#This wasn't sparked because of thievery in the fandev community I just want to highlight how easy it is to bury tiny watermarks in a game

[pokemonfangame]

For no particular reason, here's a quick sample of how easy it can be to leave watermarks and signatures in your game, featuring Pokemon Essentials.

I'm assuming most people here are players, not developers, so here's a look at a script:

All those green lines that start with a '#'? Those are comments written in plain English because the computer won't read them while running the code. You can use comments to write literally anything, anywhere in the scripts.

There's like a hundred scripts in Essentials, with hundreds of lines of code in them.

That's back end stuff though, and not every developer is going to edit it. What about the front end of the game? Oh look, super easy to leave comments there as well, in literally any event.

Comments are really obvious though, so if someone was say, trying to take and repost a game as their own they might be savvy enough to remove all comments. Is there any other way to hide like signatures and watermarks?

Oh you bet. Here's something I added as a personal joke for anyone looking into how I built my game:

It's an entire setup for an encounter with Xerneas, with everything defined as it should be...at a glance. But the highlighted line "Exit Event Processing" makes it so nothing below it runs during gameplay. There's no good reason all the lines below should even exist, except as a tease for people who are looking at the code.

One last thing, what if we really want to bury a needle in a haystack? Well outside of the Essentials engine and all it's scripts and codes there's also dozens of plain text files, with massive amounts of information.

Here I chose to make it so that a Caterpie can evolve into Mewtwo if it's already level 95 and then gets leveled up at night. That would actually have an effect in-game. Can you imagine though, that anyone would notice if I changed something like the height or weight by just one number? If I made it the Wormy Pokemon instead of the Worm? And if I made changes that tiny across many many Pokemon? No one would have the time to fact check that for 1000 Pokemon. My tiny changes would absolutely be overlooked, and yet changes that tiny and meaningless could only have been made intentionally, not duplicated by accident.