make some fucking art.
Just like our smiley-faced hacker hero, I've been out of the game for a while and now I'm back.
This is my comeback game. It's a worthy one. The design is fierce strong. I'm building on work I've done before, letting go of nonsense limitations I was placing on myself about "not repeating myself" or whatever. I'm repeating myself, louder. I'm standing on the shoulders of a giant and the giant is also me. This is a collaboration between wise old dad Michael and eager young past Michael and we're both on fire.
I've always made my games on a low budget and worked within my means. But due to my illness, I haven't released a new game since 2019 (and that was a fairly small one). I released an expansion for Imbroglio in 2020 and re-released Zaga-33 on new platforms last year, and while those were greatly appreciated by fans they didn't bring in much income. And meanwhile my wife Tara's career has been negatively affected by having children and supporting me through my sickness: at the moment we have very little income between us. I have supporters on Patreon, who I really appreciate, and their donations cover most of our rent - but not the rest of our living costs.
So most of the money goes towards supporting me and my family.
Tara is now studying music production part-time, and we're planning to collaborate on the game's soundtrack; she has access to a recording studio and if we have enough funds we'd like to bring in some session musicians to make the soundtrack really special. I'm developing most of the graphics for the game, but again if there's enough money I'd like to commission a few scenes from a cool pixel artist to help bring the game to life visually.
The scale of the project is on par with the biggest games I've made before. 868-BACK has a similar amount of game design content to Imbroglio (maybe a little more), and that took a couple of years. This won't take as long because I'm building on my experience with 868-HACK, but it's still a substantial amount of work.
The biggest risk to the project is that my health might take a turn for the worse again. I don't think this is likely. In the last two years I've had two moderate relapses, which I was able to recover from with a few weeks of reduced activity. Aside from that I just have occasional bad days. I've planned for possible delays of a month: this should be plenty. As long as I have some money, when I start to feel unwell I can do things like ordering food delivery on a difficult day, or paying for a babysitter, and that buys me enough rest to prevent it from escalating.
In all other respects, this is a low-risk project! Apart from the times when I was too sick to work, I've had a great track record of finishing and releasing games. This game is a sequel to an already-proven design, so there's less uncertainty than usual. Adding new mechanics has introduced new design challenges, but I've already solved many of them and work is progressing well.
Because I'm building up from a previous game's design to make something significantly bigger, the scope is already quite large. I don't want to enlarge it any further than I've already planned. With a densely interconnected game like this, increasing the size requires a combinatorial increase in the development time.
There are a few areas where extra spending will improve the game without drastically increasing development time - see my update post on Stretch Goals for further detail. But once we've achieved these goals, anything further wiIl go towards future work: I have some really ambitious long-term projects I want to work on and the more financial security we have, the more I can focus on those.
Also:
I'll buy a monitor the size of a (small) mattress.
I will get extra teeth implanted for even faster eating.
I'll install an extra night on top of night to make sleeping twice as effective.
I’ll buy a permanent oxygen license, to be done with oxygen bills for good.
I'll finally get that jamjet toaster-printer I've always wanted.
