In my experience developing flash games saving progress has always been an issue. Local shared objects as well as other cookie systems are disabled by many users and relying on a hard codded external server is problematic.
So I decided to try something else. A game I'm working on supports the use of local shared objects as well as save game codes to store progress. At first I used human readable text for save game codes, but this would lead to players editing basic values such the furthest level they've unlocked. So I devised a simple encoding scheme for these save codes.
So to test whether or not my encoding scheme is sufficiently advanced. I have asked you to try to crack the code.
All white spaced is used. The braces are merely used to represent the start and end of the code and have no use in the encoding scheme. The code translates to a human readable save file.
I have to say, I'm not much of a decoder myself. Seeing this would probably stop me from editing - if I did at all, since it usually takes away the fun
But if I really wanted to crack it, I'd compare two or more versions to eachother. That way the changing values become apparent, and the code you used is much easier to crack.
(to counter this, I suppose you could rotate the values as in use the first encoded entry to specify where each values resides, or you could write multiple encodings, or a combination. Just saying... There's an almost unlimited amount of time you can spend at creating better encrypted savefiles )
I'm also not much for breaking codes. But if I were playing the game and could get a few of the save codes after changing things in game I could probably figure it out. That being said, I think your encryption is just fine. Unless players stand to either make money of winning your game, or access sponsor-site only items from a version that isn't hosted on the sponsor's site you don't need to worry about it. By setting up the encryption you have you're stopping those who either don't know how to decode it or don't care to try. You could waste an infinite amount of time trying to hack-proof the save codes and chances are someone's going to figure it out eventually. So at this point I'd think you're better off investing your time in further developing the game.
