Security Education
At Safelight Security I was the only Software Engineer working on the main security education course player. Everything was very old and a team of designers and I were tasked with creating a new course player. It included the ability to skin for the company that was making the purchase. This work was all done in Flash and Actionscript 3.0.
Each of the courses that the team worked on had two game interactions, a major and a minor. The minor interactions were normally repeated with different questions or images. The major interactions were designed and created for each course and had different styles. All of the interactions were designed with the same XML driven intentions of the rest of the player. The interactions were also coded to work well with the player and to allow the player to interact with them. In the video, there are just a couple examples of some of the major interactions I worked on.
Challenges
My biggest challenge at Safelight Security was creating a new and better XML driven course player that was SCORM compliant. The goal was to make the course player a template, including the content, so it could easily be updated with just XML. The most difficult part of this was getting the "templates" to work with the player. Each screen is created in a Flash file and produced into a SWF. Our graphic designers followed a template so that the images and text inside each screen could later be replaced. You can see the side by side example on the left of a skinned course.
Another big challenge I faced was the game interactions within the course player. You can see some of them above in the video. This was my first professional experience and I was the only engineer on the team so I needed to find the right resources in case I did not understand or knew how to implement a feature. It came down to learning some new algorithms and putting my programming knowledge to the test. In the end the game interactions were pretty simple but fun to play and helped with customer engagement.
