Once we narrowed down our critical sub-functions in the functional architecture generation step, we were able to identify the key areas to direct our creative efforts. 

To list them:

• Add new challenges (specifically, allow functionality for an admin to do this)
• Display gameboard background
• Display gameboard icons
• Display challenge
• Display admin panel
• Display user interface
• Modify game settings (again, allowing an admin to make the changes)

We then brainstormed awhile in each of these areas to come up with any ideas we could for improving upon and meeting the goals set by the sponsor in these areas. We won’t list these here because of how numerous they are. However, we did narrow our scope down after this step by combining our ideas from each category into several cohesive concepts, the most promising of which we will list here.

Our first concept’s theme is to feature a Tron-like color scheme and iconography. Of course, we cannot use any copyrighted material so the theming would only be loosely inspired by Tron rather than completely ripping off that intellectual property. This concept was unique in that it would allow users to spend their points earned in order to pay for hints on tougher challenges. Also, admins and optionally students could receive feedback based on questions answered correctly and incorrectly. More gamification elements would be added to this concept so students would feel rewarded for their work. The database would also be modified on this concept to prevent question addition/removal from affecting other questions present in the database.

The next concept we decided to run with into the prototyping phase has a dueling snakes theme. The inspiration for this theme was similar to our logo; the primary language we’ll be using is Python, and the competitive nature of CTFs could be well-represented by an image of fighting snakes. This concept would also allow admins to add challenges with raw text; presently, challenges have to be entered in HTML syntax. There would be more focus put towards balancing the experience out, by having a good spread of easy and difficult challenges, and these would influence the style as well as the design of the gameboard. This concept would also have more responsive feedback for the users, such as displaying a small animation to indicate a correctly-completed challenge. As for the database, changes would be made to ensure that wiping the database doesn’t break the game or environment.