The Work This Week
Deepening on Space Travel Ideas
As of week 3, since we’ve agreed upon building a space exploration game, during the week 2’s weekend we quickly developed three sub-game ideas to explore further. After receiving faculty’s feedback, we realized that we’re in fact running in two ways, not three, that were: a casual game focusing on planning and collecting, and a story-heavy game that had an Easter Egg for those who managed to get all collectibles.
We spent the rest of the week developing mode detailed gameplay based on the two concepts, and named them Boldly Go and Secrets of the Ancients. We were still exploring how to add more cohesion between the space gameplay and hacking in cybersecurity.
Week 3 also marks the embarkation of our tech prototype. With the resources Dustin and Maverick provided, we successfully figured out how to have the backend server running on our own machines, which means we would have better control over the questions and answers! For the gameplay part, we first chose to establish the connection between our game and picoCTF competition, i.e. implementing the answer question-boost up loop.
Production
The logo/poster artists had been busy working on crafting the branding materials for HyperPickle. We will continue to polish the design next week. What’s more, we’ve finally landed upon the time for team dinner: Monday of week 4!
Client Meeting
Our team presented the two polished space travel game pitches at the client meeting. Again Megan and her teammates were unanimously leaning towards with several reasons that we all agreed as big factors in the decision making: first of all, controlling the scope is always in the top priority, let alone we’re making a delivery project that needs to be given a thumbs up possibly before finals. Secrets of the Ancients was definitely an interesting pitch but it involved more systems that we were confident to deal with. Another challenge for that game is the storytelling part for which we don’t have a dedicated writer.
We’ve also discussed possible tech approaches for an in-game anti-time traveller mechanism. Apparently, our clients don’t want our games to be hacked, especially when it’s built for emphasizing cybersecurity!
The Plan for Next Week
Next week, on Monday we are going to have the quarter walkarounds where faculty will talk about every aspect that we bring up. We are going to make a slide deck in order to better present what we’ve achieved so far and what we are unclear about.