Is it unprofessional to leave game resources to the open eye?

Question

I'm still having problems packing my resources, after going through complicated APIs and basically just zip files which are exhausting my brain, I thought I could also pack the game with the resources visible to the human eye, in a simple folder.

Would that be unprofessional? Personally, I've never even seen games do that, it would basically mean that the player could just edit whatever he wants in the game, like go in map1.txt and add an X somewhere to create a wall, or change the player sprite to a pony in MS PAINT.

Answer 1

No it isn't, changing the game data is called modding, which is a common practice and often seen as positive effect. It's actually good to keep the game data as transparent as possible, and editing it as hassle-free as possible. Even more so if you are choosing more "advanced" players as your target audience.

The reason why you won't find many AAA-games that use a plain folder structure for their data is that they use custom optimized archive formats to get improved loading times. The downside is the decreased transparency and the additional required tools in the toolchain. However, for smaller, or 2D, games these two things are usually more worth than the improved loading time.

Just make sure that what the people see is not just a huge mess :) put the files into a proper folder structure.

Answer 2

In addition to other answers, two important concerns you should consider:

Spoiling surprises
Say I'm halfway through the game and discover the "video" folder. Curious, I click on one, and happen to see the final cutscene of the game.

Losing challenge
Same scenario, but I find the saved game format has a value for "gold". I change it from 250 to 999999999, and it works. Suddenly your carefully crafted difficulty curve, maximising the fun of the game, is gone.

Both could cause someone to lose interest in the game, partially if not entirely. This could end up in a lower overall impression of how good the game was (unfair but true).

Think about these in terms of your target audience - younger players especially are susceptible to spoiling their own fun without really understanding that this is what they are doing.

Even if you want to encourage modding, you might still want to protect users from ruining their own experience with the game "by accident".

Answer 3

Perhaps unprofessional is the wrong word. It really depends on the game whether or not leaving files exposed is a Bad Thing.

For a simple singleplayer game, players and modders will love you. You would be giving them the ability to easily change your game and do what they want. And keep in mind, there will always be modders for a game, no matter how small the game is. Many gamers will feel slighted if modding is difficult, after all, they bought your game and they should be able to do whatever they want in it.

On the other hand, easily editing game assets is bad for a multiplayer game, as it is considered cheating. Malicious players can replace content to make enemies more noticeable, walls transparent, etc. Although your game code should really enforce that assets haven't been tampered with, the "asset package" approach has the benefit of helping to deter this activity (security through obscurity).

Answer 4

There is an easy fix for it.. You could simply batch rename the extensions in a command prompt using something like

rename *.txt *.map

And then place them in a \map folder

You can access a command prompt from windows running cmd

This will not stop modders who know they want to mod the game and will leave a less sloppy impression on people who just want to play the game without all the content hanging around.

Yes, it will still be editable.. People will just be less likely to notice it.

To answer Eric Robertson's comment

If you wish to properly hide the content of your game from players you could use RSA encryption on those text files and merge them into one text file while you are at it. This should not be too much trouble although I suspect it is way beyond overdoing it.

Answer 5

If it ever was unprofessional, it may not be anymore. Early on games used their own package-formats, primarily to preserve their intellectual property (IP).

You can overcome some limitations such as fragmentation and unnecessary function-invocations of the underlying native file-system, by packing all resources into a single archive. This makes fragmentation events less likely when deploying the package on the client's PC.
In the worst case scenario you might end up having tiny individual file-resources scattered around your hard-disk sectors. (With the arrival of SSD's this point is often rendered moot)

But all of these benefits can also be had with the free, (Unix) age old .tararchive format.

Additionally, by using your own package-format, you can overcome limitations such as the lack of versioning, file-hashes, encoding and pointers/links within files, to name but a few.

Concluding, I would argue for transparency in Indie-development, unless you explicitly need to protect your IP.

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As for the great points raised by MGOwen: To prevent Spoiling surprises you can rename the file extension, change file attributes, use uncommon media formats, excise the media-header and store it elsewhere, etc... To prevent Losing challenge use a binary serialization writer to store your game's state, with additional encryption and decoy-variables if you must.

Disclaimer: I am not a game developer. Only regard this post as a starting point...

Answer 6

It's easy to fix & otherwise search indexing will find your finale videos, etc. So,

For data files: flip bits with xor

   realByte_cpp = readByte_cpp ^ 0x44; // xor

To hide "Gold: 250" from GREP.

Just encode with the same (random) xor value.

To keep scenes away from casual users, try this: Machinarium translated filenames so \videos became \0101 and all files then had an 8-binary-digit id followed by .101 to stop file associations.