Phish n' Chips

Inspiration

We were inspired by choose-your-own adventure games, and by real life scenarios that we have both encountered in our lives as interns in tech. We have both taken digital literacy courses for our jobs before but we found that the content could have been more engaging and approachable. As such, we believe that by gamifying the learning through something like Phish n’ Chips could make obtaining digital literacy skills more fun and accessible.

What it does

Phish n’ Chips is a visual novel. It is driven by a main storyline with choices that affect the story as the player goes along. These choices are related to cyber security and digital literacy. If a player chooses the “wrong” option, they will get an explanation for why their choice was not optimal and they can try again. They are not penalized for “wrong” answers; instead, they are encouraged to learn from their mistakes. There are also mini games along the way that are all-or-nothing. That means, in order to move on in the story, the player must successfully pass the minigames!

By the end of the game, the player should learn digital literacy skills and cyber security skills such as choosing secure wifi, passwords, random links, “free” downloads, and much more. They can apply these skills in their working lives and at home.

How we built it

We built this project using RenPy and Python for the coding. We also used Krita and Medibang Paint to draw the assets. The music was from bensound.com.

Most of our project planning was done using Google Docs and Trello. We first figured out what problem we wanted to solve and then threw around ideas.

We then broke down the project into items that we would need and figured out each others’ strengths. Afterwards, we delegated tasks according to what we needed and what we could do in our limited time span using Trello.

We built this entire project in under a week through lots of dedicated hours, lengthy Zoom calls, and lots of laughter.

Challenges we ran into

There were many challenges we faced. For one, we only found out about this hackathon and started working on it less than a week ago; we were in a time crunch! Both of us were pretty busy with our lives as well so finding dedicated time and figuring out how to piece our work together was challenging.

Coding the minigames was one of the hardest parts because they were done in Python but RenPy uses its own language. RenPy is also notorious for being difficult to make minigames in. Bug fixing and combining our work was also a challenge.

We also were unfamiliar with background art, so we also had to push our artistic abilities.

However, we are a good team and if one person struggled, we would work together to resolve the issue.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of what we were able to create in such a short timeframe. Despite our limitations, we were able to pull together a pretty solid project. We are especially proud that we were able to complete the game in under a week and work with a platform that not all of us were not too familiar with (RenPy).

We are proud of the amount of digital literacy content we were able to add in, the jokes, the art, and the amount of hard work that went into it.

What we learned

We learned a lot!

We learned about how difficult making a game is, RenPy, team work, project coordination, Github, and of course, we learned a lot about cyber security!

Another important thing we learned was the importance of user testing; alth

What's next for Phish n’ Chips

The future of Phish n’ Chips is pretty endless and it’s quite easy to expand it. However, the number one improvement could be conducting user interviews and understanding our user base (in this case, it was young, working professionals before diving into designing something for them.

Otherwise, we could add more minigames, more choices, improve our current minigames, and follow up on the main character after they get the fishing job. This allows us to talk about other cyber security risks in the workplace and home that we haven’t talked about such as how to deal with privacy concerns. Another feature we could add is a credits screen and make the quick menu into images maps to make the user interface a bit cleaner and easier to see and understand. We could also add more accessibility features like narration or descriptive text for people with visual impairments. Finally, the art could be improved, but that will take practice. If the game gets more polished, it could potentially be used by companies to help supplement the digital literacy skills of their employees.