Testing the Game

Playtech offered us the opportunity to test out Encrypted City in a small-scale deployment.
The code was finished at roughly 2:00am Saturday morning, then some more time was spent getting it to work on actual phones. SydeWynder, the software we're using to run the Encrypted City game server off a phone, features an emulator mode. When I was writing the code on my computer, I only had the emulator to test it with. Real phones presented some added twists that had to be addressed, not to mention we had to make all the phones had the barcode reader properly installed.


Once play commenced, in two teams, all sorts of interesting bugs popped up. Considering there had been no formal testing with the phones beforehand, this wasn't much of a surprise. We have some work to do before this sucker is running smoothly.

Mission Statement

Encrypted City is a game that combines history, technology and geography. In the tradition of urban scavenger hunts and puzzles such as the MIT Mystery Hunt, Encrypted city scatters clues across the field of play, in the for on 2d barcodes that can be read with camera-equipped mobile devices. The barcodes provide instructions, further clues or collectible game tokens to aid the player's advancement towards the puzzle's solution.

Current implementations of this game include an indoors implementation at Parsons the New School for Design in New York, and another larger staging across lower Manhattan.