Updates

I haven't put anything here in a long time, but I'd really like to start using this space more often as a place to put my thoughts and such.

I might as well write about what I've been doing while I haven't been updating. Recently I've been working on trying to reverse engineer a couple of Unity + Fungus based visual novel apps for Android, The Arcana and Fictif. (Some of my 3DS themes are based off characters from these games!) Unfortunately the apps were bought out by a sort of scummy company after the original developer company fell through, and I don't trust this new company to keep the apps running for very long. Besides, no company lasts forever, so in the name of game preservation, I'm trying my hand at reverse engineering.

The games' scripts are protected with il2cpp though, which makes doing so difficult. On the plus side, it seems like all of the dialogue tree information is stored in Monobehavior assets, rather than the scripts themselves. I still need to figure out the scripts for things like dailies, but worse comes to worst I can recreate the visual novel part of the game pretty easily in Unity + Fungus using this information.

To be honest, I'm kind of procrastinating on trying to figure out how to unpack the scripts. It's very daunting, and I'm not sure my technical knowledge is quite enough to do it properly. What I've been spending my time on in the meantime is just following the dialogue trees and writing down what's in them so that I can potentially use the information to rebuild the game later. I've been learning a lot of things about how the games work, and what choices affect which outcomes in the games, and it's very interesting!

The closest I've come so far to actually getting the scripts decompiled from il2cpp tho is using a kind of sketchy program that I only feel comfortable running in a VM. It seems to work... a little bit. I have managed to get (incomplete) scripts out of the games using this program, but the program makes my VM's Windows Defender freak out. I have to delete and reinstall my VM instance pretty much every time I want to use the program again, because if I try to run the program more than once, Windows Defender will delete the program (and even if I turn it off, it will turn itself back on just to delete it) But during the one chance at running it per VM instance that I have, it does give me a lot of information from the scripts, if not everything.

I'll figure it out eventually, I hope. I don't really know what I'm doing, but I'm very determined. That has to count for something, right?