Hackero NEXT

Hackero Next Aug 1, 2024

Hey everyone,

It's been over a year since the last update on the development status of Hackero. Many of you have been asking if this project is dead, and I can assure you it's not. I’m still working on it.

Due to personal reasons, I haven’t been able to work on the game as much as I used to. Since I was focused on something significant, I wasn’t able to show much progress. I know my communication has been lacking lately, and I apologize for that. I plan to do things differently in the future, but more on that later.

Today, I’d like to talk a bit about what I’ve been working on. I call it Hackero Next. Hackero Next is essentially a cleanup and rewrite of both the backend and frontend code, built around a new architecture. In the past, all parts of Hackero were tightly coupled, making development quite difficult. It was easy to break things, leading to limitations in gameplay that I encountered during development. This was due to a lot of poor decisions that accumulated as technical debt, resulting in a state where it’s better to take the good parts and rebuild them on a better architecture.

I describe this new architecture in detail in a separate article, which you can find [here].

Addressing the elephant in the room, I understand that this might remind some of you of the Hacker Experience 2 development and how that game was never released. I’d like to clarify that this is not the case here.

Hackero Next is not as ambitious as Hacker Experience. It follows the same principles as before, and the gameplay will largely remain similar. However, there are a few changes in how the game is being developed:

Versioning: We are now following semantic versioning instead of assigning a patch or major release number to every update.
Modular Features: Features are less tightly coupled than before, making it easier to extend the game and minimize wipes.
Agile Releases: I plan to release new features in a more agile and incremental way without larger updates. This approach helps keep the changes smaller and reduces overhead.

In the near future, there will be regular blog posts about the changes and new features included in each release, and how they integrate with existing mechanics. The first of these will discuss the technical decisions that led to this new approach and provide an initial preview of a new feature that was previously impossible, illustrating the impact of these changes.

Oh and one more thing! The original version of hackero can now be played without an key at https://classic.hackero.io