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Keeping your Audience safe

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Keeping your Audience safe

There is nothing worse than spending months cultivating a relationship with your ideal game audience, only to have it taken away in seconds by hackers. This happened to a friend of mine the other day. The hacker spammed every discord server they were a member of. This caused the servers to ban my friends account. Fortunately, after regaining control of the account, they were able to explain to the Admins of the groups what had happen, and were unbanned from most if not all of the servers. Not all such stories have a happy ending however. Let me show you some effective ways of keeping your audience safe.

The best ways of keeping your audience safe online include using strong passwords and not sharing your password with people. Get to know which admin tools your chosen platforms use to help maintain your audience. Things like 2FA, Questions on joining, and moderation tools. It is also important to be careful about clicking links in emails and other messages.

Online Safety 101

It’s best to start from the basics. I know most of you will already be aware of most of these, but I am listing them for two reasons. Firstly, for the few out there who aren’t aware of these important safety tips. And secondly, because you can never be reminded too many times! 🙂

Being aware of the risks which are present while engaging in online activity, especially on social media, is a big step in keeping yourself safe. Knowing what to look out for is important.

Passwords

Whenever you create a new social media account, always remember to use a unique and strong password for it. Regardless of how easy it is to just use one password for everything, from a remembering point of view. If you your password is compromised, then you risk hackers gaining access to everything you use that email/password combination.

A three panel comic about a man choosing an obvious password

My favourite is Strong Password Generator, which I have been using for a good few years. I keep a file of the generated passwords for safe keeping, as well using the Save Username and Passwords option in my browser.

A good strong password should be between 10 to 16 characters long, and consist of a random string of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and characters.

Do not share your passwords with anyone.

Two Factor Authentication

Two Factor Authentication (Or TFA) is a system where you are asked for a second set of user verification data. This is usually a code which is sent via email or text message, or using a third party authenticator application like Facebook and Google do, or sometimes a specific hardware key like a USB stick or a Card/Pin card verifier.

I’m not sure if favourite is the right word to describe 2FA methods, but the one which feels like it balances security with ease of access is when the platform you are logging into texts a code to your mobile phone.

Two-factor Authentication – It’s a pain, but it really helps.

Admin tools for keeping your audience safe

Wherever you are trying to build your audience, there are usually some security methods you can put into place to help keep your audience safe, and to help weed out the undesirables who may try to infiltrate your audience.

As your audience grows, as does the risk of bots or spammers gaining access and using your platform to spread their message. This could expose your audience to links to malware or unrelated content. As well as tarnish you or your brands reputation.

If you are growing your audience as members on a WordPress site or Forum or something similar, then you can usually implement some form of Two Factor Authentication and email verification as well.

You can ensure new members to a Facebook Group answer a set of questions before being allowed to join. And Facebook has a reasonable suite of tools to allow you to block unwanted users and delete comments.

Some platforms offer Post moderation. Which is where users posts have to be cleared by an administrator. This allows you to keep an eye on what new members particularly are posting.

A set of community rules is an often overlooked but surprisingly useful tool. The rules should be clearly posted for all to read, and they should be enforced.

Phishing

Possibly the single biggest risk to your passwords and social media accounts these days.

For those who don’t know, phishing is the practice of sending emails or messages which claim to be from an official or reputable company in order to extract information from a person which can be used to compromise the security of online accounts.

Sometimes these phishing emails are obviously fake. Littered with spelling mistakes, or using an older logo or that sort of thing. But occasionally, the quality is much better.

The best way I have found to check the validity of emails is to check any links included in the text.

On a phone (Both Android and Apple) long pressing on a link will open up a dialogue which shows you where the link goes.

On a PC, you can hover the mouse over a link. This will display the actual destination on screen.

If this is different to the where the button or link suggests this is a huge red flag.

If in doubt – DO NOT CLICK!

Other tips for keeping safe

More than one admin/moderator

It’s usually a good idea to find at least one other trusted person to be a moderator for your audience. Especially if you tend to fall foul of the rules, and end up serving 30 days in FB jail.

But be wary, a rogue moderator can be as damaging as a hacker or spammer.

A while back now, one of the groups I am a member of on Facebook had an admin have a bit of a break down. They went and deleted over half of the groups members before someone else on the admin team noticed.

Check your email address!

All the work you have put in keeping your audience safe could be in vain if the email address you are using has been already compromised by hackers. It’s always a good idea to check any email addresses associated with the project. You can do this for free at https://haveIbeenPwned.com.

Conclusion

Hopefully that covers just about everything. Creating an audience is a labour of love. To lose it in seconds thanks to a hacker does not bear thinking about.

I’ve covered all the main areas dealing with audience security

That is just about everything I can think of for now. It should give you a thorough grounding in how to keep your audience safe. If you have any further questions then feel free to get in touch.

How to record video of your game

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How to record video of your game

I was sat browsing through some game development groups on Facebook the other day (as I often do, lol), when I noticed that a friend of mine had shared a video of the game he was working on.  I couldn’t help but notice that the video had been recorded using a mobile phone held in one hand whilst playing the game with the other.  As you can imagine the video was shaky and really didn’t do justice to the game, so I’m writing this guide not only to help my buddy, but for anyone else out there who wants to record video of your game for free and with brilliant results.

There are several ways to record video of your game from a PC.  Depending on your operating system, both Windows and Mac have built in ways to record the screen with a few keyboard shortcuts.  There are also several programs, both free and paid for, available for all platforms.  In this tutorial I will be showing you how to capture video and sound using OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) which is available for free from https://obsproject.com/

Configure OBS

Once you have downloaded and installed OBS, and run the Auto configure wizard, then it’s time to get started configuring OBS to record game play from your game.

The OBS scenes panel in the bottom left of the screen is highlighted.

In the Scenes panel, press the + icon in the bottom left hand panel to create a “scene”.  The scene can contain specific video and audio inputs, allowing you to switch between them whenever you want.  However to record video from your game we only need the one scene.

A dialogue box in OBS asking for a scene name.

Enter a name for your scene in the dialogue, and press ok.  Your new scene should appear in the list in the scenes panel.  You can switch between scenes by clicking on their name.

Next comes adding the video and audio sources to the scene.

Add a video source

Locate the sources panel, which is usually next to the scenes panel in the bottom left of the screen.  Then press the + icon to bring up the list of available sources.

The OBS Sources menu is highlighted in this image.

Now depending on how your game works, you have a choice to make here.  For Flappy-vaders, which runs in windowed mode, I selected Window Capture from the menu.  But if your game runs full screen and not in a window, then the Display Capture is the one that you will want to select.

If you do choose Display Capture then please be aware that the next paragraph or two might be slightly different for you.

Select Create New from the next dialogue and give your source a name before pressing ok and moving on to the next bit.  I simply called it Window Capture, but you can call it whatever is most helpful to you.

Adding a new source in OBS

The next dialogue lets you choose which window you are capturing from, as well settings such as whether or not you want the mouse pointer recorded.

I left everything as it was and pressed ok.

You can return to this dialogue by right clicking on the name of the source in the sources panel, and then selecting properties from the menu which appears.

The next job was to stretch the video so that it takes up the entire space available.  This was a simple case of dragging the bottom right corner handle of the video.

Add an audio source

Adding an audio source in OBS

Once again press the + icon in the Sources panel, and this time select Audio Output Capture from the menu.

Give it a name in the next dialogue box.  I somewhat unimaginatively called in Audio Output Capture.

Naming a new audio source in OBS

The next dialogue allows you to select which audio device you want to use.  I left this on default as it was fine for this tutorial, then pressed ok to move on.

Record video from your game

Start to record video footage from your game using OBS

Now that OBS is configured to record your game, it’s time to run your game, hit the Start recording button, and record some game footage!

OBS will keep recording until you press the Stop recording button, which replaces the Start recording button.  When it has stopped, it saves the video to the format and location specified in the settings dialogue, which is located by pressing File -> Settings.

Hints on recording better gameplay

  • Record a few seconds of footage before interacting with your game, this makes it easier to cut or mix your video.
  • Hide the mouse pointer unless it is really important to your game.
  • Record much more video than you need, and edit it to be more interesting or better demonstrate your game afterwards.

Conclusion

I hope by now you have a better idea on how to record video of your game using your computer.  If you have any further questions about this then feel free to ask in the forum, or even just drop me an email or instant message.

The next thing I can recommend would be to download a Video editing program such as DaVinci Resolve or Hitfilm Express, which allows you to edit the videos you recorded with OBS and add post production effects and voice overs etc.