Show HN: Dimity Jones in Puzzle Castle: An Electronic Escape Novel
obnakwa.itch.io(I solicited feedback from this wonderful community for a draft of this project eight months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39972586 ... I was humbled by and am wholeheartedly grateful to several brilliant proofreaders; their names appear at the end of the second chapter.)
_Dimity Jones In Puzzle Castle: An Electronic Escape Novel in Eighty-Nine Ciphertexts_ is a (mostly) fictional story, contained in a single text file, that requires the reader to solve puzzles as they go along, and to use each chapter's solution as a key to decipher the next.
Think: escape room in the form of a novel -- or, as one reader put it, "Interactive Fiction meets Advent of Code."
A computer, and rudimentary coding skills in a language of your choice, will be indispensable for performing the transformations -- and might help with the solving too!
My wife, the author, passed away six years ago. This is not the last thing she wrote, but it is the most unusual, unapproachable, and personal of her major works. It is also, as the only novel of hers that I cannot breeze through in an afternoon (and despite my unflattering appearance in it), my favorite.
Though _Dimity Jones_ was left unfinished, and perhaps abandoned, at the time of my wife's death, its elements were all there, on her hard disk, awaiting only a final compiling. My contribution to this text has therefore been little more than that of an occasional copyeditor (my wife was a meticulous speller and self-proofreader) and playtester.
Thank you for checking it out.
I've been playing with this off and on since the previous post, and it's such a cool idea. Thank you for sharing it.
Are there any differences between the previous version on github and this version on itch.io?
Some slight edits and revisions, yes, but the substance of the story hasn't changed.
Thanks for playing!
This reminds me a bit of Cain's Jawbone (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain%27s_Jawbone), but not quite as diabolical.
And hopefully this one won't take 85 years to find its audience ...!
Perhaps I too should have offered a prize to the first to solve it!
It does look pretty cool, even though I'm not a massive puzzle-fan. The writing style is lively and the snippets shown do seem to draw you in.
You mention that it was left unfinished - did you finish it or is it still unfinished?
I believe I'd call it finished now; hopefully Christine would agree. :)
Looks cool. What ages is the plaintext content suitable for?
Suitable for all ages, I think, though there are a couple of cuss words a few dozen chapters deep ...!
What is the character of the puzzles? Is there a variety?
Yes, there are a variety: logic problems, word puzzles, alphametics, various kinds of ciphers -- transposition, substitution, steganographic --, some coding challenges, and a whole slew of other puzzles that I don't quite know how to categorize.