The Work This Week
Brainstorming and Further Research
This week we spent the majority of our time continuing to research games in related fields and brainstorming concepts for the picoCTF game. By the end of the week, we were not only able to narrow our exhaustive list of ideas down to one theme, but we are planning to start a new round of brainstorming to break down narrative and theming details!
We agreed that in the last week we put down our thoughts on game design, story, and theming in a shared slide deck to facilitate visual communication. After we sorted our ideas into four design pitch in the slides, we met with our faculty instructors who raised a question we needed to answer for literally all of our design pitches was: “How is the gameplay and theme related to cybersecurity competition?” This question seemed crucial as we thought over target demographics and the purpose of the game. On the other hand, our instructors encouraged us to keep working on the slides, creating more ideas, and communicate to the client our understanding of the picoCTF game to make sure we are on the right track.
From the tech side, we chose Unity as our development platform. Since the whole team had rich experience working on it, we could minimize the time learning APIs and backend implementation. The team also tentatively began researching low-poly 3D art, mainly because of the performance limit for web games and our skill proficiency.
On the team production side, we’ve begun working on our team logo, poster, and website. We were still discussing the best way to do a fun virtual team dinner and how we want our team photo created!
Client Meeting
The client meeting this week was oriented around going through our game pitch slides and getting feedback from them. It was pretty surprising that our CMU mates unanimously preferred the space exploration pitch, though they were also hesitating on properly connecting cybersecurity to this theme. It seemed developing an “idle game” fits the target audience as most of the players in past years visited the game only when they felt like to.
Compared to former story-driven games, idle games are tolerant in a way that players don’t get stuck even if they fail to answer questions. As we want our game to attract more people who may have little knowledge in cybersecurity, and make them stay longer in the game, it seemed that idle games were a good direction for us to explore.
The Plan for Next Week
Next week we are going to zero in at our space exploration pitch and work out a few possible gameplay hooks and combine them with theming. With a goal of solving major design challenges by week 4 (which will be quarter walkarounds), we want to confirm our pitch with our instructors and clients in next week’s meetings. The next week we also will be busy working on branding materials (that are definitely going to chill), so stay tuned!