I’m sorry to write a whole post that’s just correcting you, but since this is the Ask Ryan thread I think I should clarify some things. And I’m sure everybody will be fascinated to read my further thoughts on this subject. We can even construe your post as a series of questions, if we append “, am I right?” to certain key sentences.
And so I will answer those questions.
One of the reasons you’re experimenting with unannounced date-locked content is to foil efforts at strip-mining a game of all its endings, collectibles, and Easter eggs, right?
I don’t think this is exactly my reasoning, at least not consciously or directly. The main reason is kind of adjacent to or upstream from my feelings about that completionist attitude: I feel like I’ve written a lot of games that you can finish in 60 or 30 minutes and then forget about. So in recent years I’ve been trying to create longer-lasting experiences that lend themselves to a longer arc of emotional investment. (Put another way, I want to remake Animal Crossing.) But maybe this is all a different way to say what you’ve just said. So, yes, you’re right.
The exclusive hosting of both Ryan Veeder’s Authentic Fly Fishing and Ryan Veeder’s Bram Stoker’s The Dracula Files , beyond driving traffic to your website and preventing the proliferation of disparate versions of the same game, helps discourage folks from decompiling the game, right?
The hosting thing is really more about the specific requirements of the games in question than anything else. If I could make RVAFF (or, more recently and more intractably, Even Some More Tales from Castle Balderstone) work properly offline, I would make them downloadable.
Unfortunately I don’t think their position as browser games makes them all that much more difficult to decompile.
You could update an online-only game to render people’s walkthroughs incomplete, right?
That would be so mean! And so much work!
I guess if someone really did post a complete walkthrough that exposed every single secret and fun thing in RVAFF, I’d feel justified in adding some more material just for the sake of creating more discoveries, if I had time. (Although I could just do that whenever I wanted, if I had time.) But nobody is out there writing walkthroughs of my games that spoil 100% of the secrets, which is nice.
I was just reminded of this PDF.
As opposed as I am in principle to behaviors like decompiling and over-walkthroughing, in practice I can only expend so much time and energy to discourage them. I kind of have to decide on a secret-by-secret basis what level of obfuscation is justified in a given situation. Sometimes I just have to tell myself I’m okay with people choosing to ruin things for themselves.
(If you’re reading this and you have a tendency to decompile games I made just because you got stuck: Please cut that out. Just ask me for help. I clearly have plenty of free time.)
But, I think I already said something like this, for the core concept of a project I’m passionate about, I’m willing to expend any amount of time or energy. And maybe I’m attracted to concepts that imply an amount of unspoilableness. So, yes, you’re right.