what?

Return of the Obra Dinn saves your game as .txt files
containing XML
which contain a date and a <data> element that's a base64 encoded string.

that sounds like binary with extra steps

I'm trying to Death Generator this game but Lucas Pope is known for two things:
1. really neat games
2. caching all his rendered text

this means that if a game has a message box that says "Hello World!" and you memory edit it to read "Cat Sauce" and re-trigger the message box, you still see "Hello World!" because it's still caching the rendered text

oh
I was worried this game had dynamic justification
but no, it's just that I can't spell.
there's only two Rs in "terrible"

the good news is that I can quit to the menu and re-load the save and it empties the cache
the bad news is that automating this is not going to be easy. this game has its own mouse controls, meaning I can't use absolution positioning

absolute positioning, I mean.

ahh, there's keyboard controls. so this is doable.
There's still a nasty memory-search in there, but I'll manage

okay got it doing a full reset.
the best part is that if I set it up slightly too slow, it accidentally clicks quit instead of begin, and the game closes, and I have to set up the IDs and pointers again

I'm not sure I've ever gotten memory searching to work

got it. the problem was, as always, memory protection

well, that didn't last long. I was trying to skip some steps and figure out what unicode regions are supported by this font, and instead it just hung my extractor

I'll just extract all of unicode!
at 11 seconds a character, that'll take about... 19 days?

there's apparently a timing bug in my script which means that sometimes instead of quitting, it tries to turn down the volume.

this is less than useful

it turned out to be because minecraft was crashing slowly in a multithreaded manner

this is one of the worst ideas for a game to extract to put in the death generator
it has, like, 7 different character sets in it?

english (plus extra characters because there's some danish and german in there), hindi, traditional chinese, russian, and probably several more I'm forgetting

frankly I'm lucky this game didn't just invent its own conlang and stick the alphabet up in the private use area somewher

also every time it renders text it looks different.

literally every time.
there are randomly missing pixels. this is intentional and part of the game's aesthetic

I have now crashed two asset extractors

interesting discovery: although the game is monochrome, the textures aren't. They seem to be mostly red/pink, with some green used.
The monochrome stuff seems to be done in a shader, but I'm wondering if the colors in the textures are being used for some in-game use?

oh neat, an undithered version of the two sketches

oh my god
the carpenter, first mate, and 7th top man have IDENTICAL arm muscles!

LITERALLY UNPLAYABLE

it keeps the list of fate-moments in a CSV file. Interesting.
the column headings are:
"id, r, die,pull, music, clear, keep, fog, loc,corpse, skel,shadows,prune,unlock"

same for the crew manifest:
"id,,gender,name_unused,shortname_unused,job,birthplace,fate,clue,difficulty,hint,sketch,tally,pay,insurance,category,pic"

{
"key": "fate_parts_fell-rigging",
"val": "Fell/Rigging | $subject | fell from the rigging to <M>his<><F>her<> death."
},

The game has an interesting implementation of gendered-text, one which I'm not a fan of as an enby

I need to write a game engine with a comprehensive pronoun engine one of these days, just to Show How It's Done

OMG! it actually DOES have more than the gender binary! just the final gender is "beast":

{
"key": "fate_parts_eaten-killer",
"val": "Eaten | $subject | was <m>cannibalized<><f>cannibalized<><b>devoured<> | by $killer."
},