Zero hour games

For me, last night was the end of daylight savings. It also happens to be one of my favourite nights of the year, simply because you get another hour of sleep. However it also lets you do something in zero hours, because you can spend a hour doing something between 2am and 3am before the clocks are turned back a hour.

Naturally, I made a small but fun puzzle game in zero hours. The itself gave you a string which was encrypted with an key. The purpose of the game was to guess the key, so that the string could be recreated.

The encryption was done using XOR logic. The interesting thing about the XOR function is that:

orginalMessage XOR key = encryptedMessage
encryptedMessage XOR key = orginalMessage

This could make for an interesting puzzle that could be used in many games. Unfortunately, XOR logic is not really common knowledge.