Protecting Your Alpha, Early Access & Side Content
It’s an inevitable part of making an interactive fiction game that someone will, at some point, leak your in-progress work.
This sucks. It will feel personal. It will hurt. It’s not a great feeling knowing that something you’ve spent years creating, something that you’ve put your sweat, blood, and tears into is essentially being pirated. Developing an IF is demanding, to the point where many games cannot get off the ground if the author does not have enough funding to make ends meet. This is a full time job to many of us and we are dependent on Patreon and Ko-fi as platforms to make a living. Part of running a platform like that is offering exclusive paid-for content, often in the form of alpha builds, early access, NSFW content, and side stories.
IF developers are not massive companies with billions of dollars to throw around. We are independent authors, often working alone, often just scraping by, making games that will eventually be fairly low cost to purchase or completely free. Unfortunately, some players are entitled enough to believe they deserve access to free alpha or side story content at no cost to them simply because they want it and they want it now.
These people are assholes. And, quite frankly, fuck them.
If you’re an independent IF developer making your game in Twine and releasing on itch.io, here’s a few strategies to help keep your private content private.
1) Keep Your Public and Private Builds Separate
If you have exclusive content, upload it as a separate copy of the game. Do not put alpha content in the public build of your game. Anything that is in the HTML file can be easily accessed through the browser.
When your game launches, it loads through the iframe, which will display all of the content included in in your game file. This includes your JavaScript, your stylesheet, and the contents of every passage, including ones locked behind a password. Even if you’ve password-protected sections of your game directly in Twine using something like HiEv’s Simple Password Hiding, it can still be easily bypassed if it’s part of the public build’s files.
A solution to this is to make different builds depending on your needs. When you upload content to itch, set your builds that are not intended for public access to Restricted mode.
This will block the project’s page from being viewed by anyone who does not have the password. You can then input a password for your patrons and supporters, which will be properly encrypted by itch.
Restricted mode will prevent your game from showing up in search results and it will also not display on your profile.
In my case, I have three builds for Wayfarer:
The top one is the public build, which anyone can access. The Playtester and Alpha builds are both in password-protected Restricted modes.
When I do my updates, I compile each build separately (I am usually changing version numbers and a few different things between them, so they contain slightly different information), treat them like three different games, and make three separate ZIP files for upload.
2) Do Not Use Draft Mode to Share Content
Draft mode is another private mode on itch.io. It is intended to be a draft of your game page, so you can get all your information, assets and files together before you hit publish. When your project is in Draft mode, it is unsearchable and no one can access it except those with Editor permissions. However, Draft mode comes with something called a “secret URL”, which bypasses the restrictions. Anyone with the URL can access the game page.
Do not use the secret URL to share alpha or exclusive content. Because anyone with the URL can access the game page, it is essentially a public link. Secret URLs should never be handed to patrons or even your playtesting team. Only use it for situations where you need a second opinion from trusted individuals.
3) Change Your Passwords Regularly
Passwords can still be shared, so it’s a good idea to change them regularly on a monthly or bi-monthly schedule.
If you run a Patreon, keep a pinned post at the top of your Patreon that has all your current build details, the link to your alpha build (or side content) and its current password. This way it is easy for your patrons to find the access information, as well as any patch notes or game updates they may have missed.
Alternatively, if you don’t want to use passwords, you can integrate your itch.io and Patreon accounts and give out access keys to your patrons. Download keys grant permanent access to the restricted project’s page, content, and files. Download keys are associated with a single itch.io account and cannot be shared.
Information about download keys is found under Edit game -> Distribute -> Download keys. You can create keys manually, or configure your settings to generate bulk keys for your patrons based on their tier level.
However, if you do decide to go this route, you may run into difficulties if your Patreon is in a different currency than your itch.io currency. (I ended up removing the integration as the troubleshooting was too time consuming to deal with on a month-to-month basis.)
These preventative measures are not guaranteed to work 100% of the time, but it should help discourage easy access to exclusive content. There is always the risk that your patrons and playtesters may abuse their privileges and share links and passwords. Ultimately, if someone wants to pirate the alpha build of your game, they will.
This is where the community comes in. If you are a player, discourage piracy where you can. If an IF dev is trusting you—whether you are a playtester or a patron—with early access, keep it to yourself. Don’t share links, keys, or passwords.
Even if you desperately want access to alpha work and can’t afford it, please keep in mind that IF developers are indie creators struggling to make a living. We are not major game studios. Don’t steal our work and pass it around. It’s disrespectful to us, our games, and our communities.
You are not entitled to early access simply because you like the game and you want new content badly enough.
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