Cryptodungeon

Inspiration:

Kind of a mix of blockchain and some other economic concepts (particularly anarcho capitalism).

What it does:

This game is a turn based, last man standing elimination game. My favorite part of this is the cryptography concepts. Unfortunately I was unable to fully implement them, but I have lots of ideas about having different parts of the save file partially encrypted, or multiple layers of encryption by different asymmetric, or symmetric key systems, to create parts of rooms that are harder to get access to. Different parts of the file would be encrypted in different ways, and at different strengths. The players would have control over things that were encrypted and how. The game would be about aquiring resources in order to out-cypher your enemies. As your cryptographic power increases during the game, you would be able to decrypt more and more of your opponent's parts of the file, to eventually locate them and destroy them. This game would use a save file to store the game state at varying levels of encryption. Anyone who runs the game with that file would be able to join into that round of the game, as long as they can send the file back to the other participants (with their moves added to the mix). I actually see this file sharing mechanism as a big strength for flexibility and interesting concepts in the game (security risks aside lol). It also allows people without a strong or stable internet connection to participate. You just need to be able to send a single file (and it doesn't have to be transmitted fast either, as long as it arrives in one piece).

The branching file mechanism, whereby anyone who has a file can play in that world, but the people who originally were playing there may just be participating on a different branch, or instance, of the same file, is very interesting to me.

How I built it:

I use python for hackathons because it is fast/easy for small apps, and I'm not going to build a massive application in 24 hours.

Challenges I ran into:

Basically nothing aside from the cryptography portion of the project. I was only limited by the fact that I abandoned my group and started coding this from scratch with only 12 hours remaining. I've built similar things before so the implementation was not an issue. I've never worked with Python's built in Crypto library before so that's why I struggled.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of:

Essentially coding non-stop for 24 hours without breaks.

What I learned:

Be more self reliant and don't expect to have good group members who actually know how to code. (This same situation happened to me in another hackathon)

What's next for Cryptodungeon:

This project has been brewing in my mind for awhile. I need to move to a better language, and after that, I can add more functionality effortlessly, due to the class structure, etc.

Controls:

Controls are wonky. Click a directly adjacent space, and then click again, in the upper left to attack, or upper right to move.

Built With

• pygame
• python