I love this game. The visuals are a nice tribute to Rogue, I love the hacking minigame, and it feels great to be in the middle of a thousand bullets but still have the time to hack a machine for two minutes :)

Now, it's been about a year since someone asked this... but will this be developed anymore? This is such a great game and I love it on it's own, but it seems like there's more story to tell, with the intro text and such. I would love to see what you had in mind to flesh this out.

If you wanted to transfer the hacking to something else, you could have "cursed" items that you can only restore if you hack them. I feel though, if you really wanted to keep away from Cogmind territory, but you wanted to salvage the mechs, then you should keep it multi-tile based. I feel like that's one of the unique parts of this game, that you have to be conscious of how large your mech is.

Possibly, you could even learn to program them- like, "if you see enemy, move toward it and shoot", as one of the other mini games. Maybe you only have a limited number of commands that you can collect as you go. I don't know, just an idea.

Regardless of what direction it goes, I'm excited to see what happens.