Net Clicker

Net Clicker is Morphray's incremental about hacking and cyberwar, built in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 32, whose theme that weekend was An Unconventional Weapon. The joke writes itself: the unconventional weapon is your network. Originally hosted at deathraygames.com, the game outlived its own homepage, which now returns a 404, and survives on the community-run idle-js-games GitHub Pages mirror, verified live, with the source open in its own repository.

What the loop feels like

You run Your Network. The verified gameplay capture shows the layout plainly: network stats up top, a row of hacker jobs underneath, and an Upgrades panel waiting for your money. You click the network for income, then hire your first SysAdmin to click it for you. Trolls, Black Hats and Developers follow, each job icon still preserved at full 160-pixel sharpness from the game's own repository.

The hackers hack, the upgrades make the hackers hack faster, and the network graph art on this page grows from a lonely node into a small cyberwar economy. You went from clicking the network yourself to owning a distributed criminal enterprise in the space of a jam build. That's Net Clicker.

The systems doing the work

Three systems carry a build this small. Active clicking is the ignition, earning income until you can afford not to. The hacker jobs are the automation layer: SysAdmins, Trolls, Black Hats and Developers each work the network on your behalf, and stacking them is how the game converts your clicks into idle progress. The Upgrades panel is the multiplier layer, spending the proceeds to compound everything you already own. It is a textbook clicker skeleton, delivered at jam scope, and the balance is exactly as shallow as 48 hours implies.

Where it stumbles

It is a 48-hour jam game and it never pretends otherwise: the loop runs out of surprises quickly, and there is no meaningful prestige or endgame to speak of. Community criticism is sparse, which for a game this size means the record is mostly the wiki listing and the original announcement thread. And the game's home is a cautionary tale in itself, since deathraygames.com went dark and the mirror on GitHub Pages is the only verified place it still runs.

Playing it today

It is free and playable at the idle-js-games LD32 build, with the source available on GitHub. If the hacking theme sticks, Bitburner turns the same fantasy into a full programming game, and Hacker Life Simulator stretches it into a life sim.

The verdict

A jam-sized hacking idle with the genre's most honest premise: your network is only as good as the trolls you hire. Play it in an afternoon, appreciate that it still runs at all, and then graduate to its bigger descendants.