Others Developing my own cheat tool

[neverending0]

Hi all,

Wanted to prefix this by saying that everyone here does really amazing work and I highly doubt I could spend the time to get into even half of a game. That being said, I wanted to get some quick pointers on hacking some of these games with hopes to sorta eventually reverse engineer a game and figure out how it all works. I could just sit here and open up Visual Studio or w/e we use for Unity games or read some of the RPGMaker code but honestly if I could get some pointers I'd be in a much better spot.

The two I want to target are Unity games and the RPGMaker version with the www folder (since that one's js based and I don't mind working with js). As a background, I work as a software engineer so I'm fairly decent at reading some of this but I've never really done game dev before so it's sorta a different world.

I noticed in Unity games people usually release cheats with an Assembly-CSharp.dll file. Do you normally decompile the one from the game and edit that, then build it into a dll? I'd imagine I could do something similar and do a diff between the game's dll and the cheat one and figure out what people add but just wanted to figure that one out.

And then for the RPGMaker games, would the first go at this one simply be to just create another canvas sort of thing that we can interact with? I guess all the games store things like items and weapons/armors in a similar area so you can just display all of these info and variables into the editor for display?

Again I'm a huge noob at game dev stuff but always found it interesting how people come out with cheat tools and the like so quickly. Sorry for all the dumb questions and all the rambling in this lol and if the answer is just to sit down and try developing a game myself I'll just have to find some time to do so.

 

[JakaiD]

Popular way to create cheats is via

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As for Unity, look into Unity Mod Manager

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It will also help if you can decompile the assemblies, via ex

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, to see what properties and methods exist so you know what to call or change values for from your "mod". Note that now that Unity has IL2CPP support there might be games that you can not decompile in this way.

 

[MLocke]

The tool dnSpyEx will let you easily make modifications to files like Assembly-CSharp DLL as long as the game code wasn't obfuscated. There are guides for this that are provided by script loaders like BepInEx.

RPGMaker has cheat tools that just edit variables. That's mostly how you cheat because it's like a save game editor, but you sometimes need a guide to explain how the game progresses as the variables are changed. The map files are usually included with the game, so you can just open them with map editor tools. Lots of the game logic is built into the map. This is more useful for fixing the bugs yourself if you really want to go that route.

You can go the Cheat Engine route, and that's more popular than you might think with people releasing cheat tables for many or most games. It gets more advanced when you try to change assembly code rather than just game variables and their values in memory. There are helpers like ones for mono used in Unity games that try to make it easier to make changes to field and methods by class name and variable name. This can get tedious like much of reverse engineering is at first, and anything you create might not last after game updates.

Finally, you really only need a story / script and art assets to make a game so your inquiry is not all that relevant to the core of game development. That is, engines like Ren'py will hold your hand as you try to put a basic game together. It only gets complicated when you are adding minigames, sandbox mode, or other custom features to your game.