Contribute to existing projects

[JayFoxRox]

I think this website duplicates a lot of information that's already present elsewhere, such as TCRF (although some of these platforms might be operated with conflicting politics).

Is this really necessary, and are there possibly better ways to handle this?

What's the motivation behind RetroReversing?

• Education
• Commercial
• ...

[RetroGameDeveloper]

This is a great point thank you for bringing it up!
Contributing to other projects is a vital goal of this project, the information needs to get out there and be duplicated as much as possible.

I am planning to contribute to TCRF with as much content as they will take, but their motivation differs from that of RetroReversing.

The motivation behind RetroReversing is to focus on the games from a software development point-of-view rather than from the players perspective.

For example, TCRF would have a list of cool things that a game has left unused, secrets, leftover development artifacts, etc.
RR has no interest in unused assets or secrets but instead wants to document what made the game 'tick', how was X game mechanic implemented, how was Y effect rendered to the screen, what was the development experience like?

Where they overlap is with leftover development artifacts such as debug symbols or leftover uncompiled code. Both sites would list this content but for a different purpose, RR would aim to build on this information to develop architecture diagrams, code examples and attempt to show the game development process in all its glory.

We are still in very early stages so we don't have good articles on a full game reverse engineering project, but we are slowly building pages that will be linked to and used to implement that goal.

The motivation is purely non-commercial, we will never run ads or promote content, we want to let people appreciate the hard work game developers put into each game (even the bad ones). Game development is a mix of so many different art forms and the creative process itself is an art that should be appreciated, developers have to create art that is 'fun' and looks 'beautiful' under punishing time constraints.

Can we reverse engineer these projects and highlight some of the magic and craftsmanship that went into them in a way that an average gamer would enjoy? Articles that let people appreciate the people behind the game and inspire people to make their own games/mods. A bit like a Gamasutra for hackers, to inspire people to implement some of the same magic in their games. I want to try, also its a fun and interesting hobby.