Does anyone know any approaches to release a "timed demo" with Godot?

[brazen radish]

Working on my first game here, so sorry in advance if I'm overlooking anything obvious.

I'm considering releasing a "timed demo" of my game -- that is, a build of the game that becomes unplayable after a period time.

In my case, because the game itself is pretty simple, it's going to be just a release of the whole game. The purpose of it would be to 1) Give the player a taste of the game, 2) Assure that the product works as expected for them.

After a set time, the demo "expires" and the game becomes unplayable.

Has anyone done something like this, or familiar with any approaches?

I'm particularly looking for approaches that don't rely on a remote service.

Does anyone know any approaches to release a "timed demo" with Godot?

[acoustic furnace]

Well there is Time class in Godot https://docs.godotengine.org/en/stable/classes/class_time.html, you can get the current date and do whatever on some condition

[brazen radish]

Yeah. I guess the question is how to persist the time played in a way that cannot be circumvented by an end user. Maybe by putting it into an encrypted config?

[lapis cradle]

A config file could be erased/replaced repeatedly. There's not really a way to save data that isn't vulnerable to user manipulation, unless you require them to be online to play. Rather, I'd recommend simply limiting the amount of content that you include in the demo-they can't play past the limit if they don't have that data.

[acoustic furnace]

Steam allows you to stop/limit availability of demos, but yes every solution would require some form of online checking. Otherwise just ask system time and stop caring about people trying to circumvent demo time limit(so what?)

[brazen radish]

Yeah, that's true. Okay, was just wondering if there was a way to do it, but I guess the answer is to just stop worrying and learn to love the bomb 🙂 My game is too simple to "gate content", so I perhaps the best things is to just put in place a little check and if people are going to go through the trouble of breaking it, then fine.

Or just not do a timed demo and try to have an acceptable price.