Backups and other stuff (#7)

The year is coming to an end so it is time to explain to you what is coming next.
First of all Merry Christmas to all of you, I'm using the holidays to continue work on hackero.

I'd like to say thank you to all the closed alpha-testers and your feedback! It's very valuable to hear about your experiences and the problems you encounter. I've collected all your feedback and you will find some of your ideas soon ;)

First of all, some numbers: Since the beginning of December around 750 keys were sent out and about 250 of them were used. I've stopped sending out keys now but will begin again in January.

I'm also talking to my mail-provider sorting out the problem with limitations. it looks like costs for the mail-account will double but then limitations are gone.

I'm also getting a lot of questions if you can support me with the development. In general, yes I'm planning on setting up something like ko-fi or buy me a coffee. As I already mentioned servers cost money, and also some tools cost money like the E-Mail Address, tools for translating hackero, the mail-account and other things. Right now I'm paying these expenses by myself, which is around 70€ a month. I do not want to charge for new themes since it is still in an early stage of development so I have the feeling this is the best way for you to support the game right now. And just so I've mentioned this again, I'm not planning on monetarizing any gameplay-related aspects of the game, as I hate games that are pay-to-win or which allow you to pay for faster progress.

What's coming next

The next topic is the next update. I've been listening to a lot of the problems and pains you've encountered so here is what is coming next:

One of the first things I've improved is password handling in passafe. The application is now much more powerful grouping passwords under the same hostname or IP address. you can also search by these or filter by hostnames you have the ssh password, bank-account passwords, or passwords of web-accounts.

It is also possible to customize the columns which are shown and you can now copy hostnames, IP-addresses, usernames, and passwords just with a click. I'm still planning on improving this even further so I appreciate your feedback!

Something that was also mentioned quite often was that the desktop cluttered fast when you started having multiple browser windows open. To improve this you can now open up multiple tabs in the browser so you do not have to have 15+ browser windows open.

And for everyone who does not like this there a setting to disable this.

A deadlock situation that also happened was, that when someone deleted a password from passsafe and then could not log in again. This is especially painful with your own accounts. therefore shops and banks now offer a reset password option which allows you get get the password once you've lost it.

What many players also requested is that they wanted to play with friends.
So from now on, you can send out 3 invitation keys to some of your friends and they can join you playing.

I'd like to end this with the biggest pain right now: when someone hacks your system and they delete everything you must start from the beginning.To solve this problem I've introduced a new kind of NPC which allows you to backup some of your files, which is handy especially when someone whipes your hard-drive.However storage is really expensive there, so think twice which files would be useful.

These accounts are hackable if you forget a passsafe file somewhere, so make sure you keep it clean, however other players cannot delete your accounts there and also cannot delete files but they can download files you've stored there.

For the next year I'm planning more and smaller updates.
This also means that I'll invite more often, and more players get to know the game.

If everything works as expected, the game will leave closed-alpha in mid 2021 and will be available to a wider audience.

And last but not least I'm also preparing another big change: secondary servers.
This will bring a lot new features like honeypots, custom hostnames, fake shops and things like that. And also a hosts file allows you to rewrite hostname resolving on a users system so when they enter a valid hostname they will instead be redirected to a fake server.

With this change, Remote Desktop Connections will also be possible so you can see the desktop of another player and you can also switch between your own servers.

That said I'm really looking forward to continuing development on hackero!
Thank you all for beeing part of this journey!