Banctulus

Banctulus is a self-sustainable quiz game that teaches secure banking habits. We believe learning about serious topics like the security of personal finance can be fun.

Comment

Challenge 🏆

🏆 Banctulus is a brand new idea made for the 🏠 Home track on Secureworks Cybersecurity Literacy Challenge by Secureworks

What is Banctulus? 👾

👾 Banctulus is a self-sustainable quiz game that teaches secure banking habits. We believe learning about serious topics like the security of personal finance can be fun.

Inspiration 💡

💡 This challenge seemed very interesting, since cybersecurity affects most of us day by day. Selecting the track wasn’t easy. We think everybody chooses learning with fun over a boring learning method. However, this mindset fits for both tracks. We tried googling potential competitors to see if it is a real market gap or not. There is an interesting fact: there are really good competitors or software for the topic of cybersecurity education, but those software have a generic scope. They do not focus on online banking security only. We know securing a home network, browsing safely on the web, avoiding viruses and ransomwares are really important topics, but there are a lot of non-professional users who know nothing about computers, they just sit down and click. Losing a Facebook account can be hard, but losing real money has deeper effects. A lot of users use their own plastic to buy goods on the internet or pay bills via internet banking. Most banking software are relatively easy to use, which is really good for the users, but an easy process can make people careless. We want to help people to make better and secure online banking habits.

🕵 According to the Federal Trade Commission, consumers reported a lot of frauds and lost a lot of money. While this is an aggregate number, online banking frauds and scam win good places in this negative race.

🕹 Since the Challenge is about a game, we figured out a game with a funny narrative: a little aliens got mission assignments to travel to Earth for investigating online banking frauds: causes and solutions.

✅ Our goal was to create a self-sustainable game that solves real-life problems.

What it does ❓

🔧 At the moment Banctulus is a fully working demo, which means it is playable with a downloadable certification. In the near future we want to add more questions and cover more topics.

🎮 Users can select a desired game type (complex course is available at the time of submission) and set the number of questions. Each slide contains a question or a statement with different possible answers or reactions. Some of them are right, some of them are wrong, or maybe there are multiple possible good answers. Each answer has a unique metric point. After the end of the quiz, we reveal the visualized result. This quiz is not about right or wrong, it is more of thinking about the problem. If the user feels stucking or uncertainty, we provide hints and background information. Those sentences reveal why that topic is important or how the situation should be handled.

📃 After the result, users can download a personalized certificate. We ask them their name, but we do not store that information. We just put on the certificate. In the future we want to add more potential gifts, badges or collectibles for the users (eg: Facebook frame, funny alien gifs).

How does it work? ⚙

♻ The gaming workflow is really simple: playing, learning, downloading the certificate. The visualized workflow and the hierarchy of possible user actions are available in the image carousel above.

actions:

1️⃣ selecting the game type (complex course is available at the time of submission)

2️⃣ selecting the number of questions [optional]

3️⃣ playing (answering the questions: selecting or clicking)

4️⃣ reviewing the visualized result

5️⃣ downloading the certificate (adding their own name before downloading)

How we built it 🔨

🔨 It is a website-based game. It is written in php, javascript and jQuery. In the near future we want to migrate the content into SQL tables. In the long term, we want to create a real platform game.

🔨 The working demo shows how we imagine the classification of the answers. It is not a closed and fully over discussed topic at the moment but the direction is given. We want to create user classes based on positive terms even though some habits are really risky.

🔨 There was a major goal that affected the whole development: positive communication. We made 4 classes for the users (apprentice, sunny-side person, chessmaster, scaling scientist). We do not want to hurt the feelings of players, since this is an important topic and any bad or negative feedback can get them discouraged.

🔨 We plan different types of tasks as well, like selecting the signs of trusted websites, etc. In the future platform game the alien narrative will be much much stronger since in the skin of an alien users can laugh about their own bad habits and they might change these bad ones.

Challenges we ran into 💪

💪 We read a lot about online banking security. Different people have different levels of knowledge about this topic. They learn differently and their intentions for learning are diverse too. It is hard to create a unified quiz that covers each user at the same time. In the future we want to measure their knowledge and organize the questions based on their actual progress.

💪 As freelancers we always experience how difficult it is talking about IT things for non-professionals. If we talk about cybersecurity the situation is even more heavy. It was a big challenge for us to find some basic questions with which we can demonstrate how we think about our communication with the user in our game.

Accomplishments that we're proud of 😎

😎 We made a fully working demo game from scratch. We are freelance deep learning developers, with a childish desire to make a game. We think a lot of programmers and software developers have a hidden wish to create a playable game for the public. We are really proud that we built this game. We figured out the whole alien narrative and drew the characters all alone. Hopefully this game is the first step for us in these fields (cybersecurity and gaming as well).

💲 This game can be self-sustainable. Business model canvas is available in the image carousel above.

What we learned 📘

📘 We learned how different can be developing a game than creating a devops software or an artificial intelligence-based program. We learned about sound design for games and user experience in games.

What's next for Banctulus ⏱

🚀 During the hackathon we made a fully working demo from scratch. This is a brand new idea, but it can be self-sustainable. We have different ideas to develop this idea further:

🟪 topic-related plan, 🟨 UX-related plans, 🟩 business-related plan

🟪 cover more topics

🟪 new questions

🟨 better sound design

🟨 better gaming workflow

🟨 ordering the questions should be about the progression and knowledge of the user

🟨 redesign the main character by a graphical artist

🟪 real-life examples based on experiences of experts

🟨 new gifts, badges or collectibles (eg: Facebook frame, funny alien gifs)

🟩 online shop (T-shirts, cups, stickers)

🟨 real platform game that provides different user gaming experience

🟩 exclusive or occasional sponsored challenges both on the website and in the platform game with cybersecurity or bank partners

🚀 We would be really happy to have the chance to meet virtually with the Secureworks team to discuss about Banctulus. Real feedback from experts could be helpful, since we really want this game to be maintained in the long term. Real-life examples are also welcome, since those can help users (players) to manage real-life threats and avoid losing their own money.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates