I'm documenting the full dialogue trees for the dating simulator Date Everything on a fan wiki, but each ending takes around 30 hours and I don't want to replay the game repeatedly just to find every choice and branch. Is there a way to extract the dialogue into readable text, inspect the game's commands, or process the files character by character? I'm willing to use whatever tools are appropriate, but I'm not very experienced with reverse engineering and would appreciate beginner-friendly guidance.
2 Answers
It depends heavily on how the game stores its dialogue. Some visual novels keep scripts as readable text files, while others package them inside Unity asset bundles or use a dialogue framework with its own format. For a Unity game, tools such as AssetRipper or UABEA can sometimes inspect and export assets, but they may not produce a clean script automatically. You may need to identify whether the dialogue is stored in text assets, localization tables, JSON, Ink, Yarn, or a custom format, then extract and reorganize it yourself. Make sure you follow the game’s license and only use the files for permitted personal or documentation purposes.
The exact game is the most important detail here. Unity alone doesn’t tell you where the dialogue is stored—it’s just the engine. First make a backup of the installation, then inspect the game’s data files with a Unity asset viewer. If the dialogue is embedded in serialized assets or an archive, you may need a game-specific unpacker or an existing modding tool. If it’s encrypted or generated dynamically, extracting a complete dialogue tree can be much harder than simply exporting text.
That makes sense. I’m not very technical, so I’ll start by checking what kinds of files and assets the game contains before trying to interpret anything more complicated.