New School Blues Dev. Diary #23: Packaging Part 2

Making sure that New School Blues is ready for approval by a web portal demands a few steps that may differ according to the website in question.  While many sites we looked into have similar processes of submission we should stress that we haven’t seen them all and things could be handled differently in different places.

That being said, there are two major steps that YoyoBolo is doing to get NSB ready for submission.  The first is to add a line of code from the hosting site to our code.  This authenticates the game, and makes sure that not just anyone is uploading it.  Next we upload the game to them.  Since we’re using Flash, it’ll be in a swf format.  Just before that though, the swf needs to undergo a process called obfuscation.

Obfuscation of code basically means we take our original code and encrypt it (encode or mix it around) so that it’s hard for people to look at it later, figure out, and/or reverse engineer.  This basically makes it more secure and less likely for people to mess around with.  Many obfuscation tools are free and readily available.

It’s important to remember though that obfuscation doesn’t make the swf impossible to crack, just more difficult.  Luckily since the game is being hosted and distributed by a web portal they have their own added encryption tools, so we get double the protection!