Category: Weekly Blog

Work Done This Week

Fleshing out mini game prototypes

Week 3 marks the start of out actual prototyping process. Last week we’ve agreed upon building a set of mini games that teach the fundamental programming principles (that are listed in the problem planner sheet handed to us by our client) in cybersecurity. The two major tasks this week: 1. Talking with educators to figure out how to engage our target demographic. 2. Receive and digest feedback from quarters walk around.

Talk with the educators

Some key take-aways from our talk with the educators:

• Youngsters in our target demographic are familiar with platforms such as “Kahoot!”, and that we are encouraged to use simple drag and drop interactions as well as scoreboard in our own games.
• Keeping the youngsters engaged will be our main task, solving Morse code during class was one of those activities.
• Giving the youngsters “options” to choose from, or even just the illusion of choices will help make the experience more engaging.
• Self-motivation stems from recognition, sense of achievement, competition (for the top students), fighting for a cause, a lot of easy wins at first and, lastly, attention grabber during the early stage.

Quarters

The team focused on making and presenting the two mini game prototypes during quarters to gauge if this is the right path. Before the Wednesday walkaround, we prototyped the indentation mini game and the ASCII decoding mini game. It is crucial to ensure cohesion between gameplay coding principles in cybersecurity. 

Here are the key take-aways from walk around feedbacks:

• Level design in our mini games should not be too easy or too hard
• Giving players a lot of feedbacks will achieve better effect
• Do not stress too much on the “magic” theme. Cybersecurity is the key theme here.
• Prove the mini game ideas, as early as possible,with your target demographics. Playtest early and often with target audience.
• Don’y just stick to one single metaphor to wrap the experience. Dive into multiple metaphors instead.
• There is a good Reference game: Dragon Box Algebra
• Connect the concept with real thing. Bridge the gap between the game experience and real world problem solving.

Logo & Poster!

Plan for Next Week

Next week, the team will try to come up with the entire set of mini games that cover all the topics in the picoCTF problem planner sheet and tentatively figure out a storyline that ties all of them in a organic manner. Stay tuned!

Work Done This Week

Brainstorming

The team spent the majority of time this week researching ideas/game genres that could fit as the wrapper of this picoCTF warm up game experience we will be delivering. Brainstorming is a fun yet energy draining process. Luckily, with the help of the “composition box” workshop, we were able to narrow down the development path the team will be treading in terms of game ideas as well as theming plans for those game ideas respectively.

For the upcoming initial presentation of ideas to the client, the team agreed to have visuals to support the showcase (reference materials of other games, films, sketches etc.), in addition to pitching/presenting multiple ideas for the client to choose from. Lastly, we will be updating the faculty advisors after the client meeting.

After sorting out the game ideas ourselves on google slide, we met with our faculty instructors to discuss the viability as well as appropriateness of each. This step is important as faculties are the first layer of filter that would eliminate anything impractical or way out of scope. Furthermore, having this internal review made communication with the client more efficient. 

Client Meeting

The talk with the client clarified our direction even further. Our client liked the mini games pitch and encouraged us to come up with more mini game idea that could cover the warm-up problems on the list. Additionally, they reminded us that the final game, ideally, will achieve a balance between harsh command line vs. user friendly interactions, and would push the player into some challenges/self learning. Lastly, our client advised us not to overshoot for making too many mini games (like including all the 14 problems on the list).

Development

In terms of tech, the team chose Unity WebGL as our development platform. This is our platform of choice as the programmers on the team had rich experience working on it. The team also landed upon using 2D art as the main aesthetics considering the limitation of the project as well as the team’s skill set.

On the team production side, we’ve started working on our team logo, poster, and website. We were still discussing the best way for team bonding and how we want our team photo made.

Plan for Next Week

Next week we are going to zero in on our mini game collection pitch and work out a few prototypes as well the theming. We also need to prepare for quarters presentation (yes, this semester is quite different). Lastly, stay tuned on our logo and other branding materials. Ciao!

Our Project

Project PicoCTF is a collaboration between the ETC and CMU Cylab where we are tasked with building an interactive web-based game for the PicoCTF competition in 2022. The game will aim to assist in introducing cyber security principles towards a young audience that has no programming background whatsoever, as well as help them learn the importance of cybersecurity in the real world.

Our Client

Our client this semester is CyLab Security and Privacy Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, who has been working with the ETC for a long period of time together has helped deliver in four successful PicoCTF web games. Our client representative is Megan Kearns, Special Projects Administrator at CMU CyLab.

Work Done This Week

Housekeeping and Role

The final deliverable clearly lines the path for us and what we should achieve as a team of 3 programmers, 1 designer and 1 artist. We as a team need to deliver a polished and interesting game that teach youngsters the importance and fundamental principles of cybersecurity. We came up with the following list of our roles.

Lewis Koh: producer

Josh Li: co-producer, designer

Oscar Huang: programmer

Jeesub Lee: programmer

Tianying Lyu: artist

We were also able to decide upon our team name: 404 Productions! “404” right away conveys the notion and purpose of our project while nevertheless keeps the fun factor in. “Productions” keeps the name professional and does not limit our final product to only games.

Lastly, faculties at the ETC helped us come up with the “Composition Box” that will guide the inital brainstorming for the project:

Client Meeting

We met with Megan and her team this week! With this initial meeting the team wanted to get know, in more depth, the client, as well as the goal for the project in greater details. Before the meeting, we prepared a series of questions to ask Megan’s team mainly to clarify some key factors of the game, in addition to discussing logistic issues such as our weekly meeting schedule.

The first thing we learnt from the client is that our target audience is generally junior & senior high school students who is new to the realm of cybersecurity and are completely new to programming. This piece of information will shape what our game will look like for the most part.

Furthermore, our client clarified a bit more on the nature of the game we will be making, in addition to the project description we received before the client meeting. Yes, the game needs to be an interesting game with a focus on cybersecurity. Yet our client also emphasized that they’d love to see this game as a framework that motivates students to learn, on their own, outside the game, cybersecurity ideas and technologies.

Lastly, we confirmed that all the questions in the game will come from Cylab’s curated list of cybersecurity problems. Constraints brings creativity. We were also given access to PicoCTF’s Discord server, GitHub, and their Google Drive folder.

Plan for Next Week

Next week, we want to officially start the team’s brainstorming process on the game’s narrative and main mechanism in group brainstorming session. We want to offer our clients a multiple initial ideas so that they can choosing the most promising. We will also delve into technical possibilities and figure out what works for the team and the project best.