How to collaborate in a safe way

Hello,

I am working on a mobile game in Unity and as of now I am the only one who has the project on his device. But I need a lot of help as I get stuck very often with the coding, therefore I work together with a freelancer. I start a Zoom meeting and share my screen and than ask for help (while sharing my screen).

I don't want to share my project with complete strangers (freelancers), but I also need their help to continue on my project.

So I was wondering if there is a way to share the project without them having all the files/code???

What I am afraid of is plagiarism, I don't want them to change my project a little and upload it in the Play Store / App Store as their own game... I know this might sound silly,,, but if you work with a freelancer that lives on the other side of the planet, what holds them back?

Is there a very safe way to collaborate with others, without them getting access to all the code???

Kind regards,
Monir

 

You shouldn't be.

I work on ProTiler which I plan to release on the Asset Store later this year. I have the entire project on GitHub publicly. If there are rip-offs, I'll deal with them. It's not that bad, after all, if it's a definitive rip-off you can issue a take-down with the store you are publishing to.

For a game specifically, let's be realistic. If you can make $10,000 in the first year it's called a success. Someone else puts a rip-off of your game on the store, they may not even get nearly as close and since the market is so big, they won't actually be competing with yours - it's just going to be one among tens of thousands. Devs who do publish illegal rip-offs will release full of bugs, half-finished features, terrible design rework and all that. I wouldn't be afraid of that. Take advantage of it! It's been done before.

Example: Big company Z publishes a shameless copy of the same game mechanics of a popular indie game, basically just replacing all assets and re-engineering the code on their own. It was totally legal. Indie dev got good rep from that and probably lots of extra sales too. Of course, the Z game sold 1,000 times more ... they have a much bigger marketing budget. But the indie dev actually profited from that too. I'd say it was a win-win for both, except working for that company ... I would say they probably haven't been hiring the best of the best.

In any case: no, you cannot share code in a "safe" way the same way you cannot share a digital manuscript of your next book in a safe way. It is digital content. In order to work on it, you have to have it on your computer. If you don't have everything, chances are you cannot work with it at all. At best, you could replace all assets with dummies but that may still prove difficult for the freelancer.

Also, freelancers that you pay for have something to lose too: trust. If you cannot trust them to begin with, you're probably hiring the ones who work for $20 per hour.