Network Engineer Simulator

About this game

Latest news

• Patch Notes·8 Dec 2025Official

  December 2025: Dev Update #8

  Work continues. We are moving forward and this game is worked on, and discussed daily in WGS meetings. We also have had to pivot, as individuals, in 2025, due to circumstances, to keep the lights on and food on the table. Has our velocity decreased on NetSim? yes; However we are coming to the end of a large project that will hopefully finance the company and vastly accelerate the work on NetSim. One guiding principal we are trying to govern ourselves by, is not to ingest large $ amounts from our community or big corps, during development, and only release a prototype of a game, version after version. Some of you may know that reference. We are not interested in that business model. We don't want to sell "pre-release packages", and other "things", before we release a game. We want to create content, publish it, and hopefully it is what people want to enjoy. Old school business model. That requires us to sometimes take on real world work to keep gas in the tank. So, we appreciate everyone and we understand if there are some that are upset by the timeline. Reality, unfortunately is reality. We will work on better communications , and we definitely understand your desire for this game.We look for ways to speed up our dev work, and as an example, we are now modeling code outside of Unreal and c++ , in another language, c#, so that we can compile it very quickly, without the UI and Unreal code, and then run unit testing very quickly. Once we prove code we convert back to c++ and place it back into the game. We have been able to vastly increase back end model development (non-UI classes) and testing. What would take a day to work on now takes just an hour or two. This is not a negative comment on Unreal. We love Unreal. It has to do with compile time and loading the game everytime we want to test a small change. So now the Network logic, from the Ethernet Frame all the way up to the L2/L3/Host devices and NET-OS is modeled and tested in a black box console app and we can i...
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Walrus Game Studio)

• Patch Notes·31 Mar 2025Official

  Q1 2025: Dev Update #7

  Hey all. We’ve been quiet. We know. The start of 2025 was full of hope and promise for our team and we were starting off very strong but real life hit and threw some speedbumps in our path. We’re again at a point where the team is back to normal. We all still have our full-time jobs, but we are back to making significant progress on the project we are passionate about. This is what we’re currently working to finish: CLI Interaction Programming functions of a switch in C++ Swapped over to our new and improved Ports in game Fixing bugs in our cabling code Finishing pass on the menu system and the game save state. These are the final pieces to complete for the initial demo. More info to come as we wrap up these final tasks and get ready to release the demo. Thank you all for your continued interest and support. -The Walrus
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Walrus Game Studio)

• Patch Notes·10 Dec 2024Official

  December 2024: Dev Update #6

  Hey all! Wanted to get one final dev update before the end of the year and we have some great news to share. As I mentioned in our previous dev update we are working on simulating how networks operate. From Layer 1 up to Layer 7. This past weekend we had a big breakthrough in our programming. We accomplished the following: MAC Address Assigning Patch Panels Wireless Let’s talk about each one for a moment and why this is a big deal for us. MAC Address Assigning. If you’re familiar with the world of IT, every single device that connects to a network has a MAC Address (also known as a physical address). So when you connect a device to a switch, that switch will learn that devices’ MAC address and put it in a table to reference. But also, on each switch, each port has its own unique MAC address as well. So what this means is we have accomplished auto MAC Address assigning of switches and their ports as well as allowing our switches to learn MAC Addresses from devices. We’re very excited about this and hoping it speeds up the IP Addressing programming. Patch Panels Wait a minute, patch panels are a big deal? Yes, yes it is. To reiterate what a patch panel is, it’s just a piece of hardware that is normally found in a network closet that acts as a central point to organize and manage network cables. So what kind of programming was needed for this? In real life, a patch panel doesn’t do anything but allows termination of cables on two sides. There’s no programming on it, it just sits there. But in our game? How do we translate that? Well, we figured it out. In our programming we had to give the patch panel some sort of logic so that it can detect when something is plugged into it and allow the other end of that termination point to detect it is online. We want to simulate the real world as much as possible but we did not want to actually run cables from the patch panel to the various termination points in our levels. So we sort of tricked it. The front side of the patch pan...
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Walrus Game Studio)

• Patch Notes·17 Nov 2024Official

  November 2024: Dev Update #5

  Hey all! We know it has been mighty quiet on the dev front. I just want you all to know we are still working on the game! We are at the point with the demo where the level is done, the wiring programming is complete, but what is taking so long? It’s just a demo level right? Well, there’s a reason it’s taking so long, we want to make sure the demo releases with a basic network OS and network stack. What does that mean? It means we want you to be able to test out logging into a switch doing some basic CLI (command line interface) programming. Maybe some show commands to start off with, or doing basic level port configurations. But what does this mean? We are basically trying to mimic how an actual network functions, with frames, packets, headers and everything. It’s really exciting stuff. We figure once we get the baseline of this network programming done, at that point it should speed up our development. We already have a lot of levels designed on paper (more like visio) and are working on creating them in Unreal. I also wanted to talk about our vision for the game. This may change as we get closer to an early access release but this is what we’ve been talking about internally and I want to share that. So we first envision two types of players: Someone who just wants to play a game. This player isn’t too worried about learning networking and may care more about just wiring closets to make them look pretty. Someone who wants to use this game as a learning tool, studying for certifications or furthering their career. This means when it comes to our level design we are trying to accommodate these two types. We plan to have different difficulties for levels something like: Casual and Learning. Casual would mainly focus on just the wiring part where Learning would include the wiring along with some CLI programming. Each of these levels we plan to introduce networking concepts such as why VLANs are important, access vs. trunk ports, VOIP, DHCP/DNS, and more. Even if you’re...
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Walrus Game Studio)

• Patch Notes·29 Jul 2024Official

  July 2024: Dev Update #4

  Hello Network Engineers, It's been a while since we've talked Net Sim updates. First off we greatly appreciate your time and patience as we work on building a game that we hope will be both enjoyable and engaging. It's been a busy year for many of us in work and our personal lives and creating a nice balance has been challenging. Rest assured we are engaged beginning to regain our focus, and pressing forward. The main focus this year has been finalizing the demo which sounds like a broken record at this point. We've been working to get the artwork going, audio, UI/UX, game play mechanics and scenarios, Lighting and Level design. We are working to build some foundational tools that will help us designing levels, and network scenarios. We've reached a point now where some of our earlier work is not the most performant and we've learned quite a bit along the way. This means we have an opportunity to refactor our code, by cleaning up the logic, removing the unnecessary parts, and better encapsulating the functionality which will make working with these objects much easier. We've already started moving beyond the demo and working to build various story elements, networking challenges and scenarios. This doesn't mean we've forgotten about the demo, but the demo will be a bit of a test bed level for us to continue to improve our core mechanics. While the demo level will be far from a complete reflection of the end game product we hope that it will show and highlight some of the core functions and game play mechanics.
  Read full article on Community Announcements (Walrus Game Studio)