Ayo, devlog 1 here, 

haven't started development of anything, so there ain't much to log, but I've started with the research part of pre-production so that I can move onto the pitch. The first part of this whole project is to choose a topic, conduct research and then utilize that research to create a game pitch relating to the topic we researched (obviously)

My chosen topic was Cybersecurity. That's a pretty broad topic, so my first objective was to pick a sort of sub-topic or a more specific focus within cybersecurity. I chose to talk about cybersecurity in relation to cyber-warfare and how hacking and stuff like that can be used on a larger scale than just hacking for petty crime or activism like in Watch Dogs (although that's pretty cool too) so I started looking for some fancy articles and cool video essays and stuff like that in relation to my topic and there's a lot of stuff there. I found some good ones and put em in my report and as I was reading through my sources and watching the videos and putting together my report, the ideas started flowing for my game pitch. I think we gotta do another devlog about the pitch itself so I'm gonna save the details of what the game is for that devlog. My research consisted of academic sources relating to the utilization of cyberwarfare and the common terminology related to it, and how hacking can be used in modern military conflicts without having to sacrifice human life in order to achieve key objectives, I also used a variety of less formal content in the form of video essays on youtube which go in-depth into real-world examples of the use of hacking in conflicts and how these earlier examples in history were only scratching the surface of the capabilities of cyberwarfare. It's a scary topic as it's something that bleeds into the everyday life of anyone thanks to the lack of digital privacy and all of the services we use that have modernized via digital means and cloud technology. The trade-off of technological advances like that is the increase in vulnerability to things like cyber-attacks, and with cyberwarfare becoming the new norm, that means there's a possibility of civilians being involved in conflicts due to cyber-attack vulnerability.

The research itself helped point me in the direction of the kind of game I want to make related to this topic. Cybersecurity, in some aspects, has been game-ified already, but I want to try an approach that I don't think has been done before. hacking minigames and similar hacking-based game mechanics have always been around in games, but I want to focus on highlighting my topic through the game's narrative. That's a hard thing to do given the timeline we have to work on our projects, but I think with a topic like this, the mechanics of hacking can be used to make the player feel like they're engaged in the activities surrounding this topic (different forms of hacking and/or cyber warfare) but the key to expressing the message of the game & the importance of this serious topic lies in the narrative content of it. Who is the player? what are they hacking & why?What are the consequences of their actions in the game's story? While my research has helped me get this far, to answer those questions in my game pitch, I need to look further than the sources I used for the report.