What happens when professional hacking habits collide with indie games? This talk follows my journey from traditional ethical hacking into the world of game hacking; starting not with some grand plan, but with casual curiosity sparked by seeing dnSpy used in a game hacking context. That small spark led to an exploration of Unity-based games, static and dynamic hacking techniques, community tools, and evolving goals.
Talk flow:
* Where it started: the initial “neuron activation” moment - spotting a known tool (dnSpy), realising how accessible this world might be.
* First attempts: targeting Muck, decompiling Assembly-CSharp.dll, patching player stats, discovering Mono scripting backend vs IL2CPP.
* Learning static patching pitfalls: dealing with broken decompilation, constructor bugs, namespace conflicts, lessons on code resilience and tool limitations
* Discovering multiplayer quirks: peer-to-peer architecture in Muck, finding which hacks persist across lobbies, architecture-based attack surfaces.
* Evolving tooling: moving to Cheat Engine for live memory hacking; dynamic patching, NOP tricks, instruction overwrites and how memory manipulation compares to static patching.
* Learning from the community: unknowncheats.me - the good, the bad, the inspiration - and how shared ideas (like Unity Free Cam) opened new attack surfaces I hadn’t considered.
* Next games, new goals: applying skills to Liar’s Bar (visibility hacks, subtle gameplay manipulation) and Supermarket Together (MelonLoader + UnityExplorer for runtime object manipulation) adapting techniques to new games and new fun challenges.
* CTF challenge: SenseCon’s WarAndUnity game; bringing it all together to solve a full CTF: memory patching for coins, object removal for progression, timer bypasses, triggering Easter Eggs - how CTF thinking sharpened my understanding of the entire process
Reflections: seeing patterns across Unity games (common flaws, architecture limitations), how hacking skills naturally transfer between domains, why this is a powerful and beginner-friendly gateway into both hacking and infosec mindset development
Key takeaways:
* How static and dynamic hacking techniques map to modern Unity games
* How architecture (server vs P2P) shapes what’s possible
* How familiar hacker tools translate directly to game hacking
* How to evolve techniques across different games and contexts
* Ethical lessons from keeping curiosity fun and safe
Conclusion:
The goal isn’t to show elite-level “hardest possible” hacks, but to highlight how transferable, accessible, and fun this type of exploration can be and why it sharpens skills useful well beyond game hacking itself. If you enjoy seeing where hacking skills can lead, this one’s for you.