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Hokay, I’m in the process of writing an online puzzle game, the structure of which is a series of interconnected pages that players can navigate.
Occassionally, the player will hit a puzzle that must be solved in order to continue (either by entering a password or deciphering a new URL, and so on).
Now at the moment the game is very much in development, so the page names are simply in sequential order (page1, page2, page3, and so on).
This is fine for testing and debugging, but when ready I want to eliminate, or at very least reduce, the chance that players will be tempted to cheat by simply punching in a future page name…
…which is the reason for the thread. As I see it, I have only two simple options available, but am curious as to whether you guys and gals have any other ideas. The two options as I see it are:
1) Frames. This is not a route I want to go down. Frames annoy the hell out of me on other people’s sites, so I really don’t want to go down this route for mine. There are also, as we all know, a whole host of other problems with frames.
2) Unintuitive Pages. This one is sort of a labour intensive but reasonable solution to my mind. Once all my links are tested and run, I could simply rename the pages and their links, so instead of Page1, Page2, Page3 I have 7htu6H, JJ3f9D, 94K5d8 and the like; by making my page names an alpha-numeric string I can scramble the page order.
Does anyone have any other suggestions of how I might achieve this? I did consider including some sort of HTTP_REFERRER on each page, the idea being it would only allow the page to be loaded if the user had come from the page immediately before, but I think this might actually end up being too unstable and causing more issues than it solves.
Anyone have any ideas?