Two things became apparent after I added high scores to Milpa: first, people are doing exceptionally well at the game. Second, the game is easy to hack. Check out those scores:

Several people were getting higher than Year 30, doubling my personal high score. I didn’t expect anyone to get that far. So, hey, you guys are awesome.

Second, the game scores are totally hackable. Year 88? No way. I took the precaution of encrypting scores before they are sent to the server, but that doesn’t stop something I knew nothing about: easy-to-use tools that can modify game memory during runtime. These tools allow you to find where a score is stored in memory and edit its value. One of these tools is called Cheat Engine.

There was a recent Digg article about hacking games where many of these tools were mentioned in the comments. People generally seemed enthusiastic about sharing different ways to cheat.

I downloaded Cheat Engine and within 5 minutes hacked Milpa. Watching the score jump from 1,000 to 100,000 felt like I had just won the lottery. It gives a sense of accomplishment, and a chance to show off to others. In a sense, it’s like playing a whole other game with a new set of rules and your own goals. So I can see why people do it.

I thought about leaving the hacked scores in and just watching to see what happens, but ultimately, that is not fair to the people who legitimately make high scores. So I did a couple things.

First, I made the game more difficult after Year 13. People getting to Year 36 is great, but at that point the game becomes a test of endurance rather than skill - playing one game must take longer than an hour, which is not at all what I intended. Because of this change, I deleted all scores higher than Year 13 so that all high scores represent the same difficulty level.

Second, the game now encrypts in-game memory. The game is still hackable, and always will be as long as the game logic exists on the client, but now hacking a score in the same manner won’t be possible. So if you want to hack, you’ve got a whole new set of rules to deal with.

Refresh the page to get the latest version of Milpa, and click the i button to make sure you’ve got version 1.2.1.

Milpa now has global high scores!

There are three lists: personal, recent, and all-time. The personal list shows the scores made on your computer. The recent list shows the top scores in the last 24 hours (although that duration will probably change), and the all-time list shows, well, the best scores ever. Enjoy!