This was our final sprint in the development schedule. In the last week, we addressed most of faculties’ feedback from soft opening, while there are some medium-to-low prioritized tasks left in our task list. Before starting, our team spent some time discussing the importance of each task and re-prioritized them. In addition, at the start of the week, we invited several of ETC peers to come and playtested our project since we would like to find out if there was still any problem with UIUX which was the most criticized aspect in our project. Thanks to the playtesters, we got a lot of valuable feedback, and we created a new task list with the leftover feedback from last week and the new tasks.

On Friday, we had Open House event. In this event, luckily we had 10 playtesters who are among our target audience joined us. Here is the playtest data.

Based on the data, our game failed to ensure that the experiences provided were effective enough to help players understand basic computer security concepts, which are complicated and hard to understand by nature. However, it is still good to see that for a few playtesters, they benefited from the game experience. We sincerely hope some participants in PicoCTF 2018 can benefit from our game as well!

In addition, some UX problems arose from the open house as well. After spending the whole weekend, our game had a lot of changes, for example all scenes are relighted, map UI renewed, more guidance added in missions and so on.

Next week we will have our final presentation. Wish us best of luck!

Taking the feedback we got from Soft Opening, we decided to streamline our production of the game and started cleaning out all the unusable parts. The client wanted a Copy-Paste feature in the Question UI as some of the flags are going to be very long and they wanted the players to have the ability to copy and paste the flags. Ramya spent the rest of the week working on this and also polishing out some of the feedback points from Softs. Rajat worked on finalising an ending to the game and putting all of that into the script for the players to access. Himanshu continued his work on the UI elements of the game and started cleaning up a lot of things. Lotus worked on Scaffold 1 and removed some bugs that we had. She also redesigned the UI for the Encrypt and Decrypt animation. Peilin worked on polishing Mission 3 and also adding hover feedback on objects in the hideout.

We are closing in on finals week and the team is getting ready to hand off the project to the client. We will be putting some time next week into creating some content for the archives and also for the website. We will also be working on a final presentation alongside the project.

We are working hard to get the fine details right before we hand off.

-Rajat

Also, we spoke with our faculty and decided that we would benefit from meeting with them more than once a week and getting their continuous feedback on the iterating builds of the project. The team continued their work on the tasks they had. Himanshu worked on changing the UI elements in the game so as to provide more feedback to the players. Peilin continued work on Scaffold 3 and integrated the base level that Guangya provided. Lotus worked on looking for some more music, putting sound effects and music in game, iterating on the sound and fixing minor programming bugs. Rajat worked on iterating on the dialogues in all the scenes and also coming up with mission objectives that would help guide the player. Ramya worked on displaying questions in the Question UI from the backend without having to login with hyperlinks. Guangya gave the client a new updated version of the promo material. He also build more assets for the mission 3 based on Peilin’s request, finished the look of the director which will be used as the profile image in game and did the three cinematics for the three missions.

The team at this point is hurtling towards Softs and we are ready to make the most out of it. We have the layout of a good game and at this point we need to work on improving the user experience for the players as they play through the game.

-Rajat

We had our process grades this week, where the faculty guided us on how to improve our process for the last part of the semester and that would help us improve the overall product.

The team shifted gears to smoothen the pipeline a little more. The most important change was that Lotus moved to working on sound full time and started compiling and integrating the sound effects and background music. To compensate for that, Peilin took over some of her responsibilities and started working on the scaffold 3. Himanshu worked on adding answer validation to the question UI so that players can get feedback on whether the answer they put is right or wrong. Ramya continued her work on scaffold 2 to remove any bugs and polish the gameplay. Rajat completed the level layout for scaffold 3 according to Guangya’s requirements and passed it onto the team. Guangya built the mission 3 environment, helped Peilin with hideout lighting and gave the client the updated version of the promo material.

The team is getting closer and closer to a finished product every week. We still have some usability issues that we need to resolve to make the game more user friendly, but we are on the right path and are getting there.

-Rajat

We spoke to our faculty advisors and they were completely onboard with our decision to scope down the project as they felt it was more important to deliver 3 fully completed and polished scaffolds rather than 5 half completed scaffolds.

The team continued their work through the week. Himanshu worked on creating new assets for the map. He also continued working on the dialogue and question UI. Ramya worked on scaffold 2 state management and moved to polishing the small details in the mission. Rajat worked on creating the first draft of the design for scaffold 3 and passing it onto the programmers. Lotus took that design from Rajat and worked on getting the base logic in the design working. Guangya gathered references for the mission 3,  He also worked with Peilin to figure out the proper lighting pipeline and troubleshooting baked light bugs.

The team had a renewed outlook on the project and a refreshed schedule for the semester. We are moving fast towards soft opening that is on April 23rd.

We also had a playtest day on Saturday, April 7th. We had several middle and high schoolers come playtest our game and give us feedback on how they liked playing the game and what they made out of it.

-Rajat

Himanshu worked on improving the dialogue system for the game. Ramya worked on restoring the functionalities in the hideout while using the new hideout model from Guangya. Lotus continued her work on the first scaffold. She polished player movement, made changes to the animation and added the end state to the mission that required you to decrypt the suitcase before submitting in the portal. Guangya worked on gathering references for the hideout, built the hideout and rendered the concept art to give a direction for lighting and mood. Rajat worked on completing the scaffold 2 amd started some research Binary exploitation for Scaffold 3.

A significant amount of time was taken up by halves and we wanted to make sure that we were on the right path and we spent time coming up with a new schedule for the remainder of the semester. We plan to keep working at full speed and churn out missions every week. We have finally found are footing and are gearing to move forward.

-Rajat

In the GDC week though, thanks to the whole programming team, the project’s level of polish was greatly improved. Here are some of the major changes to address our faculty instructors’ hints:

1. polished UI look and UX of the map UI
2. reworked on mission 1 environment
3. smoothed game flow of mission 1
4. implemented unlocking mechanic of mission 2

In addition, the team also put a decent amount of time on preparing for Halves presentation.

In the following weeks, the team will work on polishing old mission based on faculty instructors’ polishing hints as well as working on new missions. Since there are only 6 weeks left for us to finish 5 missions, the team still need to do some extra work to catch up.

The week started off with our designer finalising the design for the next scaffold likely to be placed in the Web exploitation category for now. The team got together to understand and discuss the design.

The rest of the week was filled with preparation for three upcoming major milestones spanning across week 9 and week 10,

1. We have weekly builds planned for every Thursday night which we demo to our faculty instructors every friday morning. We have planned to show a polished version of scaffold 1 and may be a rough version of scaffold 2.
2. We have a playtest planned at Mt.Lebanon high school as part of their computer fair where we want to playtest the hideout and first scaffold mechanics
3. We have also set up individual faculty meetings with faculty who were previously associated with picoCTF 2013 and 2014 and faculty who had critical feedback for story and gameplay mechanic elements during quarters.

We are hoping to receive a lot of feedback from each of the three big events. Analysing them will help us decide our next top priority tasks.

In other news, our player robot got a major makeover!! So did a lot of animations in the first scaffold which got fine tuned over the course of the week. In addition to that, our UI for instructions and displaying pico questions also went through another iteration. Lastly, a few bugs related to session cookies were ironed out on the communication with the backend side of things.

— Ramya                                                                                                                                      

A significant amount of time was dedicated to make the scaffolding interactive and educational. Since the target audience for these scaffoldings is people with very little knowledge about the addressed computer security topics, the goal is to give them a context about these topics so that they leave the experience with an increased sense of curiosity and take initiative to delve deeper into the concepts even after the competition has ended and perhaps do better in the competition in the consequent year.

The game designer started working on the design of the second scaffolding. The focus is on having a coherent experience across levels and help the players use the rules they have learned in earlier levels to help them play newer levels. Another goal is to have players spend enough time on the game so as to get context about the related questions, but, spend the majority of the time solving competition questions.

The producer worked on our schedule for the next week. The plan is to polish the first scaffolding and start implementing the second one. The semester has almost reached the halfway mark and the team will now be shifting gears to efficiently produce the following scaffoldings so as to deliver a quality project on time.

-Himanshu

Our redesign was mainly aimed at addressing

• Setting a good context such that the players action and the fiction correlated with each other
• Inserting some fun game play elements inside of scaffolding that
  A. Engage the player better in the game leading to better retention
  B. Eventually deliver some high level concepts about computer security

We had decided to build an interactive tutorial kind of a scaffold around cryptography which we demoed to our client on Tuesday. We received positive feedback about the direction we are heading. We spent the later half of the week locking in and fleshing out our new design.
Since we made a demo within 3 days of conceptualising the new direction we had not thoroughly thought through a lot of nitty gritties. We took the rest of the week to iron out the details through discussion and brainstorms.

We now have a solid overarching story and level design for the first scaffold!

On the Art front , our main player robot is headed towards modifications to make the robot look more friendly. The robot is probably going to get rounder and shorter with less sharp edges.

On the programming front, we made progress in terms of improving our communication layer with the back-end and adding functionalities to existing UI components.

We also got our individual process grades and feedbacks and realigned our roles a little bit based on the feedback. Henceforth, Himanshu will work as UI engineer, Lotus as gameplay programmer and Ramya as lead programmer in our project. We finished the week with setting ourselves a goal for next week’s weekly build and dividing tasks amongst ourselves.

–Ramya