Introduction

"Tracking" is a slow-burn puzzle-solving game where players will engage in an online investigation of the disappearance of an unknown woman. 

The core gameplay will focus on collecting clues, decoding messages, and hacking databases to exploit information that would benefit the investigation. If you're familiar with screenlife thriller mystery films, then you can tell that this game is my attempt at recreating such cinematic experiences :D 

What the game has so far

Desktop UI

All of these are subject to change in the later phase of development. 

Windows UI & Features

- Double-clicking can open a window, which you can then drag, maximize/minimize, and close.

- Windows can also be hidden on the taskbar, which enables you to reopen the tab again.

Functional Web browser

- The internet browser has been updated with fundamental functions, and some basic websites (search engine, email service, etc.)

More websites will be added later on, some of them are easter eggs, the others are for the main story. 

Update #1: The game page is live!

Well, I decided to create a page for "Tracking", you can visit it here.

It's nothing much there, but I will add more as it goes. Good news is that you can now have the first glimpse of the main plot, though I'm still in the process of finalizing it :D Thank you for spending time taking a look at the page!

Update #2: New website added!

I'm being extra productive lately, so I decided to work on this. The mechanism is pretty simple, it's the UI that takes a lot of time to put together. 

A brief introduction of the new website added: a "cipher". You might have already known the "Caesar Decoder", which is a shifting cipher that is used to decode encrypted messages by replacing letters in the source text with those further down the alphabet. But I guess that it would be too lame if I just, well, deploy the whole thing into the game. Besides, it would make the whole experience...less immersive, so I decided to tweak it up a bit: 

While the Caesar cipher functions with a fixed "shift" value, the cipher in the game will determine the shift value based on the total letters in the source text. The longer the text, the greater the shifting value. At first,  a great shift value tended to mess up both the source text and the decoded text as they did not match one another, but after several tries, I finally nailed it.

With this slightly tweaked cipher, the experience becomes more immersive (mostly because I don't want people to crack the puzzles too easily by using any other common ciphers ^^)  

What's next? 

Well, the core gameplay also requires players to decode/encode messages, therefore, I don't want this cipher to be a one-time tool. Other variations of it will be scattered throughout the game, players are required to discover them to crack more advanced puzzles in the game. That's it for now, thank you for reading!