#decrypt

0d 0a 66 6f 72 20 74 72 75 74 68 20 77 69 6c 6c 20 6e 6f 74 20 6f 6e 6c 79 20 6d 65 6e 64 20 79 6f 75 72 20 70 65 72 73 70 65 63 74 69 76 65 2c 20 62 75 74 20 61 6c 73 6f 20 72 65 73 68 61 70 65 20 79 6f 75 72 20 72 65 61 6c 69 74 79 2e 2e 2e 22"

- The Resurrected

"Never Changed" | Perpetual Testing | Portal 2 Community Maps & Mods

By Decrypt (a.k.a. CD133)

The long lingering cigar smoke is still settling in this great-looking little laser logic shuffle map.

Full Video

It’s the QWERTY (or better known as the keyboard substitution) cipher, just use this site.

Are ciphers even puzzles?

Well, not necessarily. Okay, okay, hear me out. If you get a piece of enciphered text along with a key to decipher it, is translating that text a puzzle, or just busywork? On the other hand, if you get a piece of text and need to either skillfully decrypt it or go through some other process in order to piece together the key, that’s a different story. If you’re implementing the former, ask yourself why the text needs to be encrypted in the first place, if the player is just going to translate it immediately anyway.

Types of ciphers

There are a lot of common ciphers used frequently in puzzle games: Morse code, semaphore, Caesar shift, pigpen/masonic cipher, book cipher, etc. Using one of these is not necessarily bad, but it needs to make sense in context. I wouldn’t mind never seeing a semaphore cipher again, but if I ever do, it better be in a nautical themed game. Personally, I prefer games with original codes and ciphers. One benefit is that the key won’t be available to everyone on the internet, but more importantly, your game will be more interesting, and you will probably make a better puzzle out of it, too.

(Above: Semaphore cipher. These things are annoying as heck.)

Length

Keep it brief. No one wants to spend half an hour translating letters. Likewise, a book cipher can be fun sometimes, but it can also overstay its welcome. I don’t mind looking up 5, maybe 10 words max, but any longer than that and I would suggest a shorter sentence, or perhaps a different avenue of extraction.

The only exception is when you’re trying to decode encrypted text without a key. When you’re starting from scratch, the more clues you have, the better. This way you can try to determine letter frequency and make some educated guesses based on the patterns you find (but even then, I’m talking about a few sentences, not an entire page of text.)

Leave space

Leave space either below or above each row of encoded text for the player to write in the translation. Yes, really. You can save your player a lot of time and frustration when they don’t keep losing their place and don’t need to rewrite the text on another piece of paper. This may seem like a tiny thing, but it actually makes a big difference.