A Concept for a Video Game Puzzle Mechanic
If you've ever used Wireshark or other network packet inspection tools, you'll be familiar with seeing raw byte data presented as a string of pairs of hexadecimal digits.
If you haven't, then perhaps you'll know what ASCII or Unicode is. Because of how text is stored on computers, each character is assigned a number. Sometimes it's valuable to display those numbers, and thanks to the underlying binary representation, this can be done compactly by using the hexadecimal representation of the number. This is much easier to understand with a picture:
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII#Character_set
Converting hex values to their character equivalents is trivial when you have the appropriate lookup table, like the one above. My question is, would it be an interesting puzzle to build that lookup table yourself based on some encoded input?
The gameplay I'm picturing is this. Each puzzle is a block of hex data which you know represents the text someone typed, and you have to build the lookup table to decode it. You'd be able to make some deductions based on common themes. If you know the code for d, then your next step should probably be to try assigning increasing numbers to e, f, g, and so on. There wouldn't be hard logical steps to solving each puzzle like you'd get with a Nonogram or Sudoku. Rather it would be obvious when you're making progress because the output text would become more and more readable. I imagine you'd need to start out with a few characters placed on the lookup table to get you started.
A concern is that the novelty might quickly run out. With that in mind, I'm working on a small prototype that will let me quickly create these puzzles and then put them up on the web for people to explore. I'm working with the Godot engine for this. It's still very new to me so I'm at the stage where every line of code I write requires me to look at the documentation. The going is slow, but I'm making progress. Here's an underwhelming screenshot of where I'm at today:
With any luck I'll have something to actually show off by the end of the week.