An investigation game in an invented harbour city. You’re on the night desk of The Halcyon Ledger, in Port Halcyon, where an inspection firm has been signing off containers it never opened. It runs on invented data and opens partway through the first chapter, with jobs already counting. Scan a district and nodes appear; profile one to see its services and weaknesses; then start a timed job, a decrypt or a download, and watch it pay off in documents. Up to three jobs run at once, and each one raises heat: a node that runs too hot locks for a while, and past the trace line a countdown starts that Cover tracks stops. Nothing loses progress.
The documents are short business records (manifests, crane weight logs, inspection notes, invoices), each with a name you can drag onto a ring. Build the Shippers, Inspections and Port contracts rings around the firm at the centre, and the news follows what you find. Publish in the third chapter and the Ledger’s front page is built from your evidence. The hacking stays abstract: game verbs on buttons, weaknesses named as cards, and a log that says in plain words what each button did.
Wireframes
How Hacknet plays, sketched: the loop, the board and the rings, one choice about controls, and two limits.
1The loop. The loop: find, run, read, connect.2The board. The board: the city in the middle, your jobs and the news at the side.3Documents to rings. Turning documents into a ring of connections.4How you play. Buttons and a plain-words log instead of typed commands.5Too hot. What running too hot does, and the way out.6A fourth job. Asking for one job too many.
