Hello everyone!
I would like to share with you the latest news about the development.
In the last report, we explored some new hacking methods, mainly focused on PvP. In this report, we will explore the extended behavior of NPCs. Note: The Nightly Build is in active development and is not yet available to the public.
The NPC scheduling system has been completely re-implemented, improving and adding certain activities that will allow players to interact with various aspects of their lives.
From Monday to Friday, NPCs will go to work and have their leisure time, while weekends will be mostly dedicated to leisure activities and sleep. Players will be able to check NPC activities through CCTV if the network has available cameras. This can be particularly useful if the network has certain hackable smart appliances, as these can cause accidents.
Similarly, players can track an NPC’s license plate to monitor them through traffic cameras during their commutes, perhaps to hack traffic lights and also cause an accident. If the network contains the employee records database, the players will be able to know the full schedule of the NPCs.
These accidents can cause the death of the NPCs, although killing an NPC it is not the only way to get rid of an NPC on a network that is preventing us from reaching our goal, like an annoying administrator, we can also use other methods to get the NPC fired, such as changing the alarm clock time on their smartphone so they are late for work several days in a row, or similar methods.
If a network loses an administrator (or any other NPC), either due to an accident or being fired, a new NPC will be hired to replace the previous one after several in-game days. Each NPC influences the company’s earnings, so if the player has purchased the company, they can decide which NPCs will be fired or hired from a list of candidates, showing their stats. But this is more specific to the "Impacting world by players” part and we will explore it another day.
Causing an accident that ends up killing an NPC will be taken very seriously by the Police, so covering your tracks will not be an easy task, and if you get caught, it will be a direct Game Over.
NPCs also communicate with each other through emails or phone messages with NPCs from their network and also with NPCs from other networks. Besides discussing mundane topics, they will also comment on any problems or peculiar situations involving an NPC, allowing the player to know the context of the NPCs in the network to act accordingly if we want to interfere in their behavior to impact the company, and also to discover hidden missions more organically.
On the other hand, NPCs will be more aware of the movements in their bank accounts. Therefore, if an NPC detects that someone has stolen money from their bank account, they will report it to the authorities, who will start tracing the bank transactions to try to catch the perpetrator of the theft.
In a similar way, If an NPC detects an unusual deposit in their account, they can also report it to the authorities, causing a trace of the transfer, or withdraw that money and keep it. Depending on some NPC's specific internal stats and the amount of time the money stays in their account, they might never notice the unusual movement in their account.
Although this type of trace can also be avoided, it will be a stricter and more closed trace than conventional network traces and more difficult to avoid, so the player will need to have a cleaning plan ready before making a transfer. The larger the amount to transfer or deposit, the more suspicion it will raise.
In the next developer preview, we will explore the section "Impacting world by players" which is entirely related to the extended behavior of NPCs, where players will also be able to influence the world's economy beyond the use of coins.
Thanks for reading! More news soon!