After reading Mechanic #031 on the Three Hundred game ideas blog, i got thinking. Specifically, i asked myself “How easy would it be to write a web-based tool for encoding and decoding data to 2d images as pixels?”.

Luckily, this mechanism has been implemented before. The simplest example would be a barcode. However, i wanted something a bit more advanced in order to pack as much data as possible into the image, as i would imagine quite a bit of information would have to be present in each “game image”. After much scouring the web, i found two promising solutions: QRCode and Semacode. Sadly though, Semacode appeared to have pretty dodgy licensing, so i decided to steer clear of it and see what i could make of QRcode.

QRCode was interesting, as in it was very easy to find an encoder, such as libqrencode. Unfortunately, it was very difficult finding a decoder that didn’t just run on a mobile phone (which seems to be a popular way of decoding QRCode’s). The only standalone library that could decode was written in java, oddly enough also called qrcode.

To be honest, i’m a bit put off of proceeding any further trying to get this question answered, mainly because everything seems to be written in Java, – which is fair enough, but considering my skills in programming Java are minimal, i might end up with a rather dodgy botched together solution.

Regardless, i think the concept of deciphering data from 2d images is neat. I’ll just have to find the elusive c-based decoder for QCode, or perhaps even better, find a better supported alternative system.