Hi

Im making a rougelike with permadeath and want to make replacing the savedata harder (a little bit) to prevent backing up the game state. Its a simple binary file and i dont need encryption.

NOTE: i dont want serverside solutions or to discuss why i want to prevent savegame backup.

1. Just name the save "sound.bak" or something. Really simple but also very easy to "crack"!

2. Save the data so some silly folder like "C:/appdata/flashdata/fakecompany/sound.bak". But ugly to create folder on the users computer and what if this folder is cleaned out (since its not supposed to be affiliated with the game)? Then the user will loose the progress.

3. Save a timestamp to the savefile and keep a registry of the timestamps somewhere. If the savefile is replaced they will mismatch and you can refuse to load that savegame. But if the player backups the registry then? Which means i have to "hide" the registry file as well.

4. Similar to no3 but using windows registry for some timestamp check. Would this improve anything?

5. Any way to just make the file itself harder to see in the folders?

What would you suggest? Or something else? Im aware a cracker would find a workaround in minutes but i just wanna make it less tempting for an average player.

Thanks!
Erik

You will only annoy your users by trying to force your will onto them.

The moment you save the data is the moment the user will be able to copy it, so maybe just dont.

Though the more you annoy them the less they recommend your game, so maybe just let them as its only a singleplayer game.

I would say don't put your time and energy into solving problem that may not exist. Ask yourself - is it really key feature of the game to not allow users cheat? Why? Do you have some sort of global leaderboard that you need to ensure is honest?

Some people just like to cheat. It is fun for them and as long as they affect only their own experience (AKA game is not online) you better make it easier for them to backup save and put your time into something else (content, performance, ....)

Any local solution wouldn't work with risk of user breaking their game or even OS - messing with registry may be risky, especially if done by kid who just "read somewhere" what to do.

Your players will love you more for good game than for "good save hiding feature". And if it's obvious you have roguelike game with permadeath most will just play it that way.

So... many people log in just to state EXACTLY what i wrote in the post i have no interest in and already know. Not very useful.

Im asking for simple hiding tricks. Comments on the ones I suggested or other ideas are useful.

@Brain

I dont want online simply because thats more mess (and possibly costly) than I prefer to handle for this feature:) Also it forces the player to have internet connection/be online.

If I was to do this, I'd start with a fixed size save game data file with a fixed number of save slots. This one file will store the save game data.

When saving to that file, you can also create a hash based on some of the save data. This hash could be stored in a separate file in a different directory (i.e. standard user folder) or stored in the registry. A timestamp could be part of the hash. Then when loading, you could compare the hash to the save data, and in event of mismatch disallow the loading of the data.

Obviously anyone who figures out that data is stored in two places can get around that. But you did say you only want to make it more inconvenient for the average user.

And for the record, I also think this 'feature' is a bad idea. It seems like something that would just annoy people, so not sure why you want to include it.

@Shpongle

Yeah that seems to be the best method.

I just dont want to leave the data to obvious to meddle with (not to INVITE the player to take the easy way out first thing). I dont see how it would annoy any player just playing the game. You can still save ingame, you just have to go an extra mile (or meter) to meddle with the game data.