15 votes

Meditations - a collection of 350+ tiny, experimental games by different developers that will only be available for a day each (Windows+OSX)

2 comments

  1. unknown user
    (edited )
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    So, how does it work? On startup, the launcher presumably downloads the file jan.dat, which is a ZIP archive that contains all the files for this month (jan-01.zip to jan-31.zip). Each of those...
    • Exemplary

    So, how does it work?

    On startup, the launcher presumably downloads the file jan.dat, which is a ZIP archive that contains all the files for this month (jan-01.zip to jan-31.zip). Each of those ZIPs is encrypted; the password only becomes available when the website decides it wants to let you play the game. Edit: they're encrypted with AES, so even though the password format appears to be predictable, it'd take quite a bit of compute to play a game early – hashcat predicts about 30 years to crack one ZIP on my GTX 1050, and over 600 years to crack the whole month.

    http://data.meditations.games serves some text like [0.9,03-01-2019,jan-03.zip,abcd1234]. I don't know what the first field is – it's been 0.9 on the 2nd and 3rd of January – but the others are the date (dd-mm-yy), the filename for today's game, and the password to decrypt the contents of that file. Each of those files contains some standard files (the credits in credits.txt, a description in text.txt, and information about how to launch the game in param.txt), plus the game itself, if applicable (cf January 3rd's game).

    Amusing aside: it seems that there may be a bug in the launcher; the text for the 2nd of January was saved to a file called feb.dat. Maybe something thinks that 02-01-2019 means "1st of February"? I wonder what will happen if I try to run the launcher next month...

    3 votes
  2. unknown user
    Link
    It's a shame there's no Linux version; the launcher appears to start up properly in Wine (4.0-rc2), but it can't connect to the server to download the games (assuming it hasn't been Slashdotted...

    It's a shame there's no Linux version; the launcher appears to start up properly in Wine (4.0-rc2), but it can't connect to the server to download the games (assuming it hasn't been Slashdotted testing in a VM: it hasn't).

    Not bundling the games with the launcher is an interesting/weird choice too – I wonder what happens when the server goes away. (Edit: it also makes it really irritating to download the games when said server can only do 20Mbit...)

    1 vote