Kahfi R — WarNet: War on The Bandwidth

Anyone who grew up with Indonesian internet cafés knows the unwritten rule: don't download big files. It drags the whole warnet's bandwidth down, and if the operator notices, you're out. WarNet asks what would happen if you broke that rule on purpose, and did everything you could to get away with it.

GameSeed 2026: Top 90 of 260
Team: 8 people
Jam length: 1 month

The idea

GameSeed gave us two themes: "So Absurd, It's Cool" and "Childhood Dreams". Back when warnets were everywhere, I always wondered what it would be like to actually start that huge download and then do whatever it took not to get caught. That was the childhood dream. Turning it into a stealth game, with the operator as the threat and your own PC as the hiding place, took care of the absurd.

How a session plays

You sit at one PC and can look in four directions: your screen, your left, your back, and your right. Open the browser and the download starts. From then on, the game is about hiding what you're doing until it finishes.

WarNet's four views: a download on the PC screen, the operator at his desk, a friend offering a match, and a girl leaning by the router box — The four views: the download on your screen, the operator at his desk, Farhan with a challenge, and Dewi by the router.

You win

The download reaches 100% before your billing time runs out.

You lose

The billing runs out first, or the operator catches you.

The suspicion meter

The operator doesn't patrol. They get suspicious, and the meter is how you see it.

60The operator comes over and asks what you're doing.
90They ask again. Only the right answer keeps you seated.
100Caught. The session is over.

The dark marker is a run in progress: suspicion climbs, gets talked back down, then climbs again.

Three pillars

My job as game designer was to break the idea down into a few systems the team could build. "Don't get caught while downloading" became three pillars, each one an obstacle or a way around it:

Random events

Things happen around you, often with the people nearby, and you have to deal with them.

Side tasks

Cover for the download: chatting, playing games, refreshing pages, looking busy.

Abilities

Tools like hacking that buy you room when suspicion climbs.

The most absurd moment comes when they all collide: three random events at once, the operator almost sure of you, and you in the middle of a hack.

WarNet gameplay: the player turns between views as a random event plays out mid-download — Mid-download, a random event pulls your attention away from the screen.

Design into code

The hardest part wasn't any single system. It was getting the design out of my head and the document, and into the code, with a team of eight. It's hard to make sure everyone has read the design document, let alone understood it the same way. A lot of my month went into explaining the design to the team while we built it.

Small scope first. Get the core loop and mechanics working, then expand and polish.

What we cut

Time ran out before the list did. We cut a lot of random events and side tasks, and I wish we'd had time to polish the game. That's what WarNet taught me: keep the scope small, make the core loop work first, and only then add more.

Team

Game design by ichsanfrds and me. Programming by dyan, Ken, and Waffles. Illustration by PAl. UI and assets by aditfhm and KopiCan. Music by me.