Date of Posting 09/02/2024
DECRYPT is the fourth entry in my Alphabet Superset series of games. It's essentially a codebreaker puzzle, with very limited actual direction. There's some explanatory flavour text and some other general narrative material, and then the rest of the document is a large amount of unknown script, alongside a little table demonstrating how you might work to decipher the text.
Both Bunker Busters and The Crows Know took absolutely ages to write out and do testing on, with several iterations on the mechanics of each, so I decided to do something less complex but still challenging. The result was a codebreaker puzzle- simply writing out some text and then producing a way of concealing the contents. I went through a few different ideas of how to do this, reviewing a few simple encryption methods that might be suitable or allow for interesting play, but in the end I felt like the most engaging and aesthetically satisfying would be simply to encode it within an alphabet that was completely alien. This was more in keeping with the "mystery" theme of the game itself, as well as more striking when used as part of the document.
I came up with most of the concept for this one while I was out running, which is where I find a lot of my ideas. You may recall that I did the same for Annihilation, in which I actually designed 80% of the game while I was out there. In this case I mainly came up with the overall concept and narrative ideas, and had a very firm vision of some sort of tower in a distant future. This tower concept was something I wanted to incorporate more fully into the game itself, but in the end I decided it was too complex and contrived to try and build in some exploration mechanic to a solo experience about deciphering text, and chose to focus more on the narrative content instead.
I also came up with the concept for the next game, Elegies, while out on that same run. It was a distance run so there was plenty of time for this, and I was very much in the swing of things and coming up with lots of ideas most of the time. I like finding ideas for things while out running. Something about the meditative flow of Low Intensity Steady State cardio while out in nature makes it a great place for me to do idea generation and conceptual work. There's very limited opportunities for making notes and such (I suppose I could record a voice note if I really felt the need) so it's a good way of just mentally working through some ideas without the aid of pen and paper, and the stuff that's really striking tends to stick around after I get back.
This game is overall somewhat bleak, as is Elegies and also a third game I made at this time, Extremis Exhibit. I'm not sure why I made a trilogy of sad games, I think this project just lends itself to contemplating unhappy endings, as is the part of the nature of the theme "Surviving The Future." Extremis Exhibit isn't part of the ABSS, but I'll write about it when I cover Elegies as it was surprisingly successful, probably because it was a Bitsy game and so could be easily played in the browser.
I decided that as part of the presentation for this I was going to create my own font, basically as the most straightforward way of typing something out in a novel alphabet. I decided to use Fontstruct for this, after briefly looking through a few different options and determining that this one was 1. easiest for me to use and 2. good enough that I could stop researching this fairly uninteresting topic. Creating the font within Fontstruct was actually fairly easy. You get a lot of built in options for font generation, which are mostly focused around helping you assemble a cool font that follows the traditional roman alphabet, but I wanted to make a cool chunky original form of writing to function as a cipher, so I just played around with shapes and stuff until I got something fairly satisfying. I decided to have a consistent throughline on each character, allowing for them to be written joined up. The alphabet is also intended to be written vertically, top to bottom, so with the right formatting you can have the characters naturally line up and create a constant string. This is easier to just look at in the game document than to describe.
Once the font was done it was just a matter of doing the creative writing element, which was much stronger in this than the previous games. Probably because the actual "game"; content here is deciphering the message, so it's best to try and give a message worth deciphering! Anyway, it's a message from a snapshot of the future, dragged back into the then-present in a futile effort to seek solutions from the coming generations. Also a little poem. I'll not spoil any more of it, in case you'd like to go play for yourself. I had fun writing it anyway, even if it is sad.
To supplement this, I used the stock photo elements as a more dominant feature of the document this time, rather than just as flavour. I was still convinced of the necessity of the "tower" element, so I selected a lighthouse to be the feature piece of the background art. Not only does this meet the requirement of being a sort of tower, but lighthouses are buildings designed to ensure safety, and represent safe harbour, quite literally. I thought this was appropriate for the target of a project to pull something from the future, as a beacon of desperate hope. The second page features some simple floorplan illustrations I produced as part of the ideas and brainstorming sessions for the game. I do a lot of little sketches and such like this during the ideation phase of most of these projects, as a way of getting ideas out on paper and helping myself think more effectively. Most don't make it into the final product, but I thought these were a good complimentary element in this context.
The next project was Elegies, a solo writing/poetry game/exercise about memorialising dead species and understanding climate grief. Fun! I'll provide a write up of that one as soon as I can. I know I'm months behind on these blogs but it's time to start catching up now.