![]() Will you spend a day on this? One day is certainly not enough. (It’s a “venial sin,” which does not result in the damnation of the soul.)Īt the very least, think hard about how much time and work you want to invest in preventing cheating, and how you will feel when someone cheats anyway. I do think it’s a “sin” to spend your precious time on this earth doing work that benefits no one, not even yourself. In particular, you didn’t say: “I think it will be fun to learn about hacking and add anti-hacking measures to my game.” Since you’re the only person who would benefit from preventing cheats, if you’re not enjoying the process, then no one is. I think that if you search your heart, you’ll find that this isn’t truly what your heart desires. Maybe I’m misunderstanding you (or you’re misunderstanding me), but it seems to me that you want to prevent cheating but you don’t know why. (It was a common anti-piracy technique in the 1990s to having the game start with a randomized password, based on a password list or decoder wheel in the game’s manual.) To prevent “hacking” your game, you’d not only need to prevent players from analyzing your game, but you’d also have to prevent players from cloning your game and changing their copy. (Along the way, you’ll probably learn enough about information security that you could get paid to do it as a job!)Īs pointed out, the attacker could just make a pirated copy of your game that doesn’t require a vault password. If that’s fun for you, you’d want to start by learning about information security and anti-piracy measures, learning existing traditional attacks, and brainstorm and implement as many defenses as you can. (At least for the kind of person who enjoys solving puzzles.)Īnd maybe that’s the real answer to my “why prevent cheating” question: perhaps it would be fun for you, the author, to try to make a game that makes cheating as hard as you possibly can. ![]() Thinking of novel ideas for hacks is fun, and thinking about anti-hack defenses is also fun. I think this thread has gotten so long precisely because hacking is such a fun puzzle. (And to some people, hacking the puzzles can be more fun than solving them normally anyway.) But you don’t want to be going down this road for an IF game anyway.Ī certain amount of obfuscation may be worth it, but ultimately if they’re stuck enough on your puzzle that they don’t think they can continue without hacking it, and yet engaged enough with your story that they want to try, then it’s probably better to not put too many roadblocks in their way. The only way to make something entirely secure is to have a server-based component that they can’t hack – and even then, if the requests to the server can be easily hacked out or emulated without compromising the game behaviour, then it’s still insecure – witness the number of MMOs that have had third party “private servers” created. Some design choices can make this more difficult – using a JavaScript-based language is not one of those choices – but ultimately this applies to anything. Anything that runs purely client-side can be hacked and reverse engineered – it’s just a question of time and motivation.
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