4bdul4ziz/cryptographic-puzzle-game

A cicada inspired- crypto puzzle game made with python. Contains various cool levels to work with; ideal for those who are dipping their feet on cryptographic hunting!

VIT Freshers (Introductory)

Heya! We're a batch of freshman year students from VIT-C. This project idea of ours came up completely out of the blue, we were discussing about pineapple pizza on discord, at 2AM while solving assignment problems. One of us decided to procrastinate a bit and decided to watch some controversial mystery videos on YouTube. Suddenly, he decided that he'll screen share it on discord and yeah, we spent that night procrastianting along with him ;-;. This was during the brainstorming phase so, this night of procrastination influenced the project theme for us at the very least :)

So, let's get "how we got this" out of the way and focus on what it actually is.

Overview & Purpose

The main goal that was intended to be achieved in this project was to give whoever that plans to take a shot at this trivia to get a feel of what they'd potentially get on working with cryptographic projects, this is to encourage students to take on cryptographic careers and get an advancement on their puzzle solving skills, also, to solve fun internet mysteries like the cicada 3301 :D. We genuinely hope that this would enlighten their knowledge on the types or we can say the ways on which this could be potentially observed to crack the encryptions or learn how to encrypt via a reverse engineering learning step. For those who wants to step onto the internet puzzle hunting journey and embark it successfully with basic mysteries to induce a likelihood on the subject of matter.

Tech Stacks / Softwares Used / Materials Used

We have used quite a handful of tools and tech stacks to make this possible, we used the python programming language to code out the core of this project wherein we used Microsoft's Visual Studio Code, Visual Studio and JetBrains Pycharm Professional and then the JetBrains WebStorm to create a part of the challenge website (the final level :D), used GitHUb pages to host the domain, sonic visualizer to visualize the diagram and coagula for creating the spectrogram where we embedded the solution. ASCII cypher for encoding the mysteries, discord for team coordination, a huge chunck of our time and some double extras on caffeine :).

Team Members

Coming together is always the beginning, in this team we have,

Abdul Aziz

A freshman year student from VIT-C, currently enrolled in their CSE with spl. in AI & Robotics course. I've no interests personally, things have been neutral around me. Little to say, I like ramen and coffee. And maybe, play some fortnite once in a while? The future constantly iterates on the actions you take every second. Stay put as much as you can and be the one that could steer this change in a positive direction. That's all I could say? And yeah, you're always breathtaking! <3

Nimish Kashyap

Hello, I am Nimish Kashyap, a fresher at VIT-Chennai currently enrolled in CSE-AI/Robotics. I am very interested in mystery, cryptography and all those stuff, with a great interest in the field of web development and software development in general. Looking forward in meeting new people and learn something new everyday.

Samik Saraswat

Hi, I'm Samik Saraswat, a fresher student at VIT Chennai university pursuing CSE- AI/R currently. My interests are gaming, mathematics, debugging and mostly watching Netflix series and animes. Even though I may be a master procrastinator, I like experimenting with things and exploring new fields for exposure and to improve my skill set and be a contributing person to this modern society[or at-least try my best to be one :p]. I love making new friends and working along with them, cherishing the memories we create and things we experience as a whole, marking them down as milestones of happiness. :D

Kavya

Hello I am Kavya Paliwal, a fresher at VIT Chennai currently pursuing CSE AI/Robotics. I have a keen interested in cybersecurity. I like painting and editing. Love making new friends and looking forward to meet some amazing minds.

Project Description / Working / Layout / Intentions

Educational Cryptographic Puzzle (Rudimentary)

So, you may wonder this is just a puzzle to be solved and that's it. Well, you're not entirely wrong. This is indeed a puzzle that should be solved and that's it (other than the cool fractal flower pattern at the end-credits that I spent a considerable amount of time on ;-;). We have collectively put up some Ciphered phrases and texts and hid the solutions in the not so obvious places where people would think they're smart and try up some fancy ways on solving it. But, trust me it's literally the opposite of that, you should rather be looking on the most stupidest things that could be the answer on.

We made it such and such that students who play for literally their first time would have some basic conceptual idea on how a crypto hunting game would look like, well ofcourse it's quite delirious in the real world. And also, an honourable mention to the Cicada 3301 which brought in the basic conceptuals behind this, we weren't able to solve the then famous cicada 3310 and quite obstructively sucked at solving cryptopuzzles at high-school. Which woulda been changed (I think?) if we had a conceptual idea about the mystery solving problems. Since, we didn't recieve any such fancy custom made cryptographic problems, we decided to help the future gens. out there by compremending a problem that is relatively approachable by them and would have little to none problems in solving them.

And reward them at the end with a beautifully made fractal floral pattern that would assert their sense of dominance over the program. And proudly take snapshots to post on their socials if we were to blow up that is.

Working

We used VSC and Pycharm Professional to code out the logic of this program, we used the turtle module to draw the fractals on a seperate graphical window right after you solve the puzzle. Then used WebStorm and GitHub pages to host up the final level that required some web hostings to download certain stuff for the final challenge. We used sonic visualisers for the visual apprentice of the waveforms and Coagula for drawing out the waveforms manually over the plane of action which is later converted into a wav audio file and is used on the Web-Page. We used ASCII and other forms of Ciphertexts to encode the message hints, and hid them in the most obvious of places while making it.

Layout

We followed a bottom-top approach and created the loops with the main branch with function calls interceding the previous branches to somehow manually cooperate with a reduced time complexity. As for the fractals, the time delay is increased in order to get a satisfactory time on watching the whole thing unfold itself to it's fullest glory! However, this layout is pretty comprehensive cause it has been helpful for us by getting in more simpler statements of code.

Intentions

This program is meant and is intended for the use by students and any learners in general that wants to check out cryptographic puzzle hunting. This program snippet is entirely copyrighted by VIT Freshers, class of 2024. For any re-distributions / using of our code in any projects is entirely accepted with a credit line. And lastly, thanks to our dedicated efforts onto coming up with an idea at 1.30am in the morning about puzzle hunting! :D This project is ideally meant for the DevSpace Hackathon of CSI-VIT. Code republications are subject to our permissions.

Conclusions

This'll be all our entry notes. To get a more understanding on the levels of this project, check out the hint(s) file where there'd be a readme.md to walk you through the levels, giving you a brief idea on it.