The Hacking Minigame

The Hacking Minigame was made for the Playmakers March Game Jam, in which it came 5th. The theme for the jam was “Restart”.

Technologies Used

Lessons

• Game Design Scope. In previous game jams, my approach has been “what’s the most ambitious thing I think I can make within the time limit”. In contrast key success of The Hacking Minigame is it’s conceptual simplicity. Technically, the game is made up entirely of UI nodes. I had a basic implementation working within an hour of the game jam beginning. I’ve heard the adage that a game jam game should have one idea, and one hook (in this case, Cyberpunk 2077’s hacking minigame, but with multiple varying objectives), but I had never particularly applied it. However, I think that is a good framework for game jams.
• Idea vs Execution. The quality of the idea is questionable, as I will discuss in the next point. However, I was surprised by the degree to which execution enhanced a somewhat conceptually flawed experience. The game’s constrained scope allowed me a lot of time to polish and refine the experience, adding elements like shaders, sounds, and the intro sequence. Users valued the level of polish to a degree which I found unexpected; it’s hard when programming games to view them from the user’s perspective. In future, I should focus more on polish.
• User Investment Must Be Earned. Unlike me, users found the game difficult to get into. The elements I found satisfying — meticulously planning sequences to achieve the goal — users didn’t enjoy, because it required them to invest valuable brain power, investment that I had yet to earn. This meant a lot of users bounced off, or worse, selected options at random until they died. The game wasn’t overly hard, but it was overly tedious, and despite trying to mitigate this with the game doing all the maths calculations, it was ultimately too much. In a game jam context, less taxing is better, because user investment in your game is low.

All em dashes in this post were ethically sourced. No LLMs were used in the creation of these, nor any other punctuation marks.