Here goes Team HyperPickle!
What is Our Project?
Project PicoCTF is a collaboration between the ETC and CMU Cylab in which we are tasked with building an interactive web-based game for the PicoCTF competition in 2021. The game will be oriented around delivering a fun, engaging experience to motivate a wide range of demographics to realize the importance of cybersecurity issues in the real world.
Who is 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, and her wonderful team!
The Work This Week
General Housekeeping and Everyone’s Role
The first order of business this week was to start organizing both the team and broader project goals for the semester. Since our team is given a delivery project which requires a robust, polished and interesting final product, we wanted to quickly determine as a team what everyone’s preferred roles would be, in order to be able to delegate tasks according to people’s interests. As such, we were able to determine not only people’s interests and skillsets, but also what they wanted to get out of the semester as well.
Here’s everyone’s desired role on the team:
Liangzheng: co-producer, game designer
Jiadai (JD) He: co-producer, technical artist
Andrew McLamb: game designer
Muzi Wang: programmer
Evelyn Sun: 3D artist
Chonghui (Aiden) Sun: programmer, game designer
We were also able to determine our metrics for the semester relatively quickly, which we narrowed down to the following three categories:
- Client Requirements
- Gameplay/Interactivity
- Quality Assurance
Last but not least, we were also able to decide upon our team name: HyperPickle! We liked the name since it came from Hyper and Pickle, while Hyper indicates our target on cybersecurity and Pickle sounded really close to Pico, which is the name of the competition!
Client Meeting
On Friday we kicked off our first meeting with Megan and her team this week! Before the meeting, we prepared a series of questions to ask Megan’s team mainly to clarify some key factors of the game, but also to discuss some logistic issues such as our weekly meeting schedule.
The very first thing we managed to confirm from our client is the target audience. The team was excited to learn that PicoCTF is a successful international cybersecurity competition that has been drawing tens of thousands of students, teachers, and amateurs every single year. We were also told that despite the fact that historically the game is targeted at high school students, our client did want the game to cover a wider range of demographics, regardless of their gender, nationality, and culture. It’s some really important information for us that will shape the gameplay and art style differently.
We were also able to define the boundary of our game, that is, an interesting game with a focus on cybersecurity. Our client also would like to see a game emphasizing the exploration part, which we all agreed could make the game more immersive. As for the art part, our client didn’t really push to one kind of theme but did underline that the art style should make every gamer comfortable.
Some technical issues were also brought forward and got clarified. We chatted with the tech support team with Dustin, Maverick, and Ivan, who answered many a question. We confirmed that the questions in the game will come from Cylab’s end, meaning that we could focus on bringing the most engaging gameplay! What’s more, we were kindly given access to PicoCTF’s Discord server, GitHub, and their Google Drive folder, which would definitely help facilitate our communication in a remote environment!
From a logistics standpoint, we tentatively blocked out 1 pm on Fridays as our weekly client meeting, as that works well with our client’s schedule.
The 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 order to come up with multiple ideas to present to our client and decide which one seems most promising. We also plan to explore the technical possibilities we are given and figure out how to work better with their backend support. For the art part, we wished to do some initial research and determine the art style as soon as possible, since our artist is specialized in 3D art.