Cipher Puzzle Tutorial

In this article, we cover the use of a cipher Puzzle, and how to incorporate it into your game in creative ways.

Ciphers have been used traced back all the way to Ancient Greece, as a way to trade military information while reducing the risk of exposing message contents should the messages be intercepted by enemies.

What is a Cipher Puzzle?

Ciphers are disguised secret messages. We use them to present information in a way that adds a puzzle layer and creates a bit more difficulty in our games.

What are some common Ciphers used for a Cipher Puzzle?

• Caesar/ROT
• Vignere
• Playfair
• Ave Maria
• Substitution
  

What about Binary? Hex?

There’s a wide variety of other ways to convert/encode plaintext to something less transparent. However, these aren’t really considered ciphers. Some of these techniques include (but are not limited to):

• Binary
• Hexadecimal
• ASCII
• Morse Code

How do we use a Cipher Puzzle?

The process of using ciphers in puzzles is fairly easy. You come up with whatever message you want to hide from the player, pick a cipher, and then run it through that cipher.

One very important thing you will want to do afterward, though, is double-check it against a few different tools, to verify it does in fact work. Having a puzzle get broken somewhere in the process and still releasing it can be devastating to you, the player, and the game itself.

Let’s get started!

So for this tutorial, we’re going to use a simple ROT13 Cipher. Now, ROT13 pretty much has the decoder in the name, making it one of the easier-to-understand and decode ciphers out there. It uses a “Rotation” of characters, by 13 places. The beginning of the plaintext Alphabet starts with A, but the ROT13 will start with N. Like so:

PlainText

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

Rot13

N

O

P

Q

R

S

T

U

V

W

X

Y

Z

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I

J

K

L

M

Now that we have the Cipher in front of us, we can start to encode our message. We’re going to use the name of the site, ARGCREATOR.

Plaintext	A	R	G	C	R	E	A	T	O	R
ROT13	N	E	T	P	E	R	N	G	B	E

And voila! We’ve created our secret message! Cipher puzzles can be much more complex, and contain a wide variety of information. You can even use them to present a second cipher puzzle. But be careful not to get too obscure!