comments-and-code

If you’re reading this, maybe you’re someone with a game development hobby, like me. Maybe you’re like me and you’ve participated in game jams, watched a respectable number of GDC talks, and spend most of your day wishing for an interesting problem to solve.

And maybe you’re none of those things. Whoever you are, that’s who I am. And that’s how I got where we are here. I think the problem I solve here is interesting: how could you make sharing data fun?

If you’re reading this, I hope you’re ready to learn some dubiously useful encoding methods, since that’s what I will be sharing in this blog series. For this series, I will be using Rust for the code portion. You can find the reference crate here: on Github. That said, this is not intended to be a Rust-focused endeavor. I’ll try to keep things general and simple enough that you can understand the meat of the encoding method, and maybe implement it yourself in your own language if you’re so inclined.

So, if you’re looking for interesting ways to turn data into slightly more usable data and learn some things along the way, settle in! This series will be focusing on text-based encoding, perfect for sharing over messaging or microblogging applications. In this post, we’re going to be using some ancient symbols supported in Unicode to share arbitrary data in a simple but fun way.

Remember: Encoding is NOT encryption, and encoded values can be easily recovered from the encoded text. Use this encoding with some form of encryption for uses which require some sort of secrecy.