Enigma's Echo 🕵️‍♂️📟

What I Built 🛠️

Enigma's Echo is an interactive, browser-based cryptanalysis simulation game set in the historic Bletchley Park (Hut 8) in 1941. The player acts as a codebreaker tasked with decrypting intercepted German transmissions. Instead of writing code or manually shifting letters, you configure the decryption machine using natural language commands which are compiled in real-time using Google's Gemini API.

The console interface mimics a vintage CRT monitor, complete with scanline filters, flickering glow effects, mechanical rotor dial animations, and dynamically synthesized typewriter sounds.

As a spiritual successor to my previous Bletchley-themed rhythm game, Turing's Frequency, this project pushes the boundaries of automated cryptanalysis. Furthermore, following my work on Planetary Pulse, I wanted to focus on creating an asset-free, purely synthesized audio and visual experience.

Connection to Theme 🌅

The game embraces the core themes of the June Solstice Game Jam:

1. The June Solstice (Light vs. Dark) ☀️: Puzzles revolve around balancing "daylight" and "shadows." Decrypting ciphers prevents the shadows from taking over, aligning with the Solstice's celebration of peak light.
2. Pride & Alan Turing's Birthday 🏳️‍🌈: The game is a direct tribute to Alan Turing, Bletchley Park, and the birth of modern computing.
3. Alan Turing Legacy 🧠: Level 4 simulates a dual-rotor Enigma configuration, requiring players to set the rotor starting positions to the initials of the June Solstice (J and S for June/Solstice, representing positions 9 and 18) to decode the target ciphertext.

Demo ⚡

• Playable Game Link: https://mamoor123.github.io/enigmas-echo/
• Automated Demo Link: https://mamoor123.github.io/enigmas-echo/demo.html
• Demo Video (YouTube): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uLoC8HF9cY4

Journey 🚀

How I Built It 🧰

I wanted to build a game that had zero heavy assets—no loading screens, no heavy images, and no downloaded audio files.

• Visuals: Rendered entirely using lightweight vanilla HTML/CSS. I used HSL-tailored matrix-green themes, glowing text-shadows, radial gradients, and linear scanlines to simulate a vintage CRT screen.
• Web Audio API Synthesis 🎵: Rather than loading MP3 sound files, the game utilizes the browser's native Web Audio API to dynamically synthesize typewriter clicks (a noise burst + fast lowpass decay), rotor dial whirs (sawtooth frequency sweeps), and success arpeggios (C major chord progression).
• AI Integration (Gemini 1.5 Flash) 🤖: The core mechanic uses Google Gemini API as a natural language compiler. When the user types an instruction like "reverse the text, shift left by 3 and swap the case", the app sends it to Gemini, which returns a clean JSON instruction array: [{"type": "reverse"}, {"type": "caesar", "shift": -3}, {"type": "swapcase"}] The game's engine then processes these steps on the ciphertext, accompanied by mechanical rotor dial rotation animations.
• Local Simulation Fallback 🔒: If the player does not have a Gemini API key configured, the game falls back to a regex-based pattern matching compiler. This allows the game to remain 100% playable offline or key-free while showcasing the API benefits.

Special Category Submissions 🏆

• Best Ode to Alan Turing: Dedicated levels representing historical ciphers (Caesar, Vigenère) culminating in a simulated two-rotor Enigma machine deciphering "TURING TEST".
• Best Google AI Usage: The project uses the Gemini API as a functional compiler, showing how large language models can translate unstructured human phrasing directly into executable mechanical pipelines.

Link to Source Code 📂

• Repository: https://github.com/mamoor123/enigmas-echo