Android games, RPG, APK files and more.

[MikeandIke6]

Good evening, and thank you for taking the time to read this.

I am interested in ripping character animations from several Android role-playing and RPG games, specifically from the character select menus/archives. The game I am currently interested in is Pixel Duel, which is available on the Google Play Store. These animations are cool and perfect for a side project I want to pursue. I just stumbled upon the world of ripping, so I have almost no experience when it comes to this. After researching, I could extract the APK file from the game on Bluestacks and export it to my computer. I also extracted several files from the original APK file; however, I am lost on what to do next. I do not know where these images/animations would be or how to extract them properly. Hell, I don't even know what most of these files do/mean. I would appreciate it if someone gave me a hand. This is something interesting that I would love to learn more about.

Thank you for reading, and have a good day.

[ikskoks]

Welcome to the forum 🙂 Good first post.


APK file can be unpacked or decompiled. There are several tools that can help you with that. I like to use APK Toolkit v1.3 for this purpose.
Here is the link for newer version https://xdaforums.com/t/tool-apk-toolkit-v1-5-windows.4572881/
Decompile APK file from your game and try to see what files are available for further research.
This really depends on the game, but some games use popular game engines like Unity, so you would be able to use Unity tools like UABEA or Asset Studio like you would use them on files from PC games. If the game uses custom engine then output files needs to be reverse engineered. You can start with opening them in hex editor (like Hex Workshop) and looking for patters. If your case is more complicated, then you would need to debug game's code to get the idea how the game parses the data.
You can read more about this process in our tutorials section https://reshax.com/topic/47-reverse-engineering-tutorials-collection/

Some games also use OBB archives which can be standard ZIP files with changed file extension. So sometime you can change the extension and unpack data, but sometimes it has to be reverse engineered as well.

[MikeandIke6]

Hello, and thank you for the welcome.

I appreciate the instructions/tips you provided. I will look through the tutorials you recommended and get back to you. Can I come back and ask any questions if I need assistance?

[ikskoks]

Sure, you can ask. 🙂