Hi there!

The fun thing about datacenters are racks, and currently the game doesn't support stacking devices on top of each other. That is not fun, so I added that. In order to do it I needed to re-design the devices, since currently they are not "stackable". For example this is the Load Balancer and the new design:

I'm not decided on the colour yet, but I like the simple design. I didn't gave a second thought for the router and firewall and just copy-pasted the same design:

That means the server now looks weird, since it looks like a desktop PC rather than a stackable server. I think it'll be fun to stack servers as well, so I added another colour for servers:

It was fun stacking these devices and connecting them with cables:

Devices internal logic

For the router I added a basic routing table. I don't like it as the final version but for now it gets the job done. The idea is not to be a "realistic" network simulator, this should be fun and not complicated to understand, so I'll figure out a better way to configure the routing table.

Similarly the Load Balancer has a 1:1 balancing which is configurable:

Internals

One idea I had is to display the device's internal motherboard, so players could change RAM and CPU, and other stuff. This make the process of upgrading the server (which would be the "upgrading" your tower in a TD game) more diegetic (e.g. more RAM means the server can buffer more packets to process, more CPU means the server can process packets faster, etc).

I made a silly animation to show this up in a separate camera viewport (since it's perspective and not orthogonal), the player will be able to click things around and add/remove stuff:

I made this silly and simple models myself, they get the idea across and I get to easily replace them afterwards when I want to polish the game:

RAM will be colour coded so we can have the player buy RAM that can carry 2x packets, 4x packets, etc. Usual "tower" upgrades.

Fun vs real

While working on this game I realized that many things are not "really what happens on a datacenter". I think it's better to have something fun for everybody rather than a network simulator. If people want a network simulator then just play around with GNS3. When I started making this game (as a pandemic "hoppy") I kept replicating a network simulator, with perfect OSI layer simulation and packet routing. This was not fun to program nor to play. I think the way to go here is to give the game the "Tower defense" spin.

The routing table is very simple, and will be simpler in the future. The sizes are all unreal and (usually) engineers don't just "stack up" devices on top of each other. The idea for this game is to be fun and re-playable, while also competitive through the Steam leaderboard API.

Next up

I've been doing a lot of playtest to check what mechanic is fun and what is tedious. I'll still continue with my ugly art until I have most of the game mechanics up and running, only then I can focus on really polish these up (or hire some artist to do it better...).

I was thinking of the skill tree, and this could be tied to the amount of replied packets. More replied packets = more experience = more "science" to unlock upgrades. I was also thinking of the world where this datacenter sits, and how this could be tied to the levels the player can move around. I'll share more when I have something to share.

Multiplayer

At this moment I'm not thinking of doing some multiplayer gmae out of this, but it will make sense to have some sort of reportable leaderboard through the Steam API. It could also be extended to level design and sharing through the Steam Workshop. I think that definitely will be added to the game in the final stages.