LÖVE

i'm probably more afraid of people stealing my (simple) game than i should be...

yes they can, all they have to do is replace the extension with .zip

you can make it into an exe and i think that will prevent people from viewing the source code

It will not. Method of extraction stays the same.

Nixola wrote:It will not. Method of extraction stays the same.

you can use some sort of exe obfuscator then

Not sure if that will work either. Most likely won't.

No one wants your code specifically, and if they like your game enough to copy it, then they will, with or without source access.
It's usually not their goal to make a 1:1 carbon copy (with the exception of creating remakes when the original is not supported anymore on modern systems without some emulation software, or not even with that) because that's pointless.

If you for some reason really don't want people to be able to see what your code is doing, then Löve is certainly not a good tool for you. But I can't imagine any other game creation tools being significantly better.

If you really don't want people to know what your code does, the problem you face is of the kind "I want to tell the person's computer what to do, but the person itself can't know despite being in full control of the computer". You can certainly make the code less readable in some ways, but even compiling into binaries doesn't prevent people from figuring out what it does and modifying it if they want to.

If you've got sensitive code that you absolutely cannot let people have (like for legal reasons) you can run that off a server that the game can communicate with. But that doesn't look like the problem at hand here.

But I can't imagine any other game creation tools being significantly better.

Maybe BlitzMax, since that is a full compiler, but yet an easy language. Works great on Mac and Windows, but unfortunately Linux is its achilles heel (and that was for me a reason to try Love).

but even compiling into binaries doesn't prevent people from figuring out what it does and modifying it if they want to.

Yeah, me being a kid in the 80s, I know all about it. Whatever companies came up with to prevent illegal copying through copy-protections, they were always cracked in a matter of weeks. But it least it's something.

f you've got sensitive code that you absolutely cannot let people have (like for legal reasons) you can run that off a server that the game can communicate with.

Well, that is where I personally got my own problem. I am basically an open-source developer (my first love project will be released under the terms of the GPL), however, I make most of my games able to contact the GameJolt API and with love not being to obfuscate code I'm basically forced to expose all the security codes I have to enter in GameJolt. In BlitzMax, as a compiler based language I could always keep that part closed-sourced (of course I know it can still be cracked, but I doubt people will go to the through to disassemble a game and puzzle everything out, as can be quite a hassle).

It's usually not their goal to make a 1:1 carbon copy

Well people "childish" enough to do it, will do that anyway. Having the source or not having it.

(with the exception of creating remakes when the original is not supported anymore on modern systems without some emulation software, or not even with that) because that's pointless.

Actually with some of my games (not all of them) I guess I would even encourage that (as long as I am credited as the original developer). It keeps the concept I came up with alive.
And I guess that kind of approach is normally best done by recoding a game from scratch without the original code, since programming languages of the future will support things unthinkable today, and some things used today might be deprecated/removed in the future.