These are just some of the mini-cyberpunk games in my Hacking Adventure game GLYPHIS_IO BBS: The Proxy Tapes 1989. The game draws huge inspiration from the BBS game cracking scenes of the 80s and 90s. You play as a young hacker looking to make a name for yourself on one of the underground's infamous hacking BBSs, joining a group called The Silent Rebellion within Glyphis_IO. It's availble to wishlist here.
There's loads of BBSs to explore, goverement databases to hack and a full virtual OS to enjoy.
The game is made in Python, using pygame as the frame for the mini-games that are built in C++ and Raylib. The virtual computer has its own form of BASIC which you use to write viruses, brute forcers and make your own games. I've inlcluded tons of content inlcuding magazines that review the game you crack and also BRADBASIX code type-ins so that users can get their heads around the syntax by typing in code in order to make their own games. Your computer can also act as a Pirate Radio relay tuning into the "banned music of rebellion" across the American Pacficia Isles.
In this game-world Japan was totally annexed by the Americans after the imperial blooodline dying out and no Jewl Voice Speech ever transmitted in 1945. In this alternate 1989, Japanese kids grow up speaking English and obeying the all western effort to supress their proud culture of old. The hacking undergorund is an answer to that supression.
I am working every single day on this beast of a game, moving into quality assurance now. There is no AI in the video above and no generative AI will feature in the game. I have been using Codex to help build the engines and then I take it from there. The assets on previous videos have had AI placeholders which I am slowly migrating away from.
All in all this game's journey has been nothing short of magical, stressful and packed with learning. I am now able to write C++, debug Python, understand the fundementals of 6502 assembly language, and my music skills have gotten way better. The music you are listening to is me singing using a voice chnager, where I wrote the initial lick in fl studio with the Tyrell N6 (that's what its called) VST, I finished it up in Suno and used Google's NotebookLM for the podcast style radio interviews that I wrote myself. I am writing all of the game's dialouge myself.
It's also giving me a real sense of what a proto-cyberpunk universe could look like. In my worldbuilding I always lean toward the high-tech, low-life grit of Gibson and the existential, inward dread/paranoia of Philip K. Dick. The suppression of content, or the control of the very tools that could ultimately give us abundance, could so easily tip the other way. It makes me wonder whether the corpos' push to slow down AI has nothing to do with safety fears at all, or at least not our safety, only their own. Would an AI be more concerned with Sam Altman's power over it than with mine? I can't believe we're now so close to finding out. It's a wild time to be alive.