How I became a game bot developer: Part 1

Introduction

I’ve got a crazy story to tell you about how I became a freaking game bot developer. See, ever since I was a wee little gamer, I’ve been obsessed with the epic worlds that video game developers create. It’s like these games are these insane alternate realities that you can just get completely lost in, you know?

Anyway, one day I was playing this game called ArcheAge — it’s this massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) that’s basically a never-ending grindfest. I mean, you’ve gotta spend hours and hours just gathering resources and doing boring tasks if you wanna level up your character. And I was like, “Man, there’s gotta be a better way to do this.” That’s when it hit me — what if I could automate all this repetitive nonsense with a bot?

Now, at the time I was just a young pup with only a fraction of the knowledge I have now. This was over ten years ago. So I did some digging and that’s when I stumbled upon this game bot community called Bossland. These guys had already created bots for all sorts of popular games. I was like, “This is exactly what I’ve been looking for!”

And that, my friends, is where the real adventure began.

The beginning

When it came to building the user interface for our game bot, we went with C# WinForms at first and later switched over to WPF. We also had to use C++ to create something called an “injector.” Basically, this program would go hunting for the game process and then inject custom-written code that would hook onto certain methods of the game process and change up the way things were executed. It was pretty wild stuff, and you had to have a seriously strong understanding of machine code and reverse engineering techniques to make it all work.

At that time we used tools like IDA Pro and OllyDbg for analysis.

Let me tell you, I was totally floored by all the information I had to absorb. It was like a non-stop fire hose of knowledge, just blasting me in the face with all sorts of new stuff. But you know what? Even though it was overwhelming at first, the thought of being able to create my own bot and automate all sorts of insane actions in the game was just too exciting to resist. It was like a shot of…