I bought the game on Android and opened up the APK to poke around and see if I could kludge some steam mods (like “Learn by Doing”, which is basically just some javascript) into it. I don’t code and just have a crude understanding of all this.
Unlike how I vaguely remember the pc version being, game in the APK is a ton of files with gibberish names in some format that notepad can’t read. The game seems to run on Unity, and there’s some XML files that RareByte added to direct Unity to all the myriad files in unknown format. Couldn’t really find a place to inject a mod’s code into for even a crude homebrew. Even without the modding framework, I was hoping the core game files would be easy enough for a noob to monkey with like the game NEO Scavenger (which is largely xml and txt files on both android and PC), but oh well–it probably runs better as it is.
Anybody else have any experience to share on how it works?
Really? Now I am seeing that nearly all Indie Devs are making their games out of Unity. Could someone tell me whats so special about Unity? Because I still cannot even get passed with learning the Basics of C#, rahter, I’ll learn Python instead.
Just a guess. Imported assets are re-coded by Unity then compiles them to binary files(for optimization?) just like in your screenshot. Sure you can extract them but you still needs a decompiler to read them, not just the assets but the entire APK if you really want the game’s entire source code. And because decompilers doesn’t know what variable/method names RareByte used, decompilers uses different variable/method names(random letter or number?) which needs some mass refactoring. After editing, you still needs to compile it to an APK.
Also, maybe they use JSONserialization for the game’s save and settings files which can be used for modding too.
I don’t know tho . (It’s just me being safe, again)
Unity is easy and cheap to use but I wouldn’t call it powerful. Basically anyone even someone with no programming knowledge could make a PC game and get it on steam using Unity and the Unity asset store. That’s why steam is so full of horrible games, many that use the same visuals, maps, ai etc.
You can make an excellent well optimized game with unity but it requires actual programming knowledge along with real artists, and a sound team. Generally speaking for a 3d style game a single person can’t do all the work and that’s usually what we see in 99% of unity based games. It’s incredibly unfortunate and it gives good Unity developers a bad reputation.
You can literally go onto the unit asset store with $100 and buy the parts to build a complete “game” or you can use the free assets and do the same. Then add some trading cards, sell the same for a few bucks on steam and combined with the trading card market you might make a couple thousand in profit.
1 person could churn out 10 games a week if not more and make a killing. In fact they have been since the birth of steam green light. Valve has no incentive to stop it because they make profit off every game sale no matter how small as well as profit off every trading card sale.
It’s the user base of steam forcing valves hand to try and clean this mess up.
. (It’s just me being safe, again)