A different approach to making hacking games

Ideas for future addons and sequels

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A different approach to making hacking games

Postby tumblrlikedmyghosts » Sat Aug 20, 2022 3:19 pm

Most (doomed) attempts at creating hacking games try to build the entire technology stack from the ground up. Educational, but impractical.

It has occurred to me technology has matured to the point where alternative approaches are available. You don't need to write your own IP stack, you can grab LWIP, or an actual open-source stack. You don't have to design exploits, you can snapshot the state of software at 2000 and use perfectly evil existing ones. There has been more development effort put into tmux alone than anyone can put into an entire hacking game. Why not use that?

Basic idea:
- Use modern simulation software like qemu/simics to simulate the game world
- Pretend HW progress stopped at 1985/1990
- Pretend every computer in the world is a RISC/ARM
- Pretend the player is the only person with a GUI
- Use existing software stacks like unix/linux, strip down heavily
- Each machine in the sim is it's own VM / container. Until connected to directly, these machines exist as simple scripts only.
- Abstract away firmware, microcode, RTL sim - run it at virtualization level with minimum required HW intricacies
- Content generation done using hand-written procedural generation for mechanical elements (network structures, protection schemes) and ML for fluff (faces, instant messages)
- Leverage actual existing tools like gcc, standards like RFC, technologies like HTTP
- Exploiting done using actual exploits on actual legacy software stacks
- Mitigate high skill floor by hand-picking easy-to-understand exploits and permitting script-kiddie playstyle and simplifying technology stack
- Single-player only
- Open source for obvious reasons
- Intended more as an educational toy than a proper game

This is not a commitment of "I'm going to make this try and stop me!". This is a "what do you think about the basic approach?"
"there is no spoone" - The Matricks

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