Is it that easy to reverse-engineer a love2d game?

[zorg]

There's also Warlock's Tower, which did have its source code compiled (but not the assets, and they are still accessible, and even the code can be decompiled into a bit more understandable form), and it even includes twitch integration.

Or there's BYTEPATH, which is low on graphics assets, but is an otherwise lean and clean geometry shooter type game, with ALL its code uploaded to github as a programming excercise to the masses deliberately showing off how the game itself was created. (since it was an experiment on how games are received and a few other things)

About the ignorant of piracy thing, people mostly were saying, in my opinion, that realistically, and frankly, no one gives an u'1F4A9' about the shovelware-quality projects people generate during their "testing the waters" phase (which is still good for trying out things, seeing what works for one), and usually for their early commercial releases either... unless someone's a diamond in the rough and actually accomplishes a small miracle, but that's rare (i can count that on one hand, like necrodancer; or even notch's minecraft and even that's derivative of infiniminer).
In other words, pirates don't care about such games, unless they are children thinking they can make a quick buck off of someone else's work... to which the game hosting sites can respond VERY quickly, whether we're talking about itch.io or wherever.

But, to not step on anyone's toesies, löve not being fit for commercial games is your conclusion and nothing more, hence it shouldn't be presented ultimately as a fact; new people might take it way more seriously than they should.

[YoungNeer]

Huh, on what answers is this based? There's no reason for that, you just should not fear the virtually non existing problem of reverse engineering of your code/data first and foremost because nobody who aims to do anything harmful to you will care if you don't have a highly successful game already.

Maybe you are right. But just wanted to point out that I'm not fearful of anything. It's just that I wanted to know how easy it is to reverse-engineer a love2d game and the answer as you may expect is "Super-Easy" (without LuaJIT) and about using Love for commercial games - well it's just my personal opinion that Love2D is not very useful for commercial games and it's best suited for prototyping and learning.

[raidho36]

Or maybe you just let your irrational fears get the best of you. Minecraft is, for practical purposes, open source, in spite of proprietary license: you can access the source and the assets very easily, it's just you're not legally allowed. If you think your game code contains anything worthwhile to other members of the industry, you're deeply mistaken. If you think they would rip your game assets to steal them - same deal, they won't. So what is this about? Just to prevent some 12 year old from tinkering with your game? And if LOVE doesn't naturally obstructs such access to enthusiasts, it's not a good fit for commercial games? Don't be ridiculous.

[sphyrth]

Out of curiosity, YoungNeer, are you new to the Open Source world?

[CrimsonGuy]

Oh while we are in the topic of commercial games made with Love2d, i want to point out that Kingdom Rush: Frontiers and Kingdom Rush Origins for PC are also made with Love2d both part of a very successful tower defense franchise (my personal favorite) will post the links if you want to check them out, i love their art style

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4587 ... Frontiers/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/8163 ... h_Origins/

[YoungNeer]

Or there's BYTEPATH, which is low on graphics assets, but is an otherwise lean and clean geometry shooter type game, with ALL its code uploaded to github as a programming excercise to the masses deliberately showing off how the game itself was created.

That's strange - the last time I checked I found it on gumroad. So i guess "ALL its code" is not uploaded on github (maybe some parts of the code is uploaded with documentation on github just to "attract" the potential customers - kinda like shareware games - first make people addicted by letting them play for free and soon they will be so addicted to the game that they will be willing to spend any amount of money on the game. An even better analogy would be that of unlock-codes software but again that's counted in shareware as well)

[zorg]

You're right, only the tutorial's on github, and the code is on gumroad, my mistake.

[YoungNeer]

Or maybe you just let your irrational fears get the best of you. Minecraft is, for practical purposes, open source, in spite of proprietary license: you can access the source and the assets very easily, it's just you're not legally allowed.

Well lots of software are open-source yet proprietary- even UE4 is open-source even the beast Cry Engine is open-source. However it's a special type of open-source software in that you can access only "parts of code" and you'll have to pay for more accessibility and then you cannot clone and stuff like that. I'm talking about Cry Engine in this context- UE4 is completely open-source and even free (though you must pay the royalty charges or something like that). It's understandable for UE4 and Cry Engine being open-source since Epic Games and Crytek still have the rights to them. And if anyone or anything appears as a threat to that then they will get it out of their way through "extreme measures." But also note that we are talking about GIANTS (who have loads of money to spend on those expensive corporate lawyers and lawsuits) not dwarfs. And by dwarfs I mean itch.io gamedevs who even though may have some rights to their game (which note - depends highly on their geographical location but let's not get into that for now) yet they most of the time can't act against some-one using their assets for their own personal benefit even if they do notice - reason of course being that they neither have the money nor time to get themselves involved in lawsuits. [GIANTS don't have the time either- but they have money so their full-time lawyers take care of the stuff they don't want to get their hands dirty with]

Like others pointed out a company doesn't care much (that much) about binding their assets in a data file and encrypting it or whatever (Take Rovio for context- they obfuscated their lua files but their assets are free to use - free as long as they don't come to know about it ) But again what about an indie-developer who can't afford a lawyer ( or maybe he can but it just isn't worth it ) So what could suck more than to watch someone use your fallen game's assets for free and get away with it - without even considering to credit the original author i.e. YOU

P.S. The topic was a technical topic about reverse-engineering and all that but look we made it into a legal discussion.

[Nelvin]

Oh while we are in the topic of commercial games made with Love2d, i want to point out that Kingdom Rush: Frontiers and Kingdom Rush Origins for PC are also made with Love2d both part of a very successful tower defense franchise (my personal favorite) will post the links if you want to check them out, i love their art style

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4587 ... Frontiers/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/8163 ... h_Origins/

Ah yeah, I totally forgot about those two - sadly the only one I own atm is the one made with monogame, so I can't have a look at their files.
So at least 3 very successful games.
Another game with a reasonable success is Game Dev Studio https://store.steampowered.com/app/7735 ... ev_Studio/
Not a in the same league as the other 3 but not bad either - and also the dev explicitly releases the sourcecode for the fullgame on the game's website.
http://www.gamedevstudiogame.com/

Do you know if their other game, Iron Marines, is also done using Löve?

[raidho36]

If someone's gonna rip you off, there's no stopping them. Case in point: Gianna Sisters, Crash Team Racing, Minecraft, Angry Birds. They not even gonna use your game's code or assets, they'll make their own from scratch - arguing over similar looking characters is one thing, but there's no weaseling out of copyright strike for making a carbon copy. The only people who would consider reusing your actual IP are the ones who wouldn't make any appreciable amount of money off of it, so why should you care. And in terms of being an indie, if someone just takes your game as-is and sells it elsewhere, these "third party sales" (let's call them that) don't represent your lost sales, because these buyers were never aware that your game existed and thus would've never bought it, much in the same way as pirated copies don't represent lost sales. And even then, you won't have to take it to court - just email the store owner, chances are they'll even give you some of the money.

Regardless, you're putting far too much emphasis on obfuscation. If you don't want people to have access to the source code, you don't need to do anything beyond generating appropriate bytecode in place of source code files.