Project Cipher

Project Cipher introduces students to the concept of cryptography by showing them techniques to encrypt or decrypt information using ciphers. Project Cipher is designed to introduce two types of ciphers: transposition and substitution ciphers. Players have the option to choose between a Story Mode that provides a guided tutorial on how to play, examples of various ciphers, and quizzes to reinforce learning objectives; and an interactive mode that gives direct access to various levels of difficulty of transposition and substitution ciphers.

The game launcher along with additional information on Project Cipher and other CIAS games can be found here.

Project Cipher Gameplay.

There is some lag due to the recording software.

Role

Project Cipher is the first project I worked on at the CIAS and my first shipped project. We started the planning process in January 2018 and it was completed in June of 2018. I was the lead game designer and developer working with a team of five others on the direction and design. I programmed all of the mechanics and features while our previous Project Lead created the backend code to connect this game to the CIAS Launcher. I also created animations for the tutorials, and handled all the audio. I created a simple music player with play-pause-skip functionality within the game.I presented the project each week to show our progress, cover potential changes, address challenges, and receive feedback from the team.

Lessons Learned

I had no background with ciphers or educational games so I had to learn how to solve a few transposition and substitution ciphers and come up with lessons that would progressively teach 4th grade students how to solve them.

I used a dialogue system purchased from the app store and modified it to our needs. There were constraints with the original code, but after the modifications I made we were able to trigger other events and animations. The modifications also allowed the player to skip sections in the tutorial to reach the lessons they needed.

This was my first time working with a professional game development team so I learned how to develop a game with educational and age related constraints, meet deadlines, manage expectations, present my ideas and thoroughly explain my thought process when reaching a conclusion in design or development direction.

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