This is our award winning entry at the London GameCraft 2013.
The game is written in Dart using the StageXL framework, and developed from scratch by one person in less than 11 hours, it's also the first time I have used Dart in ernest.
The theme given to us was 'Impact of P.R.I.S.M'.
To answer the question directly, it's the creation of a surveillance capability that whilst can serve to help prevent crime and terrorist attacks, is also subject to misuse and abuse.
If underused and unable to stop the sort of disaster it is intended to prevent, it’ll no doubt come under much public criticism. On the other hand, if it’s misused or overused and cause too much intrusion to everyday lives of innocent people then it’ll also cause public unrest. It is therefore a fine balance between not doing enough and doing too much, and it is this need for balance that we wanted to focus on with Agents of P.R.I.S.M.
As an agent with access to P.R.I.S.M, your task is to identify a criminal out of a set of potential targets, and you have a set of surveillance options that can be used against each of these targets, in the order of each option’s cost and level of effectiveness and intrusiveness:
- CCTV surveillance
Least expensive, effective and intrusive
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Credit card surveillance
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Email surveillance
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Phone surveillance
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Send agents on the field to conduct in-person surveillance
Most expensive, effective and intrusive, this is truly a high risk, high reward approach.
As the agent in charge, you need to balance against:
Time
If you don’t identify the criminal before time runs out then he gets away and you failed your task, so move fast!
Intrusion level
If you’re too aggressive with your use of surveillance options then it’ll make the citizens unhappy, when they become angry with how much you’re intruding on their lives it leads to civil unrest and you lose.
Budget
Government agencies have to operate within its budget, so do you, spend carelessly on expensive surveillance options will drain your budget and when you run out of budget you can no longer catch the criminal and you lose.
As you progress through the levels, the amount of budget and time you have and number of potential suspects will change and make the game more and more challenging.
![How-To-Play] (http://gamecraft-2013-08.s3.amazonaws.com/Agents%20of%20PRISM-instruction.PNG)
Clicking on each target allows you to start or stop the different types of surveillance on him/her.
As you continue to apply surveillance on each of your targets their level of happiness will decrease (even the criminal has the right to be unhappy about being watched you know!), as does the overall civilian happiness.
As surveillance reveals more information about each of your targets your level of suspicion against them will also grow. However, for the innocent civilians you’ll soon realize that they’re clean. For these civilians, continued surveillance on them will no longer raise your suspicion level but would continue to cause them upset so it’s best for you to stop any surveillance on targets as soon as the suspicion level stops growing.
The more intrusive form of surveillance option you use the faster the target’s happiness decreases, and the faster your suspicion level will grow since the surveillance will reveal more information about your target, it also decreases your budget faster too as you fork out to likes of Google, Microsoft and telephone companies in order to acquire communication records..
