On Save State Hacking

CockBlockaz auto-saves the player's progress whenever a new puzzle is solved. Saving the game state is a pretty simple affair; there are 25 puzzles, each of which is in one of three possible states (locked, unlocked, or solved). So all I have to do is write a 25-character long string (one character per puzzle) to a text file, using the characters 0, 1 & 2 to represent the 3 possible states. For instance, "1000000000000000000000000" means that the first puzzle is unlocked while the rest are locked (this is the initial state of the game).

So that's fine. But, obviously, anyone could open up that text file and edit the string to mark every puzzle as available or completed. My general stance on this matter is, who gives a fuck? There's no cash prize for completing the game (as far as I know?) & no online leaderboards or anything, so the only motivation to hack the save file is for the pure joy that certain flavors of crypto-nerds get from doing those kinds of things. I think that's great. In fact, it makes me want people to hack my save states.

But now I have an unexpected problem. If I'm approaching save state hacking as a sort of meta-game, just a fun, geeky thing to do, then my current save file is way too easy to figure out! I could obfuscate the shit out of it so that only the serious cryptokids could figure it out, but that's not really what I want. How do you encrypt a string, but just enough to make it a little bit of a challenge, something that anyone with the motivation to try could figure out? I'm not sure, but I'm gonna give it a shot.

First person to successfully hack the CockBlockaz save state wins!