ljmng7/ashorthike-ios-port

This repository is a written record of a personal technical research project, not a piece of software you can download and run. The author owns a legal Steam copy of the game A Short Hike on macOS and used it as the starting point to study how the game could be rebuilt into a working Unity project and eventually adapted to run on a personal iPhone. The repository itself contains no game files, no decompiled game code, no built app, and nothing you could install. A default setting blocks those files from ever being added to the project by accident. The work is organized as a series of careful, documented steps. First the author inspected the original Steam application without changing anything, confirming details like the exact Unity engine version used, the number of code files inside it, and which parts of the game relied on Apple only tools. Next, the game's compiled code was turned back into readable source code using a decompiling tool, without renaming anything, so the underlying structure stayed intact. The save file system was studied closely too, since the game stores saved progress in a format that depends on exact internal naming, and changing that naming would have broken the ability to load old saves. A separate tool was then used to pull out the game's original art, levels, and other resources from its data files, with the process checked step by step to record what worked and what limitations remained, such as some shader effects not exporting in their original form. All of this fed into rebuilding a new Unity project aimed first at matching the original desktop game exactly, before any changes were made to target Apple's iOS software instead of the original Mono system it was built with. Because the underlying game remains under someone else's copyright, this project is presented purely as documentation of a research process, and the author is careful to note that legal ownership of the original game is required to follow along.