Decker
Decker is a roguelike about playing a futuristic hacker with a direct neural interface. Your aim is to accumulate enough fame to be remembered for all time without being caught or killed.
Press F1 for in-game help!
Note: You can press the bracket keys ('[' and ']') to change font size! Do this if it's too tiny on your display!
The in-game help menu explains the premise, controls, and mechanics of Decker. You can also check out a screenshot of the help menu on this page if you'd like to read through it without launching the game.
7DRL 2023
This game was made as an entry for 7DRL 2023, and so was made in the first week of March, 2023. It was based on my entry from the prior year, Unwired, and reuses the basic interface and some mechanics, but takes the gameplay in a significantly differently direction.
Note for 7DRL Judges
Since this game has received post 7drl updates, I've uploaded a zip file with the official 7drl version for judging (though the changes are minor: balance tweaks, the ability to start a new game after a game over, and support for multiple font sizes). This is a zip file containing a Windows build of the game.
If you would like a version supporting multiple font sizes but without any other post-7drl changes so that you can judge it without facing accessibility issues due to small fonts, please contact me.
Download
Install instructions
These downloads are simple zip archives containing the game. Unzip it somewhere and run decker.exe. You probably want to download decker-windows.zip, as decker-7drl-original.zip is an older version preserved for judging.
Development log
- Linux BuildMar 27, 2023
- Multiple font sizes and a Windows buildMar 16, 2023
Comments
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Impressive game - loving the vibe and aesthetics. Would you consider providing Mac download? Cheers
It's not currently supported because I don't have a setup to test it and Mac support was sort of poor in the engine at the time. It'd still be a fair chunk of work to get a Mac test setup + add Mac as a build target, but it's something I want to do eventually and it's more possible now than it used to be.
Thanks a lot for taking the time to respond. Appreciate it.
That is great news and I'll be looking forward to the *potential* mac release!
Oh wow. Very nice game. I feel the Cogmind inspiration and that’s a good thing (for me). I like the feeling of being safe when I have a token, but that accessing a terminal cause an alarm which invalidates it. I also like how different “world” brings different resources. And that each room has its use and its color.
I didn’t get to the late game, but there seem to be interesting stuff there, too. I will watch Kyzrati’s video :p
My favorite 7DRL of this year so far. Congrat!
Gameplay video of your game.
Wow. Just wow. One of my favorite 7DRLs from this year! Taking the time to carefully read through all the help text was definitely an important step towards not getting annihilated too quickly, but it was pretty obvious this game was going to be fairly complicated so I made sure to do that :P. On that note, Decker could definitely use a contextual tutorial to help folks get into it, but clearly that's outside the scope of a 7DRL that already has so many mechanics. Great depth here.
For anyone else who's interested in getting into it, I did a stream of my first experience with Decker, and illiux (the dev) happened to be there that day with us in chat, since we hang out on the same Discord server / dev community. Here's a timestamp where we begin and are learning about the mechanics, and the actual gameplay ended up being in a different video after the stream connection was lost for a moment xD
I've seen old Linux boot screens that are more fun than this "game", and I use the word "game" very lightly and loosely in this case. The F1 help is useless and confusing. Looking at your other game "Unwired", it looks like this is just another regurgitation of the same shit, but worse.
Finding out about this was super confusing -- I still remember the '02 game with the exact same name and a very similar premise. Pretty curious if this was influenced by it or not, or if it's just a coincidence.
I only became aware of the '02 game after releasing this. So, there's no direct influence though they're both obviously influenced by the same source material. My choice of name was just a combination of an homage to Rogue and the nature of the game's premise. The '02 game is probably named Decker for the same reasons. If I had been aware of the earlier game by the same name when making this I almost certainly would have chosen a different name.
There's a reasonable chance I'll be renaming it for that reason, though I at least want to wait until 7DRL judging concludes because I'm concerned it'll cause confusion if I change the name while that is ongoing.
Hah, yeah, it's been an entirely obvious title choice for a game of this nature more or less ever since cyberdecks were a concept of note. I'm not surprised you hadn't heard of a little decades old freeware game, however neat the thing was at the time. Was just curious if it was a direct homage, heh.
Anyway, hope the judging goes well! I played the old decker a ton, the general concept can be pretty enjoyable.
I inspected the misdirect program in the shop and the game froze in the browser version. Very fun until then, though. Ping+Transpose is very powerful, but I think Ping's high cost keeps it from being too op
Glad you had fun with it! Ping+Transpose is one of the combos I specifically wanted to enable. That's part of the reason that targeting in this game doesn't use line of sight. That's a huge shame about the freeze. If you had Ping+Transpose and were seeing Misdirection show up in the shop, you had quite a good run going with a decent chance of winning.
There seems to be some lingering crash bug that I haven't manged to reproduce locally. FYI, if you end up playing again and run into a freeze, your browser's developer console should contain an error message that would be very helpful for me. I've received a few reports of freezes but I frustratingly haven't managed to reproduce them myself.
Just to get as much detail as I can: did your freeze occur before or after the inspection window appeared and did you inspect via shift-left click or via right click?
Inspect via right click, no info window popped up. I shall give it another go, then.
That was enough to reproduce it. I managed to get it to happen by spamming right click while holding spacebar in the shop. The root cause was improper handling of surface deletion (i.e. the info window) when it happened in the same frame the surface was created. I've uploaded a fix.
Beat it! It was quite a lot of fun. Fortunately or unfortunately, it did not freeze this time. Sometimes I couldn't inspect goods in the shop, though (perhaps if I've never seen them in the wild? not sure about that) and the Core Nuke program almost definitely does nothing-- I experimented with it last time and figured I was just using it wrong but I was pretty thorough this time, and again to no avail.
Specifically, I tried using it on:
- the stationary 'c' things the projections spawn from which are called cores when moused over, both while projecting something and while the thing they will project is not currently spawned.
- projections while their cores are also in range and visible
- the weird cube block that always spawns exactly once in each room (twice if you count the respawn rooms)
-myself
-the big objective stations like the login, log, kernal, and special server-type-specific thingy that show up on Ping. I actually only tried login and Security Nexus, but still.
Also Houdini is ridiculously good while it's relevant. It's like a better Sleaze that also doesn't crash most of the time, which means it can work in combat, too, which means it save inventory space, which is nuts. I get you're probably supposed to be struggling to slot in shielding that works v.s. Black Ice around then, but still, it felt incredibly good. Phase Light Scalpel is kinda the opposite where you need it because the stats are better, but boy does that 28 trace cost feel bad. It hardly matters because garbage files give enough cash at that point for you to buy an Operator token every entry, but still, it chunks your trace bar pretty good each time you use it.
I Really liked it. It is very interesting, although I may add that I've had some hardness and in rare times throughout the video, I've had to reload the browser. Probably just some browser problem, so don't worry. Very cool game tho! And I've made a video on it :)
Seems super interesting, but trying to play in a browser is pretty hard, at least on a Mac since it's limited to 800px so it's just *very* small and I have old-man eyes.
Did you try using ']' to cycle to larger fonts? I recently updated it with multiple font support and both a 24x24 and 32x32 font. The 32x32 I've tested on a Mac retina display with success, so be sure to try double tapping ']' to switch to it. It should result in a 3200x1792 area.
I can try to make it a bit more prominent in the description that this option exists. In a future update I'll see about auto-detecting an optimal font size instead of defaulting to 16x16.
This is smart! I didn't notice it but I also tend to fly through instructions faster than I should probably.
Very pretty. Not super intuitive, but it's learnable. Little things like "seg faults" means you can't run it while it re-loads. Before re-reading what shift-click does, not knowing what any programs do made me feel like a true script kiddie. Very authentic. 4.5 different types of health is a bit much. All in all, very enjoyable 7DRL.
Great game, gameplay feels unique with the alarm mechanics. I love the choice you have with the Emporium shop, upgrades, and picking your next targets.
looks really cool although I haven't been able to figure out how to play it
There's a pretty thorough explanation of mechanics and controls in the F1 menu, if you haven't seen it.
I'm gonna upload a screenshot of it to make it more obvious that it exists + make it readable directly on the itch page.
ok thanks I didn't know about F1