Steganography Tool

We have completed our non-game app!

CipherSquad has created an app in which the user can upload an image and specify a string of characters, and the app will encode the text into the image to create a hidden message. 

The app will also allow the user to share this encoded image with friends, who can upload the image back into the app and decode the image to reveal the hidden text. The sharing option allows the user to share their image via text message, email, and straight to the decode activity among other things.

We have also implemented an image preview so that once the user has selected an image to encode/decode, the "No Image Selected" box will display a scaled version of the image.

Rat Race! by CipherSquad

We have finally finished the game!  We will be presenting our game in Olin 202 at 2:45PM!  It's been a long time in the making and it turned out well.  We may commit a few more small changes to the code to make things more elegant and such, but all in all, the game is complete.

Future features in addition to the ones already featured may include: AI mice that you race against and Networked mice that represent other players running the game on their phones.

Stay tuned in for a potential release of Version 2.0 that will include these features.  For now, here is Rat Race by CipherSquad!

Rat Race: On to the Finishing Touches!

Since our last blog post we have made a few revisions to our game. We removed the option to choose a maze generation algorithm, so the game now only uses a Recursive Backtracker maze generation algorithm. Before we also had the level up functionality working, but it was a bit extreme. The maze would get considerable larger with each level up; we now have it working so that the size will only increase slightly.

We've also gotten some power-ups working! Currently we have two power-ups: a block of cheese and a sandwich. They are each worth 1000 points.

We've also added a scoreboard which will display the top ten highest scores along with the initials of the player.

In the next week, we will be adding a directions page to explain how the game works, replace the IntroActivity with a splash screen, and add functionality to the settings menu.

Awesome StegoTool icon!

Hello All,

Here is an icon I designed for the Steganography Tool app on a very advanced multi-layered transparency bitmap image editing software (mspaint)!

-Ethan

Steganography Tool Update

So far the app is coming along nicely! We have added in a few bells and whistles to spruce up the overall look and feel of the app along with some added functionality to really make the app a lot of fun. As it stands now we are very very close to being prepared to show the world our creation and as such once we are done you can check out the secret hidden message lodged in this picture!

Also on a side note, as of this past Monday the CipherSquad team has agreed to swap projects among its members so now there will be fresh new eyes looking to make this app better than it already is!

Matt Leja adds some cheese

Hello everyone! Today I pushed some code that finally gave the game some power-ups, which right now just add points to the mouse. As of now the only power up is cheese and there is as many pieces as the level number. So, level 5 has 5 pieces of cheese randomly placed on the map. The cheese will be removed from the map, and be removed from the array it was in.

Next may be adding other power-ups, garbage and bread are in the works and once I have copy write free images, they should be implemented pretty soon.

Also, we are going to add a page after each level, which may display the number of power ups as well as maybe the images of them in a group.

Steganography update

So after a few weeks of fiddling around and a lot stressing about whether or not this app was feasible I am proud to say that as of today I have gotten the application to the stage where it can take an image and text, and combine them so that if you were to look at the image you wouldn't be able to tell the text was even there. The library that we have gone ahead and used for hiding the text is the F5Android library (which is open sourced and free to use). This library is awesome in that it offers a very sneaky way to hide text inside of images that is still considered one of the harder methods of steganography to break. Below is an image that I have processed using our app that contains the text "Augustana CSC 490 Spring 2015" and you can't even tell its there!

Rat Race Progress

The Rat Race app has come a long way since we've started with the collaborative work. It started off as a maze generator with three different options for algorithms used to generate the maze. At this point, the maze is now playable, meaning that a player can navigate a mouse character through the maze. 

Launch screen with default values.

The game starts with a launch screen, where the player can enter the desired size of the maze they'd like to play (the default is 5), and choose which maze option to use. The options are the Recursive Backtracker, Hunt and Kill, and Prim algorithms.

A maze of size 5 (default starting point).

The maze is divided up into cells, the number of which will depend on the size of the maze itself. The mouse always starts in the upper left corner, cell (0,0), and the maze ends at the bottom right corner, cell (size, size). Once the mouse reaches the end cell, the game will level up to a maze of a larger size, and therefore more difficulty. Each level is also on a timer, so every time  the player levels up, the timer will start back at 0.

A maze after leveling up from size 5.

There are some areas for improvement before the end of next week. Currently, the mouse only faces one direction. So, regardless of the direction in which the mouse is actually traveling, the character only faces down. It would make more sense if the mouse character faced the direction in which it was traveling. We have started the process of making this happen. Additionally, the timer currently doesn't serve any purpose. It is simply there to allow the user to see their time spend on the level, but does not really have any functionality. Perhaps we could set a time limit on each level, or even have a leader board for each size of the maze to track user progress.

Individual Game: Five in a Row

For my individual game, I created a two player game that was composed of an outer square and inner square with each square having three circles on each side and a center circle. The objective of the game is to be the first player to own one group of four circles, clicking the circles changes them to the respective player color, and when one player owns either the outer four corners, the inner four corners, up and down, across, the left diagonal, or the right diagonal the center circle changes to the respective player color.

Matt Leja's individual game

Matt Leja: My individual game is "Running Through Traffic".
Some will say it is a Frogger clone, but the only similarity this game has to Frogger is crossing the street.

So, as of now the game is controlled by tapping anywhere on the screen and that makes the circle character move upward. There are cars in both lanes of traffic and the goal of the game is to run across the screen and cross the street in order to get to safety. The game is unending, meaning that there is no final level.
Adding sounds was surprisingly easy, and makes the game feel way more polished than it actually is.
I would Love to work more on this game but our group is moving on to the group game and non-game.

Here is an image of a mockup of what it should look like.

Individual Game: Rat Race

Ethan: My individual game is named Rat Race.  This game will be a maze racing game where a "rat" character has to race against 3 other rats from the start of the maze to the end.  The player wins by receiving the most points out of the other players.  Powerups will be scattered throughout the maze and will add to the total points.  Time elapsed will also add points depending on how fast the player completes the maze.  After every player finishes, the game will advance to the next level which will regenerate the maze to be larger.

Right now, I have completed the maze generating algorithms and most of the underlying code to create the mouse character.

I have three phases that we can stop at if we choose this game as our team game.  Reaching these phases will depend on how much time we have to devote to this project.

1. Complete the mouse character and have a single player race against a timer to complete the maze.  This is the simplest to complete, but won't be as fun as racing against opponents.
2. Complete the AI mouse algorithm (maze solving algorithm) and implement this as the AI opponents.  The opponents will move as the solving algorithm moves.
3. Complete the networked mouse opponents which will involve a server, but it will be the most fun of all the phases since it will involve multiple human players.

Individual Game App Idea

For my individual game idea I created a screen that is composed of a 5x5 grid of black dots. Fairly rapidly a single dot will change red and the user has to tap it before it turns back to  black and another randomly selected dot turns red. The user is timed and is notified of their time once all of the dots have been cleared. The app also has a local leader board that lists off what the best times are for the game.

Non-game App Idea

For our Non-game App idea we have decided to go with creating a steganography tool. For those of you who don't know what that means it is the practice of hiding data within other data. For our project the data that we are going to be hiding is text and the medium that we are going to hide it within will be images. The purpose of the app will be to encode images with a string of text and then be able to send it via Email or SMS. Once someone has received the message on the other end they can use the same app to pull out the text that will be hidden.

Individual Game Apps

Jamie: My individual game is an app version of a childhood game, M.A.S.H. This is a game in which a person can predict their future. There are four categories in my app: future mate, hometown, the number of kids they will have, and occupation. There is also a default category given as the title of the game, M.A.S.H (Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House), which tells the player what kind of home they will live in. The player will list three options for each of the four categories, and the app randomly selects one of the three given options as well as one of the default home options. It then will tell the player the story of their future using these randomly selected values. One opportunity for expansion of the game would be to allow the player to choose their own categories, rather than giving them default options. To do this, the player would have to give the category a name as well as a sentence for that category to add to their story.