Hi! Sorry it’s been so long since I last posted about this.
For anyone coming across the game for the first time, Panopticon: The Hacker is a ChoiceScript game where you play as a hacker who gets pulled into a conspiracy involving HELIX, corporate surveillance, predictive systems and something called PANOPTICON. You’ll investigate different parts of The City, build relationships with the people dragged into this with you, decide who you trust, and eventually have to work out what exactly you want to do with the system once you understand what it was built for.
Development ended up taking a lot longer than I expected. I started a new job in the meantime, which has eaten into my free time considerably, although apparently my response to that has been staying awake far too late hyperfocusing on the game and writing enormous drafts when I should probably be asleep.
The current version has had a substantial rewrite since I last worked on it publicly. The main story, characters, locations and routes are still the ones I originally designed, but I wasn’t happy with a lot of the prose and some later scenes weren’t properly integrated into the game. I’ve gone back through it, rewritten the narrative voice, connected those scenes properly, expanded several character/story threads and reworked the final section of the game.
There has also been a frankly unreasonable amount of CS debugging involving route flags, impossible choices, scenes returning to the wrong place and obscure combinations of decisions that apparently only Randomtest is deranged enough to discover.
The current build passes Quicktest and has been undergoing a 10,000-run Randomtest before I start relying more heavily on human playtesting.
Currently, Panopticon: The Hacker is around 65,000 words (65,000 words of prose / roughly 88,000 words including CS code and branching), with 4 main chapters plus the endgame, and I’d estimate it’s roughly 90% complete. The main story and endings are in place, so most of the remaining work is playtesting, bug fixing and final editing.
I’m aiming to post development updates approximately every 4 weeks, although I’ve learned better than to make extremely confident promises about my ability to maintain a sensible writing schedule.
To play the current demo, go here:
CoGDemos [btw does anyone know how to change my username on CoGDemos without creating a new account?]
Feedback is very welcome, particularly on the characters, pacing, choices, continuity, bugs and any sections where the writing feels noticeably weaker than the rest.
AI Disclosure
☐ No — This project does not contain the output of Generative AI
☒ Yes — This project contains the output of Generative AI
I used generative AI during development to help flesh out rough drafts of some of the main chapters and to assist with ChoiceScript coding/debugging as the project became increasingly complicated.
The story, setting, characters, routes and overall creative direction are my own. I have since gone back through the generated prose and rewritten it in my own voice, but because generative AI output has been part of the development process, I want to be transparent about that rather than claiming the project has never contained it.
AI has also been particularly useful for helping me identify coding problems, trace variables and untangle CS logic when I’ve managed to create yet another collection of flags that made perfect sense to me at 4am and considerably less sense the following morning. Also, I’ll be honest, as a neurodivergent writer outsourcing errors and typos to gen ai has been a massive lifeline during this process and I truly believe if I hadn’t done it this way I’d have struggled with overwhelm and ended up with yet another unfinished project which isn’t what this deserves!
CONTENT WARNING
Panopticon is a dystopian cyber-thriller intended for mature audiences.
It contains themes and depictions including:
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pervasive surveillance and loss of privacy
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institutional and corporate abuse of power
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profiling, predictive policing, and discrimination
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coercion, manipulation, blackmail, and psychological control
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violence, threats, injury, and death
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trauma and mental health struggles
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references to suicide and self-harm
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substance use
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poverty, housing insecurity, and class inequality
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hacking, criminal activity, and illegal access to data
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morally difficult choices with potentially harmful consequences
Some material may be especially uncomfortable for players with personal experience of surveillance, institutional mistreatment, coercive control, poverty, or being treated as a risk rather than a person.
Player discretion is advised.
DISCLAIMER
Panopticon is a work of fiction.
All characters, organisations, technologies, systems, and events depicted are fictional or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to real people, companies, government agencies, surveillance programmes, predictive systems, or historical events is coincidental unless explicitly stated otherwise.
The game explores surveillance, algorithmic decision-making, institutional power, political conflict, crime, and resistance as fictional themes. Depiction does not constitute endorsement of any character’s actions, ideology, methods, or conclusions.
Technical elements involving hacking, surveillance, data collection, and security are fictionalised for narrative purposes and should not be treated as instructions for real-world activity.
Panopticon © Somethinkorignl.