Protecting your games

The option to create an EXE in r116 is awesome. I've been playing around with it and as you may know it exports you game into an exe and a few DLL's. So I'm thinking this may give us the opportunity to use some of the exe encryptors and exe packers out there to help protect out assets. I know most of us are creating games for free but I'd at least like to explore this option for those that are interested.

So if your look at the files created when your export your game, you'll notice the creation date on them are all older then when you exported except for the exe. I checked for evidence of my game code being present and only found it in the exe.

Assumption: Our game code/assets are located in the exe.

I tested a few exe protectors, some work some don't an example of one that worked was Themida (the WIN32 version) located at: oreans.com/themida.php

After encryption I couldn't find any plain text in the exe showing my original code.

No protection scheme is 100% secure (and probably not free) but they may help to dissuade people from trying to crack your games, also some exe protectors come with the ability to evoke trials or process licence keys for your product. Note I don;t know what kind of performance hit this may have on your game, so the protection options may need to be tweaked, I just used the defaults.

FYI:

For those that are interested I've created a crypted version of a game I'm working on as a proof of concept, it located here:

dl.dropbox.com/u/11384284/starcastle.zip

Hey shabbycat. It's something worth checking out; thanks for posting up the information. I'm still wrestling with whether or not any form of DRM is worth it, given that a lot of evidence hows very small difference between protected/unprotected with piracy rates. Have you had any experiences with these issues?

Nah, I've never made a game worth of release so I've never been involved in that side of the house.

Don't get wrong I'm not promoting DRM, but commercially it might be an expectation that you can so I just wanted to make sure it's something we could do with Construct 2, that's all.

Construct 2 already closure-compiles the javascript on export, so even when exporting to the browser it should be very difficult to reverse engineer a .capx or any code. (It's easier to get images out a browser, but those are covered by copyright law and generally easier to spot if being abused.)