Why minigames for basic actions? 

My vision for this game is to create a gameplay loop, that allows stories to be told on the background and something for players to do as story organically moves forward. Also for world to change that can be felt better if there is a baseline set up. So I want to have something to achieve as story progresses and to have all actions to have little bit more required from players (not too much, in the end I want primary gameplay loop to be semicasual) so it is a choice to do them. This actually was inspired by Red Dead Redempion 2, where looting was quite slow and quite unneccessary for its value and when I looted some poor guys gold wedding ring I thought that this isn't wotrh it and it makes me feel worse so I stopped just looting all the guys and thought that it was nice moral choice without any mechanics.

Also I don’t want failure to have grave consequences like game over, but create time pressure to succeed. Succeeding in one action should be pretty easy if you don’t do anything else at same time, but as game goes forward, I want to add multiple objectives that you can choose to take your time with them or try to accomplish them at once, what creates scalable difficulty and story could have better ending if you accomplish it in shorter time, like some games have true endings for hard difficulties.

So for week 2 post jam development, I got one thing done (or started, I actually have one small game prototype that I want to use as next level for hacking minigame to create complexity for bigger actions)

• Hacking minigame added
  • Created minigame where script randomizes numbers one by one and you just have to press right ones. Idea is that this takes time and some focus, as idea is that you can’t do much else between stations, unless you have upgraded your cyberdeck. For future, I want to add possibility to upgrade different aspects like range, quickness, cooldown, charges, and failure buffer. Now I only have range and quickness.
  • Visually, I liked to add feeling that your character does more than press couple numbers, so I came up with adding particle system, drawing lines after particles to create matrix style code effect. Number UI is just text field for all codes that have [ ] marks and empty spaces to create feeling of cracking open firewall and inserting right code to unlock it. I also added draw line and range as string to signify how much you can move and underline connection between you and target. 

• What was also important was that minigames are done in real time and when hacking, you could still move, although you’d only have limited range. First I thought about also starting hacking from far away, but I like that you have to first take a risk and come close to whatever you want to hack. Also later I might do more complex version of hacking minigame for bigger challenges and then it would be fun to balance moving around on train at the same time avoiding danger and hacking under time pressure.
• Testing I noticed that you can steal or hack multiple things at once. Especially hacking looks very cool, so later I might actually turn this into mechanic. Also, the idea of upgrade that allows to steal from multiple people at once seems nice way to upgrade gameplay, so I’ll leave this bug in for while. 

Notes and ideas for later development

• Create upgradable system to hack multiple things at once
• Create deeper minigame that uses same variables, so upgrades have effect, but bring more complex gameplay for important story hack or other bigger events to feel special)
• Add some more visual flourish, light up and animate virtual glasses sat character or add shader to whole scene?

Goal for next week:

• Adding enemy sand risk of failure