My friend hates video games. She doesn’t get why I don’t just ditch the computers and study something like quantum physics instead. My response to this was to make her a video game that isn’t really a video game, but instead an interactive challenge designed just for her to enjoy. Plus, it made a great birthday present!
The end result was a point and click story with very difficult puzzles, made in GameMaker.
We’d been competing in the Alan Turing cryptography competition run by Manchester University for a few years, and she was scarily good at it. I harnessed everything I’d learnt from both that and Professor Layton puzzles to create 16 cryptography puzzles, with cruel additions such as hexadecimal colour codes and bitwise operations on pixels in images.
I merged her favourite things into a story which included Doctor Who, Sherlock, Lord of the Rings, Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and the main characters from the University’s competition.
This was the biggest project I had undertaken in GameMaker, and making it helped me improve my skills so much. There were a lot of variables that needed to be passed around and it was quite hard to keep track of them at times, but if I were to develop something on that scale again I’d know how to organise everything from the outset. I was particularly proud of learning to save games by reading and writing to files, and the code is helpful to refer back to for future projects.
Development went on for a while, as I kept putting it on hold for schoolwork, so my process at the start of it was very different to my process at the end. The final method was using Inkpad to make the graphics for codes, Pixlr to make each dialogue box, and GameMaker’s simple editing tools to include the frequency analysis and comments. I enjoyed making CD box art and a tongue-in-cheek manual for the game too.
Since the game was set inside the TARDIS’ system, I used pixel art and binary in the background to give the impression of being inside a computer.
The background music was the Doctor Who theme, but in an 8 bit style. I made it in Auxy, an app for iOS, as I wasn’t very skilled in GarageBand at the time.
The sound effects were generated in BFXR, an online tool for 8 bit sounds.
EPQ – Physics of Music – 2019