After participating in a Game Jam in May 2017, we were asked to continue development on a game over the summer.
The aims of the game were to inform people about some key elements of cyber security, including:

  • How to create a strong password and why it's important
  • Why it is a bad idea to share your password with others
  • The potential dangers of unknown USB sticks
  • Why it's a bad idea to input sensitive information into a public PC
  • How to identify Phishing spam
  • The importance of using encryption to send important data online



The Game Jam

For the game jam submission we decided to make a party game which focussed on the use of public PCs element. The premise of the game was that each player controlled a hacker, who would go around a cyber cafe waiting for people to leave their PCs and try and hack the PC without being seen by someone in the cafe.
We also implemented a “shout” for each player, which they could use and have someone come and investigate, which added more of a multiplayer element.
One of the things they asked for with the game was the capability for it to be set up in a large space and let players join and leave as they wanted, so we set it up for a new player to start playing mid game and to leave whenever they wanted.


The Summer Work

Although we were one of the winners of the game jam, they asked us to make a completely different game to what we had before, with more of a focus on narrative, and accessible to people who know nothing about video games.
The game we have been making has become a top-down adventure game. The player engagement of the game now comes from the various minigames, each of which we have tried to make as intuitive as possible in terms of how they’re played.
I also made it so the game would read the player’s device ID and would generate their character based on that, so you would always have the same looking player as long as you played on the same device.
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