The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is an amazing indie game about two siblings in an extremely toxic codependent relationship, solo developed by the pseudonymous developer Nemlei. As of writing, it’s in Early Access on Steam, and is also my current hyperfixation. I would highly recommend buying and playing the game, it is extremely well made, and you’ll support an indie dev.
The Coffin of Andy and Leyley is an RPG Maker game, and RPG Maker uses NW.js. NW.js is an app framework that uses Chromium, meaning it’s basically a glorified web browser. This means that code is written in JavaScript, making it easy to dig through.
Introducing Grimoire: Over the course of a weekend, I wrote a set of tools, which I’ve been calling Grimoire, to aid in digging through the innards of the game. It allows you to:
- Extract the main game code
- Deobfuscate the main game code
- Decrypt game assets
- Encrypt game assets
The game (or rather, Nemlei) makes quite an effort to hide all this; the main game code is hidden under several layers of obfuscation, and the game assets use a custom encryption solution. I’m curious as to how Nemlei puts all of these guards in place, whether it’s done by hand every time an update is released or whether there’s some sort of automated build step that they put together.
Grimoire is open source and you can find it here on Codeberg. There’s a longer and more detailed explanation as to how the various features work there.
On my list of things to add is a modding tool for the game, like OneLoader for OMORI. If I ever do it (no guarantees, don’t let me stop you from trying if you’re up to it), it might end up a specialized fork of OneLoader, though I’d like to attempt to write one from scratch first, as it seems like a fun project.