About the project

During my Placement Year, I’ve worked at CENTRIC as a Student Researcher/Serious Game Developer. I was part of the team working on the CyberCentric (formerly Yorkshire Cyber) project. The project serves as an educational Serious Game about Cyber Security for small-medium sized business; showcasing the potential threats that could severely impact the company’s finances and reputation while presenting preventative measures in an interactive scenario-based story.

My main responsibilities on the project were the creation of various UI elements and their refinement, implementation of general gameplay features and creating one of the scenarios with multiple endings.

I’ve also been tasked with exploring the impact of various visual cues that can enhance the experience of the user and help them understand what their decisions impact in the game. Based on that research I’ve implemented various animations and cues to help point the player attention to important things being shown.

I have also worked on the Android build of the game; assuring it’s playability and performance on Android smart phones and tablets.

The project since my departure has been awarded 2 prizes from the National Cyber Awards: Learning Innovation in Cyber Awareness 2019 and Most Original Cyber Security Product 2019. The game beat more than 200 other nominees and was the only entry to be awarded two prizes.

Knowledge gained

• Developing Serious Games and the differences involved in working on a product aimed at business owners; serving as an educational tool.

• Experience working on a commercial game in a large collaborate environment.

• Working on UI/UX and Gameplay programming/design within Unity and C#.

• Adapting to the workflow of an existing project.

• Using in-house tools to create a scenario which continues on from previous scenarios and results in one of multiple endings based on decisions made.

• Compiling the project and assuring the functionality is uniform across the PC and Android platforms.