Prevent game time from being affected by system?

I’m thinking of a game where the player would need to wait for a certain amount of time for a process to complete (a few minutes or hours, perhaps). I’m wondering if there’s an offline way to prevent players from changing the system time in order to fool the game into thinking that the time has passed. The only method that I can think of is saving the latest time, and undoing some completed actions if the system goes ‘back in time’. However, the player would still be able to keep rolling their system forward in time to skip ahead in the game, as long as they didn’t set it back to real time again.
Is there a better way than this, that doesn’t involve connecting to a server? If not, is there some form of free and easy server system that can be used, or would I need to rent a server or set up my own? I’ve never worked with servers before, but I suppose it could be interesting. Thanks :slight_smile:

the only thing I can think of is creating a list of random samplings of times - so make your game every time it loads up add now to a list - if you ever detect a time out of sequence, you’ll know they are messing around with the clock.

i.e. they might bump it forward to get something from your game - but then they will set it back because they will need to eventually probably, then if they load your game you have times out of sequence

firebase is googles cloud platform you could also use, gameDNA has a plugin coming soon for it if you wanted to use cloud - but then you punish people with no internet

Thanks :slight_smile: Yes, it would be nice for offline play to be available.

this is a tough one, i know people were hacking phones for the gps with the pokemon go thing, maybe you could find out how they dealt with that

another problem you will face is, what if users do mess with it - what are going to do? punish them/delete their save games? cuz I know what they will do after that, give you a 1 star rating and say your game is broken :smiley: also it will give incentive for someone to crack your game

let the cheaters cheat, maybe just don’t post scores to your scoreboards if suspect data is detected

Indeed… Thanks for the advice :slight_smile: