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Protecting game assets

A topic by 40wattstudio created Mar 25, 2020 Views: 271 Replies: 3

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When a player downloads a game, it is usually a .zip file that, when extracted, may contain folders with game assets. Is there a way to restrict access to certain folders after a game has been downloaded?

For example, if you had a /sfx folder with all your sound assets, you wouldn't want the player to be able to just go in there and copy and paste all of your sound assets to their HD.

Another key consideration is that I am not using a game engine (if that makes a difference).

I read the docs and conducted a few searches but didn't see any applicable answers to my question.

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No Time To PlayModerator moved this topic to General Development 4 years ago

quou4 years ago(+1)

Yeah I come across this problem a lot, since I make my games from scratch these days. Really the only way around it is to invent your own file formats and use those. That way to use the assets, people have to reverse engineer the game first, which can be very difficult.

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40wattstudio4 years ago(+1)

That seems to be the general consensus I was seeing online as well. That or some sort of encryption. Both solutions seemed a bit complicated.

One of the asset websites I was looking at had this in their FAQs:

"Do I need to protect the items within my end product from being re-used?

You should not permit end users of the end product to extract an item from the end product. You should do this by technological means if feasible, or by other means, like in the user terms for your end product."

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quou4 years ago

I release all my games as open source, so it doesn't bother me personally, but I can see why it would

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