…Out!

Well, it’s been a crazy couple of weeks. The site has gotten some pretty good attention. I’m beat. I’ve spent the vast majority of my time (when I’m not working or writing) developing puzzles to place in the source code of the site.

After days on end of combing through the Rehevkor (the word book) for words that I may be able to cobble together into phrases relevant to the script, translating them into D’ni, and finding ciphers to encrypt them in, I’m spent. I began this whole process with absolutely no knowledge of ciphers. I subjected myself to a crash course and it’s been pretty interesting, but I can tell you I won’t be reading Cryptonomicon anytime soon. This all seemed like such a great idea at the time…

I began with a simple substitution cipher. I wasn’t quite sure how proficient the fan-base would be with them. I learned fairly quickly that they were way more adept than I am (both at ciphers and the D’ni language). The real challenge has been trying to increase the difficulty level with each one. Wikipedia has been a god-send.

It’s a little aggravating that it’s taking me, on average, about four to five hours to develop these encryptions, and about two hours for the fans to solve them. I want to hate them, but I’m pretty impressed with their resourcefulness. Myst has taught them well.

In an attempt to draw some attention from Wired Magazine, I’ve tried to include articles from the publication as part of the solution to some of the ciphers. This hasn’t worked, unfortunately. We’ve remained an isolated phenomenon known only to the fans.

About week and a half ago, Patrick and I discussed a way to include other dimensions in the source puzzles. We wanted to try to include “space” and “time” in the equations. “Space” could be taken care of with a puzzle using GPS coordinates (as inspired by a fan’s misinterpretation of an earlier cipher). We weren’t quite sure what to do with “time”, but Patrick finally came up with a rough idea of how to work it in. He has a whole slew of old clocks sitting on the mantel in his family room. He was just looking at them and he realized that some of the hand positions of a clock resemble D’ni numbers. It was a cool idea. I ran off to try to figure out how to actually put it into practice. I knew I was going to be limited in the amount of numbers I could use. Eventually I settled on using addition to create everything I needed. The nice part about that was that it also created a bit of a red herring. I figured people would be trying to add hours together and would be coming up with times that meant absolutely nothing. Sadly, the puzzle was brute forced. GRR… I was pretty proud of that puzzle, too.

I’ve decided that the next puzzle is going to be the last one. I just can’t take anymore number-crunching. I’m a creative type, and all of this number-play is starting to drive me a little insane. I’ve come up with a cipher that I think is going to be rather difficult. It has multiple layers of encryption. First, they’ll have to use a key with a mixed alphabet. There are multiple ways that they may try to input the alphabet, so hopefully that will slow them down a bit. After that they have to face the evil that is the rest of the Trifid Cipher. It’s not really all that hard once you know the name of the cipher, it’s just time-consuming. Just to make it a little more difficult, I’ve decided to encode each word-set in the puzzle separately. I’m sure they’ll be trying to apply the cipher to the entire code-block. That’ll drive them nuts for a bit, I’m sure. I spent about six hours yesterday trying to encrypt everything, and I just kept getting lost. I had to start over multiple times. By the end of it I was actually shaking. I was physically weak. The fact that this cipher had gotten me to this point made me feel really crazy. I thought I had some serious anxiety issue, but then I asked Dylan for help. As it turned out, she was losing her mind last night after about two hours of reading back seemingly meaningless and redundant number groups to me. I’m sure it was a sight to see. 222, 311! We were practically foaming at the mouth.

I’ve referenced the Trifid Nebula as the clue to the cipher. It’s cryptic. Hopefully that will throw them off a bit. If the fans solve this one in less than a day, I just may have to consider giving up on life altogether.

7:52 pm

tags: anxiety, ciphers, crazy, encryption, mouth foam, puzzles