Plans regarding modding ?

[Muscarine]

Hello, i'm really liking the game so far, exactly my kind of jam and that makes me consider modding for it.

One thing that brushes me off a bit are the character animations (main menu, character menu, pretty stiff and clunky loops), i'm taking it you used Unity Animator (or Spine ?), but as far as i can tell you packed animations behind .ddl so tough chance if i want to give it a go.
Would you consider opening the source files in the future with mod support ?

On top of it i'm wondering if there's a possibility you would extend mod support as far as to allow user generated playable characters and enemies, and animated characters during dialogues.

Either way, thanks for your work ~

[nekoworkshop]

I asked the same question in Discord but haven't got a response yet. One thing for sure is the devs specifically put in effort to encrypt the assembly file. This is pretty rare as many Unity games do not officially supports modding but they don't go out of their way to prevent modding either.

Not saying the encryption is unbreakable I don't think it's worth anyone's time looking into it when the dev themselves have made it clear that they do not want us to touch their code. C# modding is a dead end.

The catch is the game actually uses Lua for scripting. Then again, the scripts are packaged and likely encrypted as well.

[Muscarine]

I can't talk for the code portion of the game but it's pretty easy to extract the .assets sources and it happens they're using Dragonbone (for the animated characters portraits and main screen) which is a free but lesser alternative to Spine

I could technically redo the animations and overwrite the skeletons assuming i keep the nomenclature and atlas dimensions intact there's a chance it'd be enough to swap

As a side note i'm pretty sure they didn't mesh their assets, or basic square 4 vertices at best so making skins overrides like.... a nude mod... is super easy

Since they don't answer i'm assuming that's because they're not comfortable with user generated content, so i'm not sure it's worth spending my time over it
Which is kind of a bummer from my perspective because the cheap animations really don't honor the sweet character designs

[nekoworkshop]

I actually have never looked into Unity modding by directly modifying the asset bundles. Sounds fun though. I might give it a shot.

Anyway the dev kindly answered my question regarding modding in Discord.

They wanted to implement some modding support but they don't really have the time at the moment, especially considering it's a 3-men team with no prior experience of modding support. They would have to do some exploration first, which will take some time.

On the technical side, they have confirmed almost all of the game logic is implemented in Lua. Depending on whether they are shipping the encrypted source files or compiled bytecodes, the difficulty of modding without official support can vary between "very tricky" to "impossible".

Kind of a bummer but I respect their decision and transparency on this. I sincerely hope one day they eventually find some ways to implement modding support.

[Muscarine]

Yea it's fine it's their choice

It's just not often you get an obviously moddable, good looking 2D game; and they're a lot more fun to work on than 3D, at least to me

Will see

[dgresevfan]

Can someone make a mod to unlock all characters by default? Because the Raksa boss is complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and I'm getting very frustrated not being able to unlock Tindra.

[nekoworkshop]

Originally posted by dgresevfan:

Can someone make a mod to unlock all characters by default? Because the Raksa boss is complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ and I'm getting very frustrated not being able to unlock Tindra.

I was on the verge of leaving some salty negative review due to the final boss but I eventually pushed through. I can definitely feel your pain.

Some random advice from a scrub:

1. Play in easy mode. I did that and I feel absolutely no shame about it because I wanted to unlock Tindra as soon as possible as well. You can always set it back to normal after you have unlocked everything you want.

2. The girl starts with sword and shield is probably the easiest one. Her innate flat damage reduction also works very well with the reduced enemy damage in easy mode.

3. Grind some souls and unlock some skill and facilities. You'll need every edge you can get.

4. Some random tips for the final boss.

4.1 Stay at medium range against him is dangerous due to how long his attack range is so when you disengage, make sure you run far enough from him.

4.2 His only threatening attack at close range is the bash. I know it's kind of a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ attack that has almost no wind-up and staggers but it's not unbeatable. Find a rhythm. Dash in when you have an opening (when he do the three swing combo or the smash shockwave thingy), punish, then dodge or parry his bash. After this either disengage (make sure you open up enough distance ), or stay close to him for more chance (a bit risky).

5 At the end of the day, the game is still about maximizing your chance of winning so try to approach it with a mindset of optimization. Try not to lose health and shield when you deal with the mobs. Try get the most value of the health/shield/mana drops.(Use your skill to heal up before picking up all the mana orbs, etc) Try stock up useful item before you challenge the boss. Try spend your gold, keys and material wisely.

[dgresevfan]

Never mind, somehow I managed to kill the Raksa and this time it didn't seem hard. Maybe they patched him.

The new problem I'm having is that Tindra is... bad.

Probably gets a lot better with upgrades but at the moment... Why the hell do you need to charge your gun to shoot? Keep it loaded and pull the trigger for an instant shot. A pause afterwards to reload would make sense. Reloading just before shooting is crazy.

After you unlock her you start seeing enemies who also have firearms and they shoot faster than she does!

[Muscarine]

95% of the game difficulty is tied to grind, the remaining comes from dubious hitboxes/patterns/tells/timings in certain bosses sequences which usually force you in a pretty boring poke and run loop.

If you can't beat a boss yet chances are you need to fail a few more runs to unlock more skills and relics.

Took me around 12 hours to beat my first playthrough which is probably slow to some better players but i get the feeling that's around the average.

[xebecnan]

Thank you for your interest in this game!

We'd like to support modding, but we haven't done it before, and still trying to figure out what's the best way to do it.
Another problem is that we are a small team of 3 people including only 1 programmer, thus we don't have much energy spending on it for now.

I don't think change c# assembly directly is a good idea, the main logic is implemented in Lua, only fundamental facilities are implemented in C#.
We've considered just release the game un-encrypted, even with some source code, but we still have some concerns, cause that we're a small team and we don't have many methods to protect us from some "bad" things.

I thought that maybe we could provide some API to support the modding in the future, but still need much work to figure out the details.

If anything we can do to make modding easier, just tell us and we'll look into it. (^^ゞ

[Muscarine]

Originally posted by xebecnan:

Thank you for your interest in this game!

We'd like to support modding, but we haven't done it before, and still trying to figure out what's the best way to do it.
Another problem is that we are a small team of 3 people including only 1 programmer, thus we don't have much energy spending on it for now.

I don't think change c# assembly directly is a good idea, the main logic is implemented in Lua, only fundamental facilities are implemented in C#.
We've considered just release the game un-encrypted, even with some source code, but we still have some concerns, cause that we're a small team and we don't have many methods to protect us from some "bad" things.

I thought that maybe we could provide some API to support the modding in the future, but still need much work to figure out the details.

If anything we can do to make modding easier, just tell us and we'll look into it. (^^ゞ

Thank you

I'm personally not a coder, i'm a game artist and what you're doing with Raksasi is right up my alley
I was looking into reworking the current characters' animations, replacing them, or even further down the line adding new custom characters

Technically it's still possible with some trial and error if i manage to replicate what you did with the existing ones, but for sure if you happened to open the files it would be a whole lot simpler
Swapping assets is easy enough, but reverse engineering your skeleton datas is a different matter

If you take a look at how Red Hook handled their mod support with Darkest Dungeon, they basically opened everything, which made modding flourish
People can still bypass files encryption, it only makes it a lot more difficult and less welcoming to modders

Opening the files would also mean we can upload only the files required for the mod to work, whereas in the current state it requires overwriting a whole .asset file even if it's just for a single asset swap
Which also removes the possibility to use multiple mods at once
(Or we would require some kind of injector which i'm not personally able to create)

But i completely understand if you don't feel comfortable doing so, it's your hard work

Cheers

[nekoworkshop]

I'm no stranger to poking and modding Unity games and Raksasi is literally the first Unity game I' ve seen where the devs go out of their way to prevent reverse engineering and modding. It's even funnier considering this is not even an online game.

I don't think it would be respectful for me to try to convince them to open up the script files since this is their game after all but still, it's a loss-loss situation for players, modders and the devs.

[xebecnan]

Thanks for your suggestions!

We don't want to prevent modding. just want to prevent something like that someone takes the game, makes some small tweaks, then sells it as their work (especially bad guys who have more money and resources for the promotion).

We're a small team without fame, don't have many ways to protect ourselves and we don't know if this game is that popular. so we have to make decisions carefully.

We'll do more research into it, and maybe we can find a good way to support modding well and protect us from bad things at the same time.

[nekoworkshop]

Originally posted by xebecnan:

Thanks for your suggestions!

We don't want to prevent modding. just want to prevent something like that someone takes the game, makes some small tweaks, then sells it as their work (especially bad guys who have more money and resources for the promotion).

We're a small team without fame, don't have many ways to protect ourselves and we don't know if this game is that popular. so we have to make decisions carefully.

We'll do more research into it, and maybe we can find a good way to support modding well and protect us from bad things at the same time.

I really appreciate the transparency and honesty. I forgot that there are shameless people out there who have the audacity to simply take the game, make some minor modifications then sell the result as their own work. As a Chinese myself I totally understand your points and I'm ashamed that I overlooked such concerns.

I've always been vocal about how some Chinese "developers" are destroying their own market by ripping off each others' work. The fact that honest and hardworking people like you guys have to put in time and effort to protect your work just because some thugs are out there is simply depressing. I hope one day we can live in a world where honest creators don't have to worry about getting screwed over.

[xebecnan]

_(°:з」∠)_