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Backdoor's Website home page
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Supported Games Page
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Hyperlight Drifter Game Decoder Page
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Celeste Game Decoder Page Explanation
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Undertale's Encoding Algorithm Page
Inspiration
The difficulty of editing video game save files is what inspired the development of BackDoor. Many players want to experiment with their games, recover progress, or understand how their favorite games store data. However, save files are often hidden, encoded, and structured differently, and this means that one small mistake can corrupt a save file or break progress.
We wanted to create a tool that makes save-file editing safer, simpler, and more understandable for players, modders, and aspiring game developers.
What it does
BackDoor is a web app that decodes supported video game save files into human-readable, editable fields.
Users can select a supported game, upload the correct save file, view decoded values, search through editable fields, make changes, and download a rebuilt save file. BackDoor also includes an AI Risk Detector that helps warn users about potentially risky edits.
Currently, BackDoor supports games such as Hyper Light Drifter, Undertale, and Celeste.
How we built it
We built BackDoor as a full-stack web application using Node.js, Express, and EJS. The app includes a catalog page for supported games, game-specific decoder pages, file uploading, save-file parsing algorithms, editable field displays, and a download flow for modified save files.
We also integrated an AI-powered risk checker using Groq to help users understand whether certain edits may be unsafe or likely to cause save corruption.
Our front end focuses on making the process beginner-friendly, so users do not need to manually inspect raw encoded save data.
Challenges we ran into
One major challenge was figuring out which games were easy enough to decode, while also being complex enough to prove the usability of our product. We had to think carefully about our about how to guide users, display fields clearly, and warn them before risky changes.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud that BackDoor can take encoded save-file data and turn it into readable fields that users can actually understand and edit.
We are also proud of supporting multiple games, building a working upload-edit-download flow, and adding an AI Risk Checker to make the experience safer for users.
Most importantly, we are proud that BackDoor is not just a one-time save editor. It has the foundation to become a larger community-driven platform where players and modders can share knowledge about how different games store save data.
What we learned
We have learned to develop a product utilizing full stack web development, incorporating UI/UX design and how to decode and identify game save files/algorithms. Most importantly we've created a tool designed for inspiring future game developers to learn how game's save file algorithms operate and to reverse engineer the process to utilize the code for themselves in a streamlined way.
What's next for BackDoor
Community Game Support Backdoor plans to implement a forum page for developers or modders to discuss, create, and innovate game save file editing to create an accessible platform for all interesting in the game development/modding spheres. Game Developer Resource Backdoor will act as a hub, namely for developers to iterate and learn from other game's encoding algorithms to grow in their professional fields, as well as create new and safer algorithms for their own games.
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