Hey there. My name is , otherwise known as . I’ve been programming for as a hobby, primarily focused on game development. I worked with Unreal Engine back in 2015 when 4.8 was all the rage (oh how far we’ve come…), but never actually made any serious progress with it. But there was a game I did make some progress on, written in my own engine in C#. It’s called The Peacenet, and I’m porting the game to Unreal Engine where I feel it’ll be easier for me to develop and will also allow me to add better UI and gameplay features.
So what is The Peacenet?
The Peacenet is…yet another hacking game. Like Hacknet, Uplink, etc. Except mine puts a spin on it a little. While those games are more focused on making you feel like a Hollywood hacker and focusing on the puzzle aspect, The Peacenet is more story-, exploration-, and realism-focused. I’m trying to make the game fun and engaging, while also having the player use realistic software to complete in-game tasks.
Game modes
The Peacenet has three major planned game modes - Story, Survival and Sandbox, as well as a planned online multiplayer mode.
In Story, you are an imprisoned criminal forced to work for the government. You are forced into The Peacenet to help stop a major war within the dystopian digital world, while also discovering the identity that was wiped from your mind before being turned into a sentient AI. You’ll meet and interact with many different characters, some of which will be your greatest friends, others of which will be your greatest enemies. And you will slowly learn the story behind the war in The Peacenet as well as the backstory of the world itself - and your role in creating it.
In Survival, the story system is completely disabled. Your goal is to survive as long as you can and gain as many resources, programs, skills and reputation as you can without being successfully compromised by an enemy hacker. Being compromised results in an immediate “Game Over.” How far can you get? Can you take over the entire Peacenet?
Sandbox allows you to completely customize the way the game procedurally generates The Peacenet, what gameplay mechanics are active (reputation, skill levels, counter-hacking, Government Alert, etc), and allows you to create an experience completely tailored to you.
Multiplayer will allow you to play online with other people. Your goal is to become as powerful and wealthy as you can. You will be able to hack other players, as well as NPCs, and the things you do will have drastic effects on the world.
Gameplay mechanics
Some of the core gameplay mechanics in Peacenet include:
- Reputation: Your actions can positively or negatively effect the way NPCs and other players see you. Malicious actions will make you seem more like a malicious user or like a blackhat, while more heroic actions will make you seem more heroic.
- Government Alert: The Peacenet is government-run. As such, there are certain rules and laws you must follow while operating in this world. Failure to do so may result in you alerting the government. You have many choices as to what you do at this point, but… be ware. They can terminate your sentience.
- Persistence: Every action you perform on an NPC will persist in the save file. If you delete a file, unless that NPC recovers it, it’s gone. This means that theoretically, you can hack into a file storage server and claim it as your own.
- Ethical hacking: Peacenet will record every action you take when hacking a player or NPC. Once you get in, you’ll have the choice to report a security vulnerability to the person you hacked, allowing them to patch it. This could be a good way to raise or lower your rep, depending on theirs.
- And there’s more, but…what’s the fun in sharing all my plans?
Introducing Peacegate OS.
(Note: dev build. I can’t show you screenshots of Peacegate running outside the editor yet.)
This is Peacegate OS, named after…well…what it is. The Peacenet Gateway Operating System. This is primarily how you’ll interact with Peacenet. There are two ways you’ll be interacting with Peacegate - through the Peacegate Desktop, in the screenshot above, or through the command-line using the bash shell. Every action in the game can be completed using either the GUI or the bash shell, it’s up to you. Just note that some actions may be more suited to the command-line, and others the GUI.
At the top is your Status Panel - you’ll see your hostname there (in my case, “unrealengine”), as well as the Power button to shutdown (exit the game) or reboot (go to main menu) Peacegate. The Peacegate menu allows you to run programs installed on your Peacenet VM.
At the bottom is your Window Manager panel, that allows you to see what’s running, hide/show all windows, switch between programs, and switch workspaces.
Peacegate Desktop is, as you can tell, loosely based off the GNOME 2 desktop environment.
If you’re bored of hacking, you can always explore Peacegate, listen to in-game music with it, customize your desktop experience, or… and this is why I wanted to switch to Unreal… use the very same editing tools I use to make the game to write your own programs and extend the Peacegate OS - whether it be with Blueprint or C++.
As mentioned before, the command-line of Peacegate is bash, popularly used in most linux distributions, so you’ll also be able to write bash scripts in-game to run either on your system or on a hacked system. And yes, before you ask, in-game malware WILL be a thing.
I want more!
Well, if you want to enter the Peacenet in its unreal form or try out the earlier Peace Engine (my own deprecated game engine) tech demos, you can download a copy of Peacegate OS at the-peacenet and enter The Peacenet yourself. You do not need to format your hard drive. Peacegate OS is a virtual machine and will not touch your host operating system.
If not, you can check out Peacenet’s official Twitter at for frequent updates on development progress.
I’ll also be making the game open-source as more of the core gets implemented, so, look out for that. 