Game Reverse Engineering with IDA Pro

Analyzing Binaries with IDA Pro

Opening a game executable in a disassembler is intimidating when you first start. It looks like a giant wall of assembly instructions and hex addresses that make no sense. But once you learn to spot the standard structures it becomes much clearer. If you want to learn how to recognize code patterns you should stop by Guided Hacking. We show you exactly how to identify the loops and conditional jumps that make up the game logic so you aren't just staring at random opcodes.

Reversing Health Logic

The best way to practice static analysis is by finding the damage function. You have to locate the specific subroutine that subtracts health from the player entity. We have a guide on creating one hit kill cheats that walks through tracing the damage calculation back to its source. The tutorials on GuidedHacking help you understand how registers are used to store the health value before writing it back to memory.

Network Protocol Analysis

Offline games are one thing but multiplayer is a completely different beast. You have to look at how the game serializes data before sending it to the server or you will never find the right functions. We did a deep dive on analyzing Sauerbraten network traffic to show the relationship between the game state and the packet buffer. You need to identify the send and recv functions in IDA Pro to see where the encryption happens.

Studying Legacy Cheats

Sometimes looking at old code is actually the best way to learn new tricks. Technology changes but the underlying logic often stays the same for years. We have a section on dissecting 12 year old hacks where we analyze old DLLs to see how people bypassed protections back in the day. It gives you perspective on how exploits have evolved. If you want to really understand binary analysis head over to GuidedHacking.com.