oninaki Let's talk about modding

[alexrp]

Hello,

I first played through Oninaki on Switch a couple months ago. As with many other people, I found that the gameplay on a conceptual level had some really great ideas but that the execution was somewhat flawed - clunky animation canceling (or lack thereof), slow moment, dumb enemy AI, poorly designed skill tree progression, etc. I recently decided to pick it up on PC on a whim, mainly just to see if playing the game at 144 FPS would make it feel a bit better. The answer is yes (unsurprisingly), but not by a huge amount. The squandered potential with the gameplay really started gnawing at me, so I decided to dig into the game files.

This being a Unity game, extracting and modifying assets is quite easy. That includes things like UI elements, sounds, models, animations, maps, etc. But, far more importantly, it turns out that the vast majority of the game is configurable through a bunch of serialized 'sheets' (as the game calls them - almost certainly exported from Excel...) stored in the ONINAKI_Data\StreamingAssets\STEAM\common\masterdata assets file. Just about anything you can imagine can be added, changed, or removed here: Levels, stats, skills, weapons, enemies, AI, loot tables, NPC/object placement, transmutation tables, story triggers/events, etc, etc, etc. I've spent a couple days digging through these and I've only just scratched the surface.

To get an idea yourself, you can take a look at the exported sheets here: https://github.com/alexrp/oninaki-reincarnation/tree/master/Assets/common/masterdata

Combined with the fact that you can actually modify the game's code (in ONINAKI_Data\Managed\Assembly-CSharp.dll) relatively easily, the possibilities here are virtually limitless.

As a contrived proof of concept, I decided to increase the maximum character level from 99 to 101 and change the amount of healing incenses I can carry at that level (it changes with level, not story progress, by the way) from 9 to 11. This meant adding a few extra entries to the PlayerGrowthData sheet, and modifying some of the game's code to recognize the new max level in some of its XP calculation logic.

Here's me successfully leveling up to 101 and getting a max healing incense count of 11 as expected: https://imgur.com/ti9LZ8L

Like I said, this is very contrived in and of itself. But it proves that modding is totally possible and actually quite easy.

I think this is a great opportunity for the (admittedly fairly small) Oninaki community to come together and work on improvements to the game to make it more enjoyable and to improve replayability. Even if Tokyo RPG Factory missed the mark with the game and are seemingly not planning on doing post-release updates, it doesn't have to go down in history as a poorly executed set of ideas. As you might have noticed from the GitHub link above, I already have plans to turn that project into a combat and post-game overhaul mod for the game.

The main project page is here: https://github.com/alexrp/oninaki-reincarnation

The README has instructions on how to actually go about modifying the game files and integrating the changes into the game. There's also a link to a Discord server (https://discord.gg/kMWvXbd) I set up for people interested in modding. Even if you have little to no experience in programming and/or modding, feel free to drop by and ask questions if you'd like to try to get into it!