Hey there! I am still working on my current project where you play as a network engineer.

As a player, the main goal will consist in building a computer network and find efficient ways to route the traffic between the different endpoints that can be connected.

The previous post described some of the constraints I added to the level design in an attempt to make the tasks feel more like a puzzle than a chore.

But I still wanted to try to expend the concept a bit further. So I asked myself: what kind of interesting task would a typical network technician have to deal with? Respond to network incidents, of course!

Here is how the mechanic works so far from the player's perspective:

As you continue connecting more endpoints to the network, you quickly notice that something is odd: some of the endpoints you already connected some time ago don't respond to ping anymore. As you start investigating, you follow the cables to see if one of them got cut or disconnected. But you can't find anything. Everything seem to work as expected. So you keep walking until you reach the faulty endpoint:

You continue your investigation by inspecting the packets currently transmitted through the nearby network devices. 

You don't see anything abnormal until you find out that one of the endpoints (0.0.3.1 in this case) seems to send packets with very suspicious payloads:

You follow the cables that connect to 0.0.3.1 and you start feeling unusual radiations as you get closer to the emitter.

A few minutes later, you finally find the source of the issue:

Someone or something hijacked one of your endpoints. What will you do? Disconnect the endpoint completely? Filter out the packets emitted by the hacker? There are several ways to resolve the incident but I don't want to spoil too much here ;) 

I hope this type of random event will complement the main gameplay loop and add some additional challenge to the game.

Besides that, I also continued to add more details to the environments. Here are a few screenshots of some of the new rooms I recently added:

Thank you!

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Puzzled Squid