Encoded information

STACKED REALITIES

« Index :: Appendix :: Puzzle ideas :: Encoded information

People always pondered about the inherent meaning of individual dream elements although technically dreaming as such is more like a quasi random meta mechanism to process and sort out past experiences.
However, psychology works better when there's a ruleset at hand, ideally a symbolic look-up table or dictionary, which strives for explaining exactly all those strange things happening in dreams. Applying any kind of knowledge (even a hallucinated one) simply feels much nicer than cluelessly facing a pile of open questions.
As of our game we aren't primarily interested in the functional side of such a symbolism. Instead, we'll look at its formal side, that is, types of encodings, either visual or auditive, to create unobtrusive hints for puzzle solving.

Visual
- Glyphs (e.g. Braille, Morse code, or hieroglyphs)
- Weak cryptography
  - Transposition (e.g. anagrams)
  - Substitution (e.g. Caesar cypher)
Auditive
- Morse code
- Tap/knock code
- Frequency-encoded letters/digits
- Sound-encoded values
  Example: A cat meows 3 times (either short and long sounds).
  Later, the player has to make 3 binary choices (e.g. yes/no, left/right, or up/down) in a row, where only one of the 8 (2³) combinations leads to the solution. He may solve it by trial-and-error, condoning backtracking, or by using the friendly cat's info, which happens to be the correct code.