Jack Spero's Great Devlog!

Prototyping Log

Jack Spero

The Unknowns: The biggest question mark surrounding the entire e-mail system was figuring out a way to properly generate them. Assuming I had the ability to transfer an excel file (which I currently did not), then I’d have to determine how the system would tag every piece of text, what tags would be required, and how complex the emails in question should be.

The Prototype: For my prototype, I ended up building a physical copy of the e-mail generator I wanted to program. I ended up writing over 100 sticky notes that would make up different parts of an e-mail, and, after giving every sticky note the proper tags (i.e. Management, IT, Paragraph 3) I had a way to physically produce e-mails which I could then use for the programming aspect.

The Evaluation: There were two main things I was trying to evaluate using this system. The first, was if this prototyping system would be able to functionally create fully generated e-mails using the sticky notes. If this system worked 100% then that would tell me that I had the way I was going to program it already locked down. The second was if the system was simple enough for others to understand how it works. Since others are going to be using this system to add in the parts of the e-mails, they’d need to at the very least have a rudimentary understanding of how it functions. So, getting others in the class to participate, I sat them down and attempted to run through how the system would function to see if they understood how it works.

The Learnings: While there were two different things I was trying to evaluate, they ended up producing the same learning for me. That being there were too many tags or edge cases I needed to keep track of in the system’s current form. The way I currently had it set up was that there were an absurd amount of tags. Ones for the different types of phishing flags, ones for the section of the e-mail, ones for if the sender / receiver was Management, IT, a coworker, ones for if it could be used with attachments or not, ones for how large the e-mail section was, and more. Needless to say, it ended up being too confusing for the average game design student to grasp, in addition to making it a nightmare to sort through all the sticky notes for ones that could be used for the specific categories that got drawn.

Informing The Project: The biggest change that came out of this project was changing the role the player does in the story. Originally we had it so they were overseeing the suspicious e-mails that arrive at a specific company, and were responsible for either allowing them through or flagging them for phishing. Instead, we’ve decided to switch it so that the player is now only an employee at the company. This’ll not only help enforce the skills we’re trying to teach but putting the player in a situation many will find themselves in, but also makes the programming much easier as it removes the unknown of who the email is going to be sent to as it’ll always be the player’s computer. This means the "recipient" tags won’t be needed, and will help simplify the system a ton. 

In addition, the group agreed that we should essentially sort messages into “groups” rather than have some “catch all” messages that can be used at any time. This’ll help to simplify the system even more so I’ll have a better chance at programming it for the end of the semester. In Conclusion: The prototyping assignment I found to be a welcome success. It helped highlight some problems that I had overlooked in my initial pitch for the system, as well as showed some areas that our group could focus on when implementing it into the game.