Receiving the Dean’s Award While My CTF Challenge Was Breaking
I recently attended the Majlis Anugerah Dekan while also monitoring several CTF challenges that I had created for an internal Capture the Flag competition organized by FAIX UTEM.
It was a little chaotic because one of my challenges suddenly experienced an issue while I was at the ceremony.
Instead of fully relaxing and enjoying the event, I kept checking my phone to make sure the challenges were still working. When I confirmed that there was a real technical problem, I had to rush back home, open the project, investigate the issue, and deploy a fix.
To the players who were affected by the problem, I am sorry for the inconvenience.
This experience was a strange combination of two completely different parts of my university life. On one side, I was attending a ceremony to receive recognition for my academic performance. On the other side, I was worrying about whether participants could properly solve an RPG Maker CTF challenge that I had built.
It also reminded me that developing a challenge does not end after uploading it.
A challenge may work perfectly during local testing but behave differently after deployment. Participants may follow paths that the creator never expected. Files may be missing, conditions may fail, or an event may not trigger correctly.
Challenge creators must therefore be prepared to:
- Monitor their challenges during the competition
- Verify reports from participants
- Reproduce technical problems
- Distinguish bugs from intended difficulty
- Deploy fixes without revealing the solution
- Communicate clearly with organizers and players
Originally, I had planned to travel to Melaka and watch participants struggle with the challenges in person. Unfortunately, I had another event to attend on the same day.
I still enjoyed seeing the screenshots, solve attempts, and reactions from participants. Watching people interact with something that I designed is always interesting, especially when the challenge uses an unusual platform such as RPG Maker MV.
In the end, I managed to attend the Dean’s Award ceremony and fix the challenge. It was stressful, but it became one of those university experiences that I will probably remember for a long time.
Congratulations to all the winners and participants of the internal CTF competition. Thank you for playing my challenges, including the ones that temporarily decided not to cooperate.
Dean's Award and CTF gallery
