NITE Team 4
This was the first published game that I’ve worked on during my time at Alice & Smith.
It’s a realistic hacking simulator where you play the role of an agent working in the cybersecurity branch of the shadowy organization known as The Black Watchmen. The name is a play on SEAL Team 6 but for people that prefer keyboards over machine guns.
While I was initially brought in to assist on coding, I eventually played a pivotal role in puzzle design as well as creating full-fledged story missions, side-missions and weaving ARG inspired open world scenarios. Most of the levels (aka networks) that you hack in this game were designed by me, including their visual assets, such as videos, text documents and images.
You can find the game on Steam here:
NITE Team 4
The Academy - Our tutorial missions featuring real tools used by professional pentesters. All the objectives for these missions were very cut and dry in order to acclimate players with their tools so I made sure the networks were simple and that we had an NPC called "Wingman" to guide the player along the way. Wingman would continue to be a guide throughout every story mission moving forward. I also contributed heavily on Wingman's dialogue and on the voice actor's direction.
The Story Missions - inspired by real cybersecurity events. Every Theatre, which is what we called scenarios, had around 4 to 5 missions. We would provide a moral choice at the end of some theatres that would severely impact the start of the next one. Players could also come back to this menu and see what the other players chose, as a community vote.
One of the modules used to hack into a network, using phishing tactics. Players would craft their own virus and write a custom subject and fake sender before email blasting their target. My job was to sprinkle this information in different areas of the network and have the player deduce the correct subject line, file type and sender name. For example, it would be easier for someone to open an infected email if it came from their boss with an urgent subject line. So finding the boss's name in the company's active directory, and the name of a project the target is working on, could do wonders in accessing their workstation.
Uplink51 was part of our DLC mission, featuring a chatbot using Google's DialogFlow. This was the first time I utilised this tool for gameplay purposes, which is typically used on commercial websites. Certain commands would be processed by the chatbot, and would return with a JSON file that would trigger events in the game. None of the commands were specifically coded in the game, allowing us to change keywords from DialogFlow without having to alter any code in Unity. This made bug fixing and on-the-fly changes extremely easy. I was charged with writing the commands, their responses and implementing them on DialogFlow, maintaining a logical communication flow along the way.
An example of an ARG inspired Open World mission. Players had to scour the internet for clues to solve puzzles in order to infiltrate a hacker group. This particular mission was inspired by Ransomware attacks and I wanted it to feel like you were storming a castle. The group you were infiltrating was called the RatPack, so it had a grimy feel to it, while still keeping the general modern aesthetics of hacking networks, using data moshing, pixel stretching and data corruption to heighten the visuals.
Bounties - Bite-sized missions that would appear when certain conditions were met. Bounties were not considered canon and would be released in batches of 5. Some of them would be chosen randomly while others were considered "threaded" and contained their own little story. I had a lot of fun creating these mini-missions, especially for the Halloween ones, where I could flex my horror muscle. The challenge with these bounties were to create small, self-contained stories in a short amount of time. Most bounty sets were hand-crafted and implemented in 2 to 3 weeks alongside any assets that needed to be created, such as documents, images or videos.