
Show HN: Cryptris, a video game on cryptography - lducas
http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~lducas/news_cryptris.html
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bgutierrez
I like it so far. Do you already have plans for translating? I think I can
read just enough french to understand what is going on and I'm interested in
helping out.

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dang
I hope you do! This project sounds cool, and if you and/or others produce an
English version, we'll waive the rule on duplicates and welcome a repost.

It seems like this work would best be discussed here once the entire community
is able to play the game.

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lducas
Thank you for the encouragement, and waiving the rules...

The game has just been released in French (36 hours) after two years of work;
but yes I'm already thinking about translation...

Unfortunately, for budget reasons, the game wasn't originally designed for
multilingual support; so there is work not only for translators but also for
developers. The good news is that it is open source so we can make that
happen.

Another solution might be to crowd-fund the translation and leave the
multilingual support to Digitalcusine who know well its own source code and
have done amazing work so far (especially considering budget constraints).

Anyway; I'm open to any suggestions and help on the matter; please email me if
you'd like personnaly to help out so we can organize ourselves !

Thanks again. \- L

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gnocchi
Just finished the game, it was really good.

It would help if you can open the issue tracker on this project, like this we
can discuss new features such as translations. For that go to settings and
tick the checkbox for issues.

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gnocchi
Was just investigating the source code and noticed it's a fork from daformat,
would it be better to open issues here?

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daformat
Sorry for catching up late, definitely, please submit issues to my fork so we
can all keep up with what's going on.

Thanks for the help and comments guys, nice to see Cryptris getting some
supporters on HN.

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danielweber
Having to translate from French does increase the difficulty.

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atmosx
yeah, that was kind of a blow to me...

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ucarion
This game is quite confusing even if you speak French.

Somehow playing a variant of tetris explains public key crypto.

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lducas
The relations between the game and public key crypto are explained here (if
you speak french...) :

[http://images.math.cnrs.fr/Cryptris-1-2-Comprendre-une-
des.h...](http://images.math.cnrs.fr/Cryptris-1-2-Comprendre-une-des.html)

and

[http://images.math.cnrs.fr/Cryptris-2-2-Les-
dessous.html](http://images.math.cnrs.fr/Cryptris-2-2-Les-dessous.html)

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schoen
It's quite clever, but I think the pedagogical function is questionable,
because I don't think that the geometric interpretation will be particularly
clear to players who haven't read these articles.

The idea of the game seems to be to show people that public-key cryptography
exists and can work, yet the actual method of creating the public and private
keys (and the fact that the public key can be created easily given the private
key and not vice versa) won't be especially obvious.

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lducas
Indeed it was our idea; with the opportunity for the most curious players to
learn more about Crypto, Algorithms and Math. The articles (and the whole
"documentation" menu) are for the curious kids (of all ages...)

After 24h hours the game is already a success. I will for sure put a lot of
effort in getting the game translated !

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schoen
I think it's excellent to try to find new ways to explain these concepts. Do
you think there is a path for an ordinary player of this game to come to
perceive more about the properties of public and private keys, and especially
how the two are related to one another?

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daformat
Add this to that the fact that we need to try not to lose the player's
attention so he won't get too confused by too much information.

In the dialogs, we first explain to the player that we need to create him a
username, a private key and a public one. Now the player gets too chose his
username, and right after that we generate a random private key (well not
exactly random, in fact _we randomize a pre-generated private key so we can be
sure of it 's properties,_ otherwise the player could get hard times
decrypting).

Once the private key is generated, we get the player to create his public key
through scrambling and mixing the private key.

During the normal game, we add an extra check to make sure the private/public
keys matches the ideal properties we need for our demonstration: we want the
player to play with a simple public key and the AI to play with a strong (kind
of) public key, in the game this translates to _one column significantly
'bigger' than the others for the private key_ and _more than one 'big' columns
for the public key_.

We only constrain the public key during the game's story mode, in arcade one
can chose to create a 'weaker' public key ("Arcade" > "création des clés"),
then let him play the arcade boards with it.

Additionally, we allow the player to chose who plays with what, so both the
player and the AI can play with private/public keys.

So I really think all the building blocks are already in the game + arcade
mode. But we need to admit that most people just skip dialogs, no matter what.

Oh, well let's just keep on iterating :)

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lducas
Two editions pads for collaborative edition (Thx Framapad !) have been opened
for the translation of the explanation articles to English:
[https://cryptris.framapad.org/1](https://cryptris.framapad.org/1) and
[https://cryptris.framapad.org/2](https://cryptris.framapad.org/2) .

The bug tracker has been opened on github to discuss implementation of
multilingual support.

Merci !

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contingencies
I block twitter.com and Google Analytics, and this thing refuses to load.
Well, you lost these eyeballs.

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daformat
Can you please specify what is your config (including how you actually block
those) so we can fix it?

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flym4n
Stalls after clicking "suite" of creating the public key

