Links to individual blog posts:

Our Individual Deliverables Document

Nick’s blog post

Peter’s blog post

Diego’s blog post

Calvin’s blog post

Name Ideas:

• Blundows 24
• A Suspicious Email

Tone: This is a game that transforms an average player into an expert hacker.

We want to give players the feeling of computer mastery, to take matters into your own hands while completing a funny yet serious mission. We plan to achieve this by focusing on three core feelings:

• Wonder: we hope to surprise the player at every turn and have them feel both powerful and inspired to continue on their journey. By throwing new challenges, unexpected consequences, and a constantly unfurling world that gets deeper and larger before their very eyes, we want players to feel like they are experiencing something wonderful.

• Community:  we want this to be an experience that brings people together to achieve a common goal. Similar to how people work together to defeat an escape room, we want this game to act as a catalyst to bring people together to overcome a series of challenges that will bring people closer.
• Adrenaline: by going through a series of challenges (some of which timed, some of which testing their mental fortitude, and some of which being spontaneous and requiring quick thinking), we hope to get the users on the edge of their seats as they move from challenge to challenge, gearing up for whatever will greet them next.

Setting: The game takes place within a faulty operating system running out of the terminal.

You are a fresh user and have been guaranteed a top-notch, state of the art operating system. Little do you know that this OS is riddled with bugs and problems just waiting to be unleashed. In fact, hackers already have a hold on the computer and it is only a matter of time before they start demanding things from you. 

Within the operating system are numerous files that create a backstory to this character. Some will end up being integral to the narrative. Others will be red herrings. You are free to navigate this environment that we hope to grow as the game progresses. 

Based on our narrative, we will also incorporate real-world locations into the game such as Moscow, New York, and Washington D.C., which will all tie into the game and give it a feeling of three dimensionality and realness. We may even incorporate real news into the game, such as stock prices or political events, in order to make the environment feel that much more real.

At the end of the day, we want this story to feel like it could happen to anyone, and that anyone could have the power to fight back against online attackers. As such, we want to create an environment that feels real and lived in.

Narrative: You’re trying to get inheritance money from your long lost relative, but something goes wrong.

You are greeted by a new operating system, Blundows 24,  and a peppy yet wholly unhelpful computer assistant, ClarK. ClarK explains to you the controls of the operating system as well as possible things you can do with its new capabilities, which are presented as top-notch but feel too good to be true. After a brief introduction, ClarK wishes you their best to explore the operating system, and informs you that they are just a command away. 

With the controls under your belt, you are free to explore this environment. ClarK mentioned to check your email, so you do and you find that you have one new message from the one and only Heinrich von und zu Liechtenstein, Duke of Liechtenstein. He explains how you two are long lost relatives, and sends you a suspicious link to click on in order to receive your rightful inheritance. Of course, without hesitation, you decide to click on it. 

Windows start popping up everywhere and you try to close them, but in the corner of your screen, you notice a timer counting down. You furiously click even faster to close all the windows before the timer ends. “Congratulations! You successfully passed Stage 1. Please await further instructions.”

This is just a taste of what we plan on implementing in our game, yet to be named. We hope to merge a quirky and relatable storyline with mini games and challenges the user has to navigate in order to complete the game. Around each corner is a new twist, with a challenge that is related in some way thematically.

Gameplay: Related to the plot, but not related to each other.

In addition to a punchy storyline that will keep the player laughing while simultaneously on their toes, we hope to push the boundaries of what is possible in the Terminal in terms of challenges and mini games. As stated earlier, we want the games to be intertwined with the story line so it makes sense to the player why they are playing each mini game. However, we really don’t want the game to become repetitive, as there will likely only be one storyline: one beginning, one ending (because of short development time). This means that the challenges will have to be very different from each other. We want to give each one its own mechanic that relates to the part of the story the user is currently at. Between each challenge, the user will likely be reading a lot or seeing “hacker-y” animations (depending on what we have time for). We’re also playing around with making the story line “faux interactive” where the user is asked for certain prompts and we end up stitching together a story using those prompts—essentially Madlibs-ing it.

Challenge ideas:

• Spamming tons of suspicious pop up windows that the player must close before the timer ends
• A maze the player must navigate through, with hidden traps will inevitably run into, and have to memorize in order to get to the end.
• A simple cryptographic puzzle that might involve the user doing some web research or getting a pen and paper to solve it. Hints can be provided as needed.
• A turing test with ChatGPT where the player tries to convince one LLM #1 that they are a human while simultaneously another LLM #2 is trying to convince LLM #1 that they are in fact more human than you. What strategies will prevail?
• Word puzzles, riddles, and ciphers embedded into a password cracking minigame
• Connect the flow type game: create a path from A to B with different shapes that can be rotated
• Typing speed challenges: type sentences with a certain WPM to stay alive

Challenges: 

Draft:

• What’s the correct order of development? Story then coding? Do at the same time?
• What is the expected deliverable, given the content in this document and the lack of time in the quarter?
• What if we can’t get any challenges to work? Is a word-based adventure story fine?

In the development process, some of the design challenges stem from different ways to approach the game. For example, we’re weighing whether it may be more beneficial to work on a narrative as opposed to starting coding. Either way, we’re thinking about using an outline to expand on the narrative and mechanics, which may end up working well if done simultaneously. We envision having a playable product by the end of the quarter, where a player can fully progress through our narrative while interacting with multiple mini-games or stages. In the case that these mini-games are unresponsive or simply do not work, we can still utilize the narratives’ full potential by framing the game as a word-based adventure story. We would still have players interact with the Terminal, so making the game have a digital component would not be an issue. In order to make the game functional, engaging, and fun we may have to sacrifice certain aspects of game making such as the aesthetics of gameplay or complexity of mechanics. Playtesting will be a great tool for uncovering any potential pitfalls we may encounter with developing a cohesive narrative, intuitive gameplay mechanics, and overall fluidity of the game. Since our game operates through the Terminal, and as mentioned in the above section, having interactions that are solely terminal-based may feel limiting to a player. But, by pushing the limits of what we can do in creative ways can help make the game feel exciting, fresh and will optimize performance.