A cyberpunk hacker game: Console GUI or more traditional game-like GUI?

[The Saber Cat]

Hello, fellow adult game developers!

I always wanted to create something like Strive for Power, Free Cities or Jack-of-Nine-Tails, something which blends strategy and RPG. Recently, I began to conceptualize a game in this genre.
Because I'm a programmer without any artist skills, my game will be text-only - and searching for the setting which fits the text-only adult strategy-RPG game, I decided to take the cyberpunk setting. My protagonist will be a hacker who invented a way to hack a person's mind through a neuroimplant (which is conviniently installed by almost all people in this world). My hero will exploit this ability by brainwashing sexy ladies, and doing other things that a honest adult game protagonist must do ;-)

To better fit this game premise, I wanted to make its GUI very console-like - in the style of old-school applications like Norton Commander. Or, if you want to look from another angle - I wanted to create a roguelike without map, but with text "buttons", switches and sliders. I began researching virtual consoles and roguelike game engines, but then a question came to my mind...
... will somebody ever want to play such a game?

The pure-text games are very niche market - many players come to fap at the pictures, not to imagine them. And I am limiting this niche again - for one person, the console aesthetics is a nostalgic throwback, but to another - ugly and painful new experience.
Maybe I should make my game on a convinient engine, with classic GUI - buttons that are buttons, edit boxes that are edit boxes, et cetera?.. But maybe console-like GUI will put people in a context where they will not expect graphics and will not be disappointed by its absence?..

Please, help me decide, which GUI graphics style to choose!

 

[drKlauz]

Find Uplink by Introversion. Should give you enough inspiration.

 

[The Saber Cat]

Thanks, I'll try it, but...
According to Wikipedia,

Uplink focuses on emulating highly stylised,

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-esque hacking, as seen in movies such as

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,

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,

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and

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.

The problem is, I do not want my game to use this particular style. I want my game to look like applications looked in reality in late 80-s/early 90-s, not like Hollywood thought the programms looked like. My inspiration is

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, not Hackers.

In other words, I do not want my style to say "It is a cool fantasy!", I want my style to say "It is a grim reality". As any proper cyberpunk world, my world is "High tech, low life", with greedy megacorporations, criminal clans, and so on. It is not a good place to live in.
I even have an in-universe reason for my MC to use console-like interface - he got his mind hacking abilities in the same incident where he lost his regular neuroimplant abilities - his brain was burned by a corporation's virus, and his mind chip cannot project any images - only simple texts. So, there are out-of-universe reasons and in-universe reasons for using this style...

... alas, I fear that this style will push players away from my game :-(

 

[drKlauz]

Fair enough, tho i still suggest playing it a bit, atleast to see how similar stuff done before in games.
Btw if you plan to allow player to do anything outside of network, like personally having fun with his victims, you will need some sort of real world mode.
Raw console may be bit too hardcore for most players, but again it is your game, your vision.

 

[The Saber Cat]

Btw if you plan to allow player to do anything outside of network, like personally having fun with his victims, you will need some sort of real world mode.

Yes. In fact, at first you will need to plug physical cable to the victim's neuroport - the ability to do it wirelessly will come later, and the ability to do it over Internet will be near the "capstone" of the game.
But the "real world mode" in this style will be still in console GUI - like:

You are in the [shady alley]. You see a lonely, [average-looking] girl.

YOUR STATS                 HER STATS
HP          82/82          HP           56/56
Willpower   45/50          Willpower    40/40
Implant     Lvl 5          Implant      ???
Strength    5              Vunerabilities:
Agility     8              ???
Memory      6
Logic       3
Intuition   10

[1. Shoot with a pistol] [2. Hit with a bat] [3. Hit with a fist]
[4. Wirelessly scan ports] [5. Leave her]

Raw console may be bit too hardcore for most players, but again it is your game, your vision.

Yes, but the game worths nothing without a player... :-(

 

[Eoin]

What engine have you thought about using? It being text-based, you could use Twine, which you are obviously familiar with, or maybe creating your own engine for it (using Java to do this seems like the best way to go)? Going full command-line will alienate a lot of players, but could gain you a following (take a look at Dwarf Fortress).

The era games (eratohoPM, for example) are basically command-line only, with the exceptions of a couple of pictures here or there. If your game was written in an engine like that, it may work great.

 

[W65]

What engine have you thought about using? It being text-based, you could use Twine, which you are obviously familiar with, or maybe creating your own engine for it (using Java to do this seems like the best way to go)? Going full command-line will alienate a lot of players, but could gain you a following (take a look at Dwarf Fortress).

The era games (eratohoPM, for example) are basically command-line only, with the exceptions of a couple of pictures here or there. If your game was written in an engine like that, it may work great.

I was going to suggest the OP look at the era games, but I think a critical feature of those games is the mouse interface. Era's alternative to using the mouse is to enter up to three digit codes to select options--it's very 70s-feeling in that way. I think I get the reasoning behind doing the selections with numeric codes instead of, like, up to three letter combinations--it's a little easier to extend since you never have to worry about collisions between selection mnemonics. But still, being able to interface using the mouse is an enormous positive, and it allows for tooltips. Since everyone has a mouse or a trackpad these days, I don't think it would conflict too much with the setting, either.

If I'm reading your intent right, OP, I think you might be better off emulating the look and feel of an old BIOS using a modern engine. That gives you some flexibility to break out of your own theme if you think you need to do it for gameplay purposes. It also spares you from developing the thing from scratch--I guess could be a downside if you're an adept programmer. I dunno. The average player cares more about how it plays than how it was developed, so I guess you ought to go with whatever you're more comfortable handling. But if the UI ends up clunky, players won't play it. Whatever you do, don't sacrifice usability or ease of installation for authenticity. Make it have the flavor of authenticity without the inconvenience.

I think there is always going to be the question of "who will play this game" and the knowledge that supporting images would attract more of an audience, no matter how successful a text game might end up being. Look at Fenoxo's games: they were popular even before they started having official art made for them. Then again, they were sorta new and had the benefit of newness to contribute to their popularity. Maybe it's better to look at things like Free Cities and the aforementioned era games. They don't have enormous followings, but they have had at least some success and are largely text-based. Just how popular they are is difficult to gage, which I consider to be problematic for ALL adult game developers.

Even if your game is text based you should probably include at least the ability for players to add portraits or body images for characters that they like. Most players would probably not go to the effort, but I do think that folks like to be able to give a head and body to at least a small number of characters. Ultimately, if you don't design with the ability to include images, you might well end up in a situation where you find your playerbases want to be able to include them, but incorporating them into the game would simply be more than you could feasibly do. It would be a lot more effort, but I'd say you should plan ahead to be able to include them at least in some limited capacity, and then up-front tell players that you aren't planning on providing any images yourself in the base game.

 

[The Saber Cat]

What engine have you thought about using? It being text-based, you could use Twine, which you are obviously familiar with, or maybe creating your own engine for it (using Java to do this seems like the best way to go)? Going full command-line will alienate a lot of players, but could gain you a following (take a look at Dwarf Fortress).

If I'm reading your intent right, OP, I think you might be better off emulating the look and feel of an old BIOS using a modern engine. That gives you some flexibility to break out of your own theme if you think you need to do it for gameplay purposes. It also spares you from developing the thing from scratch--I guess could be a downside if you're an adept programmer. I dunno. The average player cares more about how it plays than how it was developed, so I guess you ought to go with whatever you're more comfortable handling. But if the UI ends up clunky, players won't play it. Whatever you do, don't sacrifice usability or ease of installation for authenticity. Make it have the flavor of authenticity without the inconvenience.

If I'm going the console route, I will definitely use a modern engine - something like SadConsole or BearLibTerminal. I do not want to give my players additional problems, and I agree that usability trumps style in this case. And I do not want to write my own engine from scratch - after all, I want to write a game about mind hacking sexy girls and bending them to my will, not a game about regularly-hacking with OpenGL and bending it to my will

Even if your game is text based you should probably include at least the ability for players to add portraits or body images for characters that they like. Most players would probably not go to the effort, but I do think that folks like to be able to give a head and body to at least a small number of characters. Ultimately, if you don't design with the ability to include images, you might well end up in a situation where you find your playerbases want to be able to include them, but incorporating them into the game would simply be more than you could feasibly do. It would be a lot more effort, but I'd say you should plan ahead to be able to include them at least in some limited capacity, and then up-front tell players that you aren't planning on providing any images yourself in the base game.

Yes... this is a problem I didn't thought of. I fear that there will be too much of a style discrepancy between console GUI and the full-colour, small-grained JPEG image. Maybe... maybe my game would benefit from, for example, pixel-art, but on one hand I have no artistic talents of my own (that's why I chose this genre and setting, after all), and on the other hand... will pixel-art heads and bodies be attractive enough for the audience?..
But if I will go another way, "Modern GUI with authentic flavour", like Twine with custom CSS or something, then this problem will not arise at all - there will be no discrepancies. Maybe this is an argument in this way's favour...

 

[W65]

Yes... this is a problem I didn't thought of. I fear that there will be too much of a style discrepancy between console GUI and the full-colour, small-grained JPEG image. Maybe... maybe my game would benefit from, for example, pixel-art, but on one hand I have no artistic talents of my own (that's why I chose this genre and setting, after all), and on the other hand... will pixel-art heads and bodies be attractive enough for the audience?..
But if I will go another way, "Modern GUI with authentic flavour", like Twine with custom CSS or something, then this problem will not arise at all - there will be no discrepancies. Maybe this is an argument in this way's favour...

That's one argument for something like Unity as a development environment. Rather than being entirely bound to tiles/ASCII, you would be able to support full-resolution images if you could think of a way to integrate them better into the UX (think I'm using that term right). Like, have the full-resolution image in a Polaroid frame, or something. That's the kind of thing you might find taped on someone's monitor and would maintain immersion; a full-color high resolution image might look out-of-place being displayed in a console environment, but the explanation is that it's a photograph of the character taped to the monitor. I dunno.

A fellow in the No Haven thread (stuntcock) in the Games forum made some interesting arguments about not allowing the interface drive the gameplay or even the look-and-feel. It might be worth reading? Starts around

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and goes on for a few posts afterwards--you can just ignore my posts there.

 

[drKlauz]

With right font and enough tweaking you could use even RenPy.
For art you could use some "bad CCTV" filter/overlay on images, by upgrading hardware player could reduce filter/overlay visibility. If done right player will get in-setting art with ability to turn it off as he progress thru game.

 

[The Saber Cat]

Like, have the full-resolution image in a Polaroid frame, or something. That's the kind of thing you might find taped on someone's monitor and would maintain immersion; a full-color high resolution image might look out-of-place being displayed in a console environment, but the explanation is that it's a photograph of the character taped to the monitor.

It's funny, but I agree - this IS a way to integrate this two styles together

For art you could use some "bad CCTV" filter/overlay on images, by upgrading hardware player could reduce filter/overlay visibility. If done right player will get in-setting art with ability to turn it off as he progress thru game.

Yes, it is another way too. Thanks!

A fellow in the No Haven thread (stuntcock) in the Games forum made some interesting arguments about not allowing the interface drive the gameplay or even the look-and-feel.

Thanks, I will read it

UPD: He has a good points about the UX improvements that can benefit a text game. I'm considering something like Godot now - because with roguelike engines I will not be able to make tooltips and such.