Universal 868-HACK by Michael Brough

Ouch. If you had ANTI-V you'd probably have been fine though

 

Given the tools you have you should be able to survive this. In fact, the more monsters the merrier. I'm not sure whether you'd have enough resources left to survive 7+8 though.

Spoilers:

Spoiler

PUSH between 5 and 8 times, using EXCH as required, then DEBUG

 

The [redacted] before the storm

I posted this on the /r/roguelikes thread on reddit but it seems like this screenie would have a better reception here. I ended up with 61 points, which was 1 short of getting on the high score table at the time.

[Edit: Just realised the horrible spoilers that this screen shot includes so removed it from being inline.]

Click here to be spoiled about some stuff.

 

Jeez. I didn't even look at the price before I bought it because of the massive raves. I *just* noticed it on my iTunes receipt. I think if I'd realized it was $6 I might have paused.

It is an awfully good game, though.

 

Touch Arcade forums’ Game of the Week
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868-HACK was successfully nominated for voting in contest for the Touch Arcade forums’ Game of the Week. Voting will occur over the following 3 days at the link below. Developers may not vote for their own games. New user votes will be subject to review.

http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?p=2957721

 

I'm not sure on the etiquette on voting on these polls, as a new user who came here to talk about 868-HACK (there's no other forums with this game being discussed around). However, I note in passing that Terraria has 1 vote for every 10,000 players on Game Centre at the moment, 868-HACK has 1 vote for every 100 players on Game Centre.

In my opinion that's a pretty good thing.

 

You should be okay since you joined before the poll went up, and I see no reason to suspect you are a shill.

 

While Michael Brough is well deserving of gajillions of those bucks (and arguably the best game designer working today), I suspect what would be more valuable (and likely) in the short term is getting an actual Touch Arcade review, and word of mouth to grow into a sleeper hit. (See e.g. 10000000)

 

This game's had a couple big features today - including on The Verge. Definitely interested in this one now.

 

I am intrigued by this game. Does it play well on an iPad or is the iPhone better suited?

 

Wow - finally got to this today. Absolutely mind-mendingly good. Simple on the surface but with a lot of depth. Spent all week putting off playing it and am so glad I got to it tonight. Perfect for touchscreen of any size. I'm playing on iPod5 just now and it's perfect but would also be perfect on iPad. Reminds me of Paradroid.

 

if you like roguelikes and ever listened to the roguelike radio podcast you'd also recognize his name

 

This game is fantastic. So much replayability and depth compared to just about anything else on iOS. I've currently got the #11 score on Game Center (68pts) but there's still lots of stuff I need to do to improve.

Some random notes and tips:
(WARNING: I recommend figuring this stuff out for yourself; it'll take a while, but it's fun to discover things. I'm writing this mostly for discussion purposes.)

Spoiler

- Don't worry about points until you've beaten the game a few times. That'll give you a better sense of how many resources+progs you need to have to survive until the end.

- Don't feel like you need lots of progs. You only need a few good ones to survive. It's often much more beneficial to spend your siphons 100% on resources.

- Learn the enemy movements and practice against them, and get especially good at creating a funnel for them so you can kill them off one at a time.

Cryptogs (blue) - Hidden except for when they're on the same row or col as you. They will stay out of your row/col until they have to move into it. Count their moves, and make sure you don't move beside one accidentally. You can tell how many are alive by the blue corner marks, which show the last time you saw one. The counter to them is .SHOW, which doesn't hurt them but at least makes them way easier to track.

Daemons (red) - They take 3 hits (all the other enemies take 2). They always pathfind towards the player, but as far as I can tell, whether they move into a row or column is random. Countered with .D_BOM, which explodes the nearest one to the player AND damages+stuns all surrounding enemies. Extremely powerful. If two daemons are an equal distance from the player when you use .D_BOM, both of them will explode.

Glitch (pink) - They can walk through walls. If there is a wall on the route to you, they will always take the path to the player that goes through the most walls. Countered with .DEBUG.

Virus (purple) - They take two steps every turn. Make sure you don't get into a situation where you are only one tile from them, or they will move and then attack you. If you are funneling enemies down a corridor, keep a careful eye on the viruses and try to ensure that they are two steps away from you. It's kinda hard to explain, but if you move backwards away from an enemy in a funnel/corridor, then the virus will end up two steps away from you. Just practice with them a lot. Countered with .ANTI-V, which will damage+stun all viruses on the map (and even enemies that are overlapping viruses!). Super handy.

- You can start as one of four classes in the game:
[H]ACKER: starts with a siphon and a prog
[A]GENT: starts with $10 and a prog
[C]YBORG: starts with 10 energy and a prog
[K]ID: starts with two progs

- Transmissions (the square things before enemies appear) only have one health. For this reason, .DELAY is one of my favourite progs, because it delays transmissions for 3 steps. Every time you start a new sector, just run .DELAY and then destroy a bunch of the incoming enemies before they finish transmitting.

- Some stuff with numbers:
* the number of enemies that spawn at the start of a sector is equal to the sector number
* hidden progs+score have 1 less "alert cost" than they normally would (to compensate for their hidden-ness).
* Enemy spawn rate is 13 - (sector_num) - (num_siphons_used_this_sector). Also, each time you use a siphon, it delays enemy spawning by 5 steps. (this took some experimentation for me to figure out!)

- So with the spawning rate in mind, don't make siphons until you know exactly what you're going to do and what your path to the exit is going to be, because with each siphon you place, the enemies will spawn faster (for the rest of that sector). Also, keep this in mind if you go crazy with .SIPH+

- If you siphon next to an exit, you'll gain 1 hp.

- Siphon takes a step, so you can use it instead of .WAIT in a pinch.

- You can .STEP through walls. This makes it VERY handy. My favourite move: triggering a ton of point blocks in sector 8 and then using .STEP all the way to the exit.

- If you debug when you're overlapping something, you will die. A fun (but expensive) combo is .PULL .PULL. .PULL .STEP .DEBUG

- .POLY is super cheap for how useful it is. Note that enemies will ALWAYS turn into a different enemy type. Very useful for getting rid of pesky glitches when you've got a nice funnel set up.

- I don't use it very much, but .WARP can be a lifesaver in the last few sectors (especially since it kills an enemy each time you use it).

My favourite progs: .DELAY .D_BOM .ANTI-V .DEBUG
Progs I use a lot: .SIPH+ .SCORE .EXCH .RESET .POLY .STEP
Progs I almost never use: .CALM .ATK+ .UNDO .REDUC .ROW .COL

I think that's about it for now! Hopefully someone finds this useful

Cheers,

-Matt

EDIT: put the whole thing in spoiler tags!

 

A recommendation by the guy who made Trainyard is something special.