Play game
Ciphers Please's itch.io pageRate this game
In order to rate this submission you must be logged into itch.io and have submitted your own entry. Anyone with an account can leave a comment.
GitHub repository URL
https://github.com/Fxll3n/Ciphers-Please
Game description
You are a newly recruited army cryptologist. You sit in a tight and messy corner desk with an almost ancient computer to use for decryption and encryption. Everyday you find messages pinned on your pinboard that you either need to encrypt or decrypt. At the end of each day you get your pay based on your performance.
Theme interpretation
The theme of secrets was interpreted as military secrets and espionage. This is shown through the narrative and the core gameplay mechanic of using ciphers to decode hidden transmissions.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
Really cool game, I genuinely learned a lot about ciphers while playing this. Before this game I only really understood how Caesar Ciphers work :)
Reading the comments below, I see you guys did this in half a month rather than a whole month. That is super impressive as this game is pretty well fleshed out! As mentioned before, the only real major thing that I would add is some automation after you figure out the code of the ciphers, as it can get a little repetitive after a couple of decoding sessions.
All in all, great entry team!!
I clicked on the computer and was stuck until I realised one of the three black buttons on black background inside the computer meant 'stop using computer'. Couldn't move around - wasd, cursors did mothing. Clicked on the alarm clock and then nothing I did would leave the alarm clock, at which point I gave up.
I think there might be an interesting game in here but the control system desperately needs work, at least make it work like normal games - or add a lot more work in explaining your custom setup.
Yup that's because we forgot to write the controls in the game description... it's Tab or right-click ^^' I agree it's not intuitive, when you say "make it work like normal games" what kind of control where you expecting? (specifically for the "go back" / "zoom out" control)
If you're capturing the controls correctly for the major browsers then tab should be fine, it's just not something I'd think of trying :(, it doesn't work in most web games (because you have to disable the built-in browser controls). Same with RMB - it's annoying when web games break the browser so they can use RMB, and very few do it well (also: works badly on a lot of laptops, so most devs don't use it any more).
Standard for 'go back/out' is escape - and doesn't have a special meaning in browsers.
Most games I've played have an on-screen button for 'back' or 'exit', so there's no problem. I'd say 9 in 10 games have an onscreen button, whether or not they also have 'esc'.
Really enjoyed the cipher decoding aspect, as someone who enjoys ciphers! Camera controls were a bit weird at first until I figured things out, agree clicking letters to decode would be neat and help speed things up for players not familiar with these ciphers as letter by letter can take quite a bit of time. Overall a fun game, keep up the good work!
Glad you liked it :) because the messages are quite long, the idea was to have the computer automatically process the message once the player has correctly done some %age of it. Because we ran out of time, we decided to have the "submit" and "trash" buttons always enabled so you can at least progress through the story!
Cool idea! Do you suppose it would still be fun if you automated parts of it? For example, after choosing the right key you click the letters to decode them or something?
Thanks! This was part of the plan, but we started the jam halfway through and obviously ran out of time. Still planned if we do future updates ;)
I like the idea….but I struggled what exactly to do. I started with the plain text “cypher” and tried to copy paste the note into the “user entry”…but I didn’t find a way to do this. and then I typed the text and I probably made a typo and then failed…. for the other cyphers, I wasn’t quite sure how to operate the computer.
but well done anyways of submitting to the game jam.
I want to say, it’s a really interesting game. I like the audio and the way you pick cyphers and place them on the monitor. However, I struggled with the controls for decryption and often found myself lost. I didn’t know when I was doing it right or wrong.
I understand your frustration. As we started quite late we had to rush a few things and simply scrap some other parts. One of those parts was a tutorial. I understand that not everyone is nerdy like me and can do most of these ciphers in their head or by memory. We also didn’t have time to provide players with proper feedback when completing a cipher. I wish that maybe in the future, if I or someone else on the team is willing, we could fix these issues and give this game some major polish and reworking. I really do appreciate your response though! I hope you atleast found the idea interesting :)