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Indie developer has a plan to keep parts of his game secret, even from data-miners
(www.gamefile.news)
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2024
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Unfortunately we all know what happens when you tell hackers that something's going to be very hard to break into.
I understand that they were excited about the idea and wanted to share it with gamers, but if they actually wanted to give the system the best chance of success, they should've kept their mouth shut.
Yeah but also free advertising.
at least it probably saves you from the worst fate: that nobody cares about the game enough to try to discover the things
(I'm fairly sure that datamining is not that common outside highly popular games, well assuming the data isn't neatly in plaintext)
Considering it’s being published and promoted by a huge YouTube video game channel it’d never be likely to stay under the radar.
It was a really interesting food for though, especially since both cybersecurity and game development are my main areas of focus (I work part time in offensive security, and part time as game dev). I has actually motivated me to start considering that I might give data-mining this game a try, because I'm really interested in how he wants to solve the many issues present.
I'm betting it would probably be mostly leaning into "security by obscurity", but if that's the case, throwing a gauntlet like this wasn't a good idea. Because every technically sound solution I came up with was a nightmare from game design standpoint, and I couldn't came up with any puzzles or secrets that wouldn't be extremely complex, mostly because you just require a really large problem and input space for it to not be brute-forcable at any of the reverse-engineerable stages.
Also, I have a soft spot for clever marketing tactics, and this one is amazing.
… you work in offensive security and… game development
Are you … Thor ? 😁
I was always aiming towards just being a gamedev, but since there weren't many Bachelors degrees at the time focused on that, I went for Software Engineering, and then Masters in gamedev. However, experience working for alongside school in QA for a bigger gamedev company has kind of made me realize that corporate and AAA gamedev isn't really art, and you're basically the same code-monkey as you would be anywhere else, just for a lot less money. And since at the time I just played Watch Dogs 2 and was running a Shadowrun campaign, I was pretty into hacking at the time, solving CTFs and generally researching into it, which was prompted by one optional class on pentesting.
So I decided that since working in gamedev will probably leave me burnt out and with lot less money, I just applied for part-time cybersecurity job so I could finance my hobby gamedev career that's not limited by the fact that it's my livelyhood and I have to make money - and that makes every kind of art so much better. I still went for Masters in Gamedev, though. And after several years, the cybersec company started to turn more and more corporate, and I was offered a job at a small indie studio made of mostly friends, so I switched from full to part-time, and took another part-time for a lot less money but with an amazing work environment.
Besides that, Red Teaming is basically just LARPing Shadowrun, it sounded like the perfect job, just trying to talk and hack you way into banks and corporations, I couldn't say no to that :D