Week-2 : First things First

Hello!  

This week kicked off with Peilin (our producer) setting up a comprehensive Project Management Worksheet.

As a team who must deliver a product at the end of the semester, planning is crucial to us. We realized that scoping the project realistically with an achievable goal is the key to success.

From last week’s client meeting , we had pointers to three research papers published about previous picoCTFs. Peilin and Rajat read the papers and shared their knowledge with the rest of the team. The papers served as good resources to make certain design decisions.

We had our second client meeting in the middle of the week. After the meeting, the entire team was on the same page on client expectations. There are at least 3-4 important point of contact in our client committee, each with a different agenda. Honestly, identifying the distinction between them helped!

We now have a precise understanding of our deliverable which is – A game with multiple levels that encompass the questions prepared for picoCTF’18 aimed at middle/high school students who are in the competition to learn and explore . We are not targeting students who are in the competition with a razor sharp focus to win as they are very likely to be using the plain HTML user interface to save time.

We have also promised to pitch a couple of concrete game design ideas to our clients in our client meeting scheduled for next week. Therefore, the week was heavy with brainstorming design ideas and noting them down as we speak. We have got to prepare a pitch presentation too.

On the tech front, the programmers had 2 follow-up meetings with Maverick who is responsible for a backend framework <https://github.com/picoCTF/picoCTF>. This framework is used to maintain consistent state management between the game and the plain HTML interface as both of the frontends communicate with the same backend. First, all three programmers set up the server on their local machine. Mike, a NSA official currently working with CyLab, briefed us about the infrastructural details of the backend. It is a very cleanly built support framework which can help us build a stronger frontend.

Last but not the least, we participated in the Playtest Workshop at ETC. Needless to say, the workshop was beneficial in number of ways but my personal best takeaway is the importance of focussing on the user group. You never know what your user thinks until you actually make them think. We are looking to playtest plenty this semester!

— Ramya