Secret Republic — Open Sourced Hacker Simulation Futuristic RPG — Browser based game (PHP Browser Based Themed Game)
The Secret Republic of Hackers has been a long-running project for us: a close friend, myself, a considerable number of players (over 20k first and second version, 3k current version), followers, and contributors.
Starting as TheSecretRepublic.com and ending up as SecretRepublic.net, the game has gone through no less than 4 massive iterations, complete code rewrites, and design overhauls.
Let’s jump through a wormhole to ~2011–2012
The very 1st version
Featured the futuristic design of that time. With AJAX-based simulated UNIX terminals allowing players to battle each other to the last byte. With organizations (alias guilds), blogs, missions, and arenas, it was all there for the taking. Not many screenshots remain from that age.
Moving right along to a more responsive ~2014–2015 version, skipping a few others that were experimented with in its wake:
V3 — more features than V4 w/ poorer code design choices
V3 is the most complete and fully featured, with automated and randomised hacking competitions, viruses, terminal based missions some of which can be played in parties, organization battles, a grid of conquerable nodes for players to defend and steal from one another, simulated servers (components and software), forums and blogs, mission designer, you get my point.
V3 which is arguably better than V4 and more complete, will likely be open sourced soon as well. The code is a bit of a mess but it’s sort of an organized mess.
An automated setup process has been introduced in 2021 to allow those interested to have a quick startup:
And down to V4 — less featured
For the past two years, yet another version has been created featuring its own Mission Creator and re-done design and gameplay, with a mobile-first design specifically made to be rendered as a phone app.
While each version was better and worse than the previous, the goal remained true to its initial target: to give players an interesting gameplay experience through a futuristic UI in a world controlled by a story with a path preferably driven by the player up to the point of giving players the liberty to design the missions themselves.
All graphic assets have been created by contributors, especially for the game. 50% of the music has been recorded for this project while the rest is royalty-free and the web designs have been made mostly from scratch, at some point built on top of Bootstrap.
An automated setup process has been introduced in 2021 to allow those interested to have a quick startup:
It has been quite a journey
With a number of supporters and dedicated players. However, it does not feel like I will be able to dedicate the much-needed time to keep up with adding new content, building up a team around the game and getting it where it should, and joining players expect it to be.
So it was about time this was made open source. Not because it is designed or coded well or particularly useful for that matter, but because there aren’t any other options for the game to move onwards.
If there is someone who feels they want to pick it up or best case if a learner gets to benefit by fixing it up and experimenting with their own version then the circle is complete as the snake bites its own tail, since I myself have started that way through the XNova project (a space simulation RPG).
Contributions are welcomed and I’ll likely be updating it occasionally as well. All assets and code are for grabs (CC BY-SA 3.0 License) with the condition to link and attribute back to the Github repository and contribute to the main codebase.
While the initial storyline I had in mind for the Secret Republic has ended, our destinies will remain intertwined forevermore.
So long, and thank’s for all the fish
Thank you to everyone who has ever joined and played, to those who have given feedback and emailed me, and who offered to design missions.
Thank you to all graphic and sound designers, and to Mike for the artistic contribution and storyline adaptation over the years.
And even if we could’ve done more, I think we enjoyed the ride.
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