Hello everyone!

This is team brute4s, we’d like to show our best welcomes to you and share an insight on what we are doing in the next 15 weeks.

The team consists of –

Magian Li (Producer)

Tina Tian (Artist, Writer)

Brian Teng (Programmer, Sound)

Max Hsieh (Programmer)

Team and Project

We are a 4-membered interdisciplinary project team (that’s why we’re called brute 4s!) at the Entertainment Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University. This project is a part of our curriculum and spans across a full semester. Our project’s client is CMU’s Cylab and specifically the ‘picoCTF’ team inside Cylab lead by Megan Kearns (Project Lead on picoCTF’19) and Maverick Woo (Tech Lead on picoCTF’19).

PicoCTF is a cyber security competition conducted by CMU’s CyLab for middle and high school students.<https://picoctf.com/> The competition aims to:

>> Expose middle/high school students to the field of cyber security/computer science in general;
>> Lead them to learn and explore computer security area;
>> Encourage them to pursue further education in this field;
>> Identify best talents among the participants who are already good at it.

The game

Our mission is to make the competition not only an exam-like experience, but also a game with story and other challenges. Along with us developing the game, another team of CMU students from SCS (known as the Problem Development Team) will build the problem set, and we will try our best to make a great combination.

Research

After the team assembled in week 1, we conducted some meetings to talk about team roles and plans for the early stage of the semester. We knew that ETC has a great relationship working with picoCTF team, and developed games for the 2013, 2014 and 2018 competition, so all of them would be great reference for us to look at. So even before we met with our client, we went through the 2018’s game online(which is the only one available now) and all the ETC team presentations in 2013, 2014 and 2018. With information from them, we had a better understanding of the relationship between our game and the competition. And also one very important aspect: scope.

We are very aware that we are a team with 4 members, so the game will not be as big as those 6/7-member teams had developed. We want to have a clear mind of what we are able to achieve, and use our best effort to make it.

Tech

We spent some time on researching which engine to use, since our game will run on website, we have the choice to go with JS based engines. We were worried that since the Unity Engine is a heavy one, it would not perform as smooth in web browsers as a standalone version. Additionally, the 2018 game adopted 3D graphics instead of flat sprites, which could also impede performance.

We tried a few JS engines out in the market, such as Phaser.io and PixiJS, yet we determined that given the limited workforce and time for our project, we simply couldn’t afford spending two weeks on just figuring out the how-tos. On the other hand, Unity is an engine we all have some degree of proficiency. Eventually we decided to go back to Unity, but we also need to ask about performance when we meet with our clients.

We also looked into game of last year and found that it had some minor issues that could affect the user’s experience:In the game, the players will solve problems related to computer security. In a lot of cases, they need to use shell to run/submit their answers. Therefore, they need to frequently copy and paste. However, due to safety issues, Chrome browser doesn’t allow the Unity web client to access the clipboard directly. While it’s still possible to copy and paste, it can only be done using a dialogue, which is much less efficient.

Our programmers worked on this issue and solved it by adding an HTML overlay. While it’s still technically outside of the game, we can customize the overlay with CSS so that it appears to be part of the game. This will help us a lot to keep players immersed.

Other things we did in the week:

>> Decided core hours
>> Set up work environment
>> Attended the ETC playtest workshop. Got some helpful suggestions!

For the next week, we’re planning to:

>> Meet with our client to get clear idea about project goals and the other part of picoCTF 2019 team
>> Figure out our game genre, story, art style and tone
>> Work on development method, project schedule, branding and other logistics
>> Decide which engine we are going to use, since that’s pretty brutal.

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