Hey everyone! I'm looking for advice on how I might be able to restore a couple of old mobile games that no longer have active servers, specifically 'Into The Badlands: Blade Battle' and 'Into The Badlands: Champions'. Even though they're still available on the Play Store, they barely work because the servers are shut down. When I try to play, it tends to delete my progress if I interact with anything online.
What I'm hoping for is a way to play these games solo, mainly to access the 'Events' mode for rewards, and 'Versus' mode where I take on computer-generated teams instead of players. I'd love to adjust a few things too, like removing paywalls on some characters and enabling certain content to be purchasable with in-game currency.
These games mean a lot to me—I've got a lot of nostalgia attached to them as they helped me through some tough times. So, I'm really eager to know if this is at all feasible and what steps I might need to take!
1 Answer
Restoring those games is definitely possible, but it’ll be quite a project! You’d essentially need to reverse engineer the games and set up a local server to handle the online features. After that, you’d modify the game client to connect to your new server instead of the old, defunct ones.
The changes regarding paywalls would probably be simpler—most of that involves tweaking some configuration files or database entries. The challenging part would be replicating all the server-side logic for modes like Events and Versus. Look into mobile game modding communities or tools like Frida for runtime modifications. Just a heads up, this could take a few months depending on how the games are built.

Thanks for the insights! Since I have zero programming experience, what should my next steps be? Is it a good idea to hire someone for this, and any idea on the potential costs? Or do you think I should attempt to learn and do it myself?