The Pigpen symbols certainly are distinctive, recognising them helped me get started.

That's great to hear, hope your kids enjoy. Thanks!

Very cool! Although it doesn't solve either of them perfectly for me (e.g. "HEY BUYS" instead of "HEY GUYS").

Would love to read more about how that tool works :)

Great question :) Frequency analysis is actually still pretty useful for ciphers more complicated than a monoalphabetic substitution cipher. Take a polyalphabetic substitution cipher (similar to the one you described), where a key is used to determine the offset for each character. In this example the key is ABC:

Key: ABCABCABCABCA... Plaintext: MYNAMEISAARON... Ciphertext: MZPANGITCASQN...

At first glance, frequency analysis would be useless against this ciphertext. But if you can work out the key length (in this case, 3), you can group every 3rd character together and then perform frequency analysis on each group, as we know each group as been encrypted with the same key, making frequency analysis relevant again.

That's a great question! My original plan that once I had extracted all the items from the plate, the app would then detect the average colour of the remaining regions and "fill" the gaps - that wouldn't work well with plates that have different patterns, but would probably be good enough for plates of a single colour.

Due to time constraints (and ultimately solving the majority of the problems I had originally aimed to with this project), the app replaces the cropped circular region with a plain white plate (a separate image contained in the app) before placing the extracted items.

Maybe I'll go for the more advanced implementation if/when I spend more time on this project!

Awesome, glad you enjoyed it :)

Thanks, glad you enjoyed it :)

I'd love to see someone build this as a bookmarklet - I wouldn't know where to begin with image processing in JavaScript. Maybe a project for another day...

That's a great idea. If I could get the image processing to run fast enough, I'd love to get to a point where you could have Screentendo overlay a video (of a scrolling level for example), and have the level blocks generate as the video played.

My Sony phone has augmented reality toys that kind of do this. Point your phone at a table top, and dinosaurs appear which are able to navigate objects on the table and trees grow out of things.

The Sony PS4 also has demos with the same idea.

I'm almost 100% sure I've seen this demoed before, and obviously it wouldn't be real-time, but would certainly be a cool proof of concept.

Thanks, glad you liked it!

Yeah I played around with building levels in TextEdit while I was developing the app - it's a lot of fun watching lines of text turn into platforms for Mario, and it allows for iterating on level design really quickly :)