Cookie Injection but with Real Cookies

Inspiration

We wanted to create a video game that taught the critical skills of the cybersecurity mindset to 3rd-6th graders. The cybersecurity industry is already lacking 300,000 jobs, an early introduction to the cybersecurity mindset will allow society to manage this need.

What it does

We created both: a. An example game to play through the first initial levels of our game using the Godot Engine. b. A white paper on the principles we applied and a development plan for the future. This white paper goes into detail the future game and level design as well as the cybersecurity learning objectives for each level.

How we built it

We used the Godot Engine to build all of the characters and levels, starting from an initial example stage of a platformer. All assets and code are 100% MIT Licensed or in the Public Domain. We developed our game with this as a priority because we find it incredibly important for schools benefit from this game as much as possible, including analyzing the source code and making improvements as needed. The game is runnable in basically every format: Web, Windows, Mac, and even Linux. This will greatly benefit distribution and adoption.

Challenges we ran into

Neither of us had ever made a game before, so we where learning as we went along. We spent a large amount of time on just getting the dialog box to appear, then even more time trying to get a button that had an image (plus or minus sign) as it's texture. Once we got over those roadblocks and started to figure out how Godot organized and controlled assets, it was much more smooth (choppy) sailing.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

That we have a game to show and a lot of development planning at the end of this! We are both really happy about the knowledge we gained about game design, from 0, to being able to make a basic app. I am also proud that we created something we feel could be actually impactful. Cybersecurity education and outreach is very important both of us.

What we learned

Don't underestimate the time it takes to do basic tasks and learn new advanced software, like a game engine. This was really time and energy intensive, which means we weren't able to create all the examples that we wanted too. We also learned to appreciate some of the abstractions a game development engine provides. Using one editor, we were able to export functional copies for (almost) any platform.