Our new game new methods

Welcome to yet another dev log of mine!

This time sanspapyrus683, krables, and I participated in a brand new game jam (Cybersecurity Game Jam) with a theme aimed at gamifiying the hard cold boring cybersecurity topics into something even an elementary schooler can get their interests on!

Each summer we would try to seek for game jams to create games on. When sanspapyrus683 in our team recommended this game jam for us to participate in, naturally the scale of the prize money alone already blew our mind. "A prize pool of 4K+ dollars!" the others exclaimed in our discord server including me. The largest prize money game jam we have participated in before was the Solstice Fire and Ice Game Jam, where first place earns $250 in steam credits. Comparing to this game jam, where the first ranker can get up to $1500 in any medium!

Unfortunately, we soon realized that we know absolutely nothing regarding the topics of cybersecurity.  Luckily, I dug out my school's computer science club lectures and found one resource they recommended back in the day: Cisco Net Academy online cybersecurity course. I put up the link for everyone to see, then we all started grinding as much knowledge as possible out of this course to help us prepare any cybersecurity theme the host will announce at the start of the jam.

When the game jam started, there were actually 2 themes for us to choose from: password strength & email phishing. We tend to argue back and forth for hours on day one, each defending their own game idea from the other. But this time, surprisingly, we all came to the same conclusion in just the first minute: Accept & reject style phishing email identification game idea inspired off a once-popular game Papers Please. "EXACTLY,  oh my god", one of our teammates commented in discord. Without further ado, we started planning in-depth with the idea we have in mind. 

This type of genre is quite new to us since the game idea's design will only be revolved around the usage of UIs, and heavier usage of UIs. To all the games we made before, all of them have to do with something regarding controlling some sprites in a moveable screen. The process was challenging, but we split tasks and managed to get it done. 

Next up, we have to actually write the emails you see in the game. We divided the types of emails into 5 categories: Business, Personal, Advertisements, Resume, and Customer Support. Believe it or not, to ensure players hopefully do not get bored seeing duplicating email messages, we actually ended up with not just 10, 20, 50, but ~70 different emails thanks to krables! (Drafts can be found in this google sheet, we realized later in the jam that copying pasting text from google sheet to JSON files was too much hassle, so latter emails were just written directly in the JSON files for the game)

After we were finished with the core mechanics, we started polishing our game. Background music, sound effects, post-processings, menu decoration, and a long credit scene to summarize all the resources we used. I then decorated the game's itch page and submitted the project. Normally we would add easter eggs to our game, but despite this is the longest duration game jam we participated in, we perhaps focused too much on over-polishing that we forgot to implement those secrets for players to find this time...

When everyone submitted their game and was ready to play. I could not believe it until I have seen those top-notch games on the submission page. One of them created a game where each character in a password can act as a troop, few others created a whole OS simulator just to simulate what could happen in the real world!

At the end of the day, I was amazed. When the results came out, we got a prize of $100 on Sustainability. The outcome wasn't too bad, but not so great either. We put out our best efforts, but we can definitely have much more room to improve into to worth the 1st place we always aim to reach next time.

Ok enough of me ranting here again. As always one more game jam down the line, and our game will be much better. Stay tuned for our next game!