Decrypting with Ghosts

This is a submission for the June Solstice Game Jam

What I Built

I built an atmospheric, web-based cryptographic puzzle game using Twine (Harlowe 3). Together with the ghost of Alan Turing! you must crack five distinct historical and digital ciphers to unlock a mysterious mechanical core.

My goal was to blend historical text-based cryptography with rewarding visual mechanics. Every time the player solves an encrypted message, a digital flower dynamically sprouts and blossoms in unison with their achievements, populating a persistent garden.

You can give the game a go here : {https://stargalax.github.io/June-Solstice-Game-Jam/}

Relation to the Theme

The game embraces the June Solstice theme through a deliberate aesthetic contrast and its core gameplay loop. While the background is locked in terminal darkness, your progress acts as a digital solstice. The entire experience mirrors a time-lapse organic transformation: by overriding security locks, the player coaxes digital life out of a cold machine, culminating in a fully bloomed, glowing neon summer garden at the absolute peak of the solstice loop.

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Video Demo

Below is a brief look at the custom-engineered visual reward loop in action.

As seen in the video, the game tracks player victories with precision. When a cryptographic multiple-choice question is answered correctly, a flower blooms.

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Code

You can explore the full interactive framework, the custom Twine macro logic, and our custom CSS animation stylesheet here:

stargalax / June-Solstice-Game-Jam

How I Built It

Building an interactive fiction experience with persistent, fluid animations presented unique challenges in Twine's default browser rendering engine:

• The Cryptographic Loop: Rather than standard general knowledge trivia, I converted the interactive loop into quick-thinking cryptographic hurdles, featuring Caesar Shifts (-3), Reverse Ciphers, ancient Atbash Ciphers, 8-bit Binary ASCII streams, and a matrix-style Grid Cipher.
• Defeating the Animation Glitch: In early iterations, changing rooms forced the browser to re-render all CSS items from 0px to 100px, causing a frantic, messy "double-growth" loop on screen. To solve this, I decoupled static flowers from active ones using an intentional .bloom-now class state.
• Dreamy Ambience Integration: To combat aggressive modern browser auto-play blocks on music elements, I routed a soft, floating ambient pad track through global JavaScript triggered dynamically by the player's very first interaction click.

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Prize Category

🎖️ Best Ode to Alan Turing

This project was built from the ground up to celebrate the legacy and intellectual brilliance of Alan Turing. Instead of a passive biography, players step directly into his footsteps.

By interpreting raw binary bitstreams , navigating morphological patterns, and working side-by-side with his digital phantom, the game acts as a living, breathing monument to his foundational contributions to computer science and cryptography. The bittersweet finale on the solstice peak serves as a heartfelt thank you to his enduring legacy.