Summer Research 2017: Week 8

This week, I continued my DDoS literary review and created a presentation about our current game, Bird's Life. I began with the publication "DDoS Defense Mechanism Analysis Based on Signaling Game Model" by X. Gao and Y. Zhu. Overall, this paper draws the conclusion that "adding service hopping strategy is superior to a pure filtering strategy, and it provides beneficial references on DDoS attack prevention". They also provide multiple defense mechanisms (intrusion detection, IP/ICMP tracking, export/import filter) against DDoS, including the most recent method of end hopping for active network confrontation, such as port hopping and address hopping. This paper also takes a stance that I agree with, which is analyzing DDoS behavior from both the offensive and defensive perspective. I find this to be most useful because it helps in being as accurate as possible in developing a game that must express both sides.

I also created a 28 slide PowerPoint presentation about our current game and the process of its creation. Below is a screenshot of one slide over-viewing our primary goals during development:

As shown, our main focus was on clarity, simplicity/challenging, and achievement/understanding. Clarity was an essential sub-goal because it involves the first message delivered to the player, and every message thereafter. In addition to having a clear purpose, we also wanted to ensure that the game mechanics were easy to learn, but the gameplay provided an adequate challenge. This was the thought processes behind having only movement controls but having many obstacles to overcome during gameplay. Lastly, we wanted to make sure the player felt a true sense of achievement and understanding from completing levels and the overall game. To accomplish this, we added the tips for the player to collect during gameplay, as well as question scene gameplay with questions for the player to answer to test their understanding.