Game Engine Cheats

When building a game, you can build it from scratch or you can choose a game engine. Most game studios will choose a game engine since it has a lot of pre-built features that game developers don’t need to worry about, usually, they’re tested to the max by other game devs/players and have big communities (depending on the game engine) where you can find a lot of information and help if needed. In other words, makes sense to choose a game engine when building your game.

Since most game engines are available to anyone and some have their source code publicly available, makes it easier for an experienced attacker to understand how that game engine works. They can make a “controlled environment” by creating a simple game and studying the structure of the game engine, helping them build software tools for the engines. A lot of these tools are available for free to anyone, even on GitHub.

Cheats

Some of these tools allow attackers to get the memory addresses and offsets to use in their cheats, otherwise, they need to use one or more software to get this information about the game, and they could need to spend more time understanding how the game it’s structure, especially if you’re a beginner cheat developer. This helps them to build their cheats easier and faster.

Game Modding

Game engines, normally, have a specific way to pack the game assets to reduce the game size on disk and for security and performance reasons.

So, attackers also develop some tools to extract the game assets files that ship with the game, allowing them to modify, sell, or use the contents (textures, meshes, and models) in their own games.

Preventing these tools

It is not possible to have a 100% solution for these tools, attackers will always be able to find some way to crack the game, so we need to make life harder for attackers.

Regarding cheats, to prevent this, games can be protected with packers using code obfuscation, anti-debuggers, virtualization, etc. The only problem with these techniques is that they can lower the game’s performance.

Regarding mods for games, this could be prevented by encrypting the assets bundles, or, if the game engines could provide them, creating custom assets bundles. Also, the techniques mentioned above in some cases could work.

Final thoughts

Finally, it’s important to say that, everything mentioned above is also possible for games built from scratch, for example, Minecraft has a lot of mods available and it wasn’t built with a game engine. Building a game with a game engine doesn’t mean that your game will have more cheats.