Adventures in Reverse Engineering @adventures-in-re - Tumblr Blog

Hello! It's me, the @amiibo-king! This is a sideblog where I post about all the digging I like to do in the code of games I like. Right now, that means Fictif and The Arcana.

Why do I do this? Well, sometimes it serves a greater purpose *cough*gamespreservation*cough*. Other times I just do it because I have mental problems and a compulsive need to know the ins and outs of how my favorite games work. A lot of the time it's both.

Feel free to ask me any questions about the inner workings of any particular game I'm hyperfocused on. I love being given excuses to root through the code for answers, and more than that I love having an excuse to infodump!

If you want to refer to me by name, you can call me Daz if you'd like. My pronouns are he/him.

quick access links:

Various non-game content archive (wip) (please contribute if you have any missing ones or higher quality versions!)

Folder of assets and sprite PSDs (currently only Last Legacy, Monster Manor, and Snow Falling in Love, more coming soon)

#the arcana #fictif #last legacy

I forgot to say when you first posted, but congratulations on top surgery!!!

Thank you!! It's a big relief to have that done ^^

Hi Daz,

I hope you're well. I just stumbled across this blog tonight and I want to thank you for the work you're doing <3

I realised a while back that just having an APK for Fictif wouldn't do anything once it went offline and I've been worried for a few years now about Dorian shutting down their Fictif servers and Last Legacy becoming lost media. I was seriously considering e-mailing the devs for permission to create a private server ('cuz that's how delusional I become when desperate -_-') and I didn't know it even was possible to make the stories available offline aside from recording them, which isn't really ideal :/ so thank you!! You're a gem.

Thank you again for your dedication to preserving these stories so they don't just disappear into the ether. I feel much more at ease now. Wishing you all the best for the rest of the year!!

Hello! Thank you!

That's something I was worried about as well, and that is part of what inspired me to start the preservation project, although I didn't originally start digging around in the code with that intention. I originally only started digging around to find image assets to use in edits, but then discovered accidentally that I could see all of the game's dialogue without even needing to decompile the apk (although I did have to do some decompiling to figure out the programming logic that would allow me to piece all that dialogue back together).

Thankfully, while the apk itself doesn't contain that much data (which is why the apk requires a connection, it has to be able to download the route data) the route data *is* still downloaded onto your device when you play a route or story. (in fact, you don't even have to play all the routes, iirc playing one route also downloads all the data from every other route, and in Fictif's case, simply playing the prologue of a story also downloads all route data) so I was able to back up all those files. So even if Dorian were to shut down the servers tomorrow, I would still have everything I need to continue this project.

Granted, the files I have are from a backup I did quite a while ago, but my aim is to preserve the Arcana/Fictif as they were before Dorian came into the picture, and my backup is from around the time of the acquisition, so that's not an issue :P

The only thing I'm really not sure whether or not I'll be able to preserve are the Arcana's daily games. I've not had as much luck getting the precise code for them, and it's not going to be easy to reprogram them in Renpy even if I do figure that out. But I'll cross that bridge when I get to it, lol (the routes are my priority for the most part right now) And since Fictif doesn't have anything like that, it should be able to be preserved entirely.

#in general the hardest parts of this have nothing to do with putting together the actual scripts themselves #i made a program that does that for me. the hardest part is actually making the base structure work lol #besides just the dailies.#for example saving/loading in renpy works a lot differently from how the Arcana and Fictif do it #so I have to kinda fight with renpy to make it function the way I want it to #I've thought about switching to a different engine even.#The original apps were made in Unity with the Fungus visual novel template library #so if Renpy fails me I can try that but it would probably take a while to convert everything over...

amiibo-king

Ok ive seen some of your posts now about digging up the arcana stuff and I'm wondering... do you have the demo chapters? I have a transcript of the original prologue and i remember the Julian and Nadia previews were kinda turned into real chapters (i don't remember them that well admittedly - just for sure that the memory illustrations for them were used in the real game) (even if Julian's was edited for his eyepatch change) HOWEVER everything from Asra's demo was scrapped (except for his sprite in it getting used as his old masquerade one i think) and it haunts me i want to reread those again so bad but especially his. All i can remember is at the end him getting pushed into the fountain and disappearing... sighs

I do not, unfortunately. If I had an apk or otherwise some sort of executable of the demo, I could try and see if it exists within it, but I'm not sure if something like that would still exist anywhere. I don't really know a lot about the demo because I only got into The Arcana around 2021, so I wasn't there when it originally launched (and as such I would have missed any demos) if the demo was launched on the play store, then I could try looking through play store version history archives, but a lot of those archives don't necessarily go all the way back.

if you happen to have a copy of the original apk/executable, feel free to link it to me and I will take a look!

#reblogging this ask here since its more relevant to this blog lol

rpgchoices

Remembering The Arcana

I suddenly remembered how much I enjoyed The Arcana (that phone app), so I reinstalled it and found out it was sold to another company.

It is so disappointing. I remember it was created by a small company called Nix Hydra. They also have/had an itch io account, and they started a very successful kickstarter campaign to create a visual novel dating sim videogame.

(link)

The game was successfully funded, and some of the rewards for the pledges were:

An artbook

A PC VERSION OF THE ACTUAL GAME

For a while the company was ignoring the pledgers regarding the artbook:

They later replied that they were working on sending the artbook, so I think that was finally shipped but not everyone seemingly received it.

And of course, the pc version...

The pledgers got a discount code for certain routes only.

The game was supposed to be a steam/gog/pc game, a full on visual novel. But unfortunately greed won:

You can see here a bit more about how much more they ended up earning with predatory mobile app practices.

Basically, they knew they had a hit, and locked all the romance content behind pay for play. When you play the game on mobile (mind you: this is a romance game, a dating sim), you will be able to play a non romance scene for free, and a romance scene only by using a coins/keys that you can win (with high difficulty) or purchase with real money.

Nix Hydra was mainly owned by:

Nikolai Ladizinsky, Dana Rune... the rest of the employees at Nix Hydra seem pretty hard to find.

It looks like a lot of people went to work at Red Spring Studio just to open a new kickstarter for a new videogame.

The kickstarter is from 2023, with an "estimated delivery" set to 2023 (EDIT: apparently the release date for the game is 2025, but none of the backers saw chapter 1 till now... 2026...). The owner and workers at the company all use nicknames so it is hard to know who they are, but they do credit "The Arcana" among their successes, in their website.

Funnily enough one of the rewards is an artbook and the comments are...uhm... very familiar.

Luckily, this time there is a steam entry for the game but the game is still "to be announced" three years later, which is not promising. And after three years what is currently available is still Chapter 1, which can only be played on Patreon. Updates of the game are also locked behind paywall (for patreon and backers).

And what happened to The Arcana, in the meantime?

In 2022, as soon as it stopped making money (I suppose) it was sold to some predatory mobile app called Dorian, which follows the same rules of having a dating sim/romance story where the romance scenes can only be unlocked through payment of difficult to earn coins. Dorian allows fans to create their games, using AI art etc.

So yeah, pretty sad story and a very disappointing ending. Especially because The Arcana had a solid plot and quite interesting diverging romance interests. It could have gone down as one of the most popular dating sim (with queer romance) of the past years, and instead it will probably one day disappear into a blip as soon as this mess of a company called Dorian sink into the sea.

adventures-in-re

There's more to this story:

For one, the Arcana had a sister app, Fictif, which was also owned by Nix Hydra. It was a collection of smaller VNs, most of which were low quality, but there were a couple of gems, notably Last Legacy, which was written by the same team behind Touchstarved, and is at a much closer quality level to the Arcana. But of course because it was on this app that was otherwise much less appealing, not many people played it. And Last Legacy never got finished because the team working on it all quit Nix Hydra simultaneously to go start Red Spring Studios, so Last Legacy ends on a cliffhanger, with no resolution. Nix Hydra originally promised that they would find someone else to finish the story, but then they sold to Dorian, and that never happened.

The artbook did get made, eventually. It is still for sale on what was formerly the Nix Hydra store (now the Dorian store) but the PC version was never made.

The Arcana and Last Legacy were a hyperfixation for me for several years (and lowkey still are in some capacity) and because I don't want them to disappear when Dorian inevitably sinks into the sea, I have been working on my own preservation project. Largely it's just a port of the game to renpy (which would be playable on PC) there are a lot of things that are not easy for me to reverse engineer (such as the math behind the daily minigames) but I have all of the games assets and story scripts backed up, so if Dorian disappears tomorrow, The Arcana and Last Legacy would not simply disappear into a blip. I am working to ensure that doesn't happen.

How’s it going?

if you mean me, i'm okay! i had top surgery recently but i just recently got cleared of my healing restrictions.

if you mean my preservation efforts, they're still ongoing, though a lot of life stuff has gotten in the way, so it's been slow. rest assured i haven't given up yet!

#late response bc this weekend was all over the place lol

Now this is a big ask but this is one of my last resorts can you get the files for games that isn't on the app store anymore? and or do you take request outside of your interest?

It depends pretty heavily on a few factors:

if it's a game that stores it's assets on a server (and therefore can't be played without connecting to that server) then I have no way of accessing any assets if the game's servers are down or if it's no longer on the app store (unless I or someone else found a way to extract those assets from the server *before* the app was removed from the app store and backed up those assets locally, the way I've done with The Arcana and Fictif. But if the app is already off the app store, chances of that are slim, and there's no way to do it retroactively)

if it's not an always-online app, it depends on whether or not someone has archived an old version of the app on a site like apkpure

it also depends on what engine the game runs on. The Arcana and Fictif are built in Unity which is a lot easier to rip assets from than something that uses it's own custom engine, or an engine that is otherwise less common or not as well-documented

So in order to say for certain whether or not it would be possible, I'd have to know what app it is (and if you know what engine it was created in, that's also helpful)

working once again on my renpy port(s) and i suddenly remembered why i was procrastinating on the arcana for so long.. it's because of the save system.

in fictif, when you play a route for the first time, the game saves the choices you make, and if you replay that chapter and make different choices, future chapters will only take into account the choices you made the first time, they won't be affected by the choices you made in the replay unless you completely reset your route progress and start over. versus the arcana, where future chapters are affected by replay choices without the need to start over.

...which means that programming the save system is a lot more complicated in the arcana than it is in fictif, just because of how renpy handles saves. renpy assumes that players are going to completely play through and finish a route (or start a new save slot) before attempting to replay with different choices, and it definitely was not built with that sort of real-time choice updating in mind.

so while i've got the fictif save system working nicely, i can't exactly copy and paste it onto the arcana without getting rid of that real-time choice updating behavior. I think I could probably finagle it a bit to work the way it does in the original app, but i'll definitely be breaking some programming best-practices in the process 😅

hello hacker bestie, hope you're alive and thriving I was wondering if I could make another request, for a fictif story? if you're busy I totally understand, oh and don't forget to hydrate<3

thank you! and certainly, it's no trouble! what kind of request specifically? assets, a peek at the inner workings/code, a feature request etc?

#i'll go get some water while i await your request :P

adventures-in-re

Another thing I'm wondering, with regards to the reverse engineering/arcana-fictif archival server: personally I don't really like discord, I prefer using matrix+element when I can, which also has a discord-like server feature (although they call them "Spaces" with "Rooms" rather than channels, and you opt into each room that you want to be included in)

so if it were up to me I'd rather set up a matrix space, in order to encourage a switch from discord to matrix—but I'm worried that sort of thing might be too niche and might prevent people from joining. It's pretty simple to sign up for matrix (i even have a tutorial on my website) but i know people can be stubborn about using new things.

I could also make a classic forum like the good old internet days....

so i'm gonna run another poll here.

if i made a matrix space or a classic internet forum for the purpose of reverse engineering and archiving the arcana and fictif...

would you join?

I would join a matrix space

I would join a classic forum

I would join either/or

I would ONLY join if it was discord

Voting ended onMay 10, 2025

adventures-in-re

hm.. well that's pretty inconclusive.

Matrix spaces *do* offer the ability to bridge with a discord server, (only downside being that you don't get end-to-end encryption like matrix usually would have, and the people messaging from the matrix side show up with the bot label on the discord side) so I could do both, have the matrix server be the main thing and then have a discord server also for the accessibility of people who don't want to spend a minute making an account on a matrix homeserver.

idk, i'll think about it. if anyone has any extra thoughts, feel free to send me a message or leave a comment.

Another thing I'm wondering, with regards to the reverse engineering/arcana-fictif archival server: personally I don't really like discord, I prefer using matrix+element when I can, which also has a discord-like server feature (although they call them "Spaces" with "Rooms" rather than channels, and you opt into each room that you want to be included in)

so if it were up to me I'd rather set up a matrix space, in order to encourage a switch from discord to matrix—but I'm worried that sort of thing might be too niche and might prevent people from joining. It's pretty simple to sign up for matrix (i even have a tutorial on my website) but i know people can be stubborn about using new things.

I could also make a classic forum like the good old internet days....

so i'm gonna run another poll here.

if i made a matrix space or a classic internet forum for the purpose of reverse engineering and archiving the arcana and fictif...

would you join?

I would join a matrix space

I would join a classic forum

I would join either/or

I would ONLY join if it was discord

Voting ended onMay 10, 2025

#the arcana #fictif #last legacy #the arcana game #putting it in the tags this time fuck it

adventures-in-re

Sorry about the radio silence, I promise I'm still working on the NH games preservation project... just been on hold for a while because of life stuff.

I've considered starting up a discord server or something in the interest of a) lighting a fire under my ass b) keeping people more updated without worrying so much about alerting dorian to my archival PC port plans and c) maybe getting some help with mundane and repetitive tasks such as sprite optimization and QC testing from people who might want to support

is that something ppl might be interested in joining?

yeah i'd join

i probably wouldn't

other (comment)

Voting ended onMay 9, 2025

adventures-in-re

well a sample size of 4 isnt huge, but thats my fault for not putting it in the tags :P still, a unanimous yes is promising.

i'll try and set something up soon :]

Sorry about the radio silence, I promise I'm still working on the NH games preservation project... just been on hold for a while because of life stuff.

I've considered starting up a discord server or something in the interest of a) lighting a fire under my ass b) keeping people more updated without worrying so much about alerting dorian to my archival PC port plans and c) maybe getting some help with mundane and repetitive tasks such as sprite optimization and QC testing from people who might want to support

is that something ppl might be interested in joining?

yeah i'd join

i probably wouldn't

other (comment)

Voting ended onMay 9, 2025

#idk if its safe to put this in the tags or not

Posture check! Straighten your soon, unclench your jaw, and remember that you’re awesome

Thank you! I was definitely slouching :P

adventures-in-re

Helllooo :3 I was wondering if you have the love letter files for Chava,Sergio,Nicky, Miguel and Celia :0? Also hope ur having a great day/night or afternoon!

As of yet, I unfortunately do not! Since the love letters are a merch item as opposed to a file within the games, the only way for me to get them is to either purchase them myself or have them shared with me by someone generous who has. I eventually do want to purchase or otherwise collect all the love letters for preservation's sake, but money's tight for me at the moment. Whenever I do get them I will add them to the non-game content archive folder linked in my pinned!

adventures-in-re

oh, I just realized that despite adding this to the archive a while back, I never actually posted to let people know, so quick update: I now have Chava and Sergio's letters thanks to the very generous @gloamingardor! You can find them in the pinned post's content archive link :]

adventures-in-re

We now also have Nicky and Howie thanks to @idkiguessiamatable <3

adventures-in-re

Helllooo :3 I was wondering if you have the love letter files for Chava,Sergio,Nicky, Miguel and Celia :0? Also hope ur having a great day/night or afternoon!

As of yet, I unfortunately do not! Since the love letters are a merch item as opposed to a file within the games, the only way for me to get them is to either purchase them myself or have them shared with me by someone generous who has. I eventually do want to purchase or otherwise collect all the love letters for preservation's sake, but money's tight for me at the moment. Whenever I do get them I will add them to the non-game content archive folder linked in my pinned!

adventures-in-re

oh, I just realized that despite adding this to the archive a while back, I never actually posted to let people know, so quick update: I now have Chava and Sergio's letters thanks to the very generous @gloamingardor! You can find them in the pinned post's content archive link :]

#apologies for not shouting it out sooner #still looking for the tatw-verse letters #but we have 2/3 htlal!#Val does have one despite her route never being made

Hope you’re doing well! Have a happy holiday season!

Thank you very much for thinking of me! I have had a rough week but things are looking up. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season as well :]

#I'm glad there are still people keeping me in mind despite my lack of updates #rest assured i'm still working on this!#its just been mostly uninteresting.#you'll see more from me here eventually!

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