Modifying Ski Safari, and thoughts on pay-for-unlocks in other games

Ski Safari is a fun "endless runner" type game for iOS that features a skier attempting to outrace an avalanche while doing jumps, backflips, and riding yetis.

It has the familiar mechanic of offering three meta-challenges that can be attempted at any time during the game session. Completing the meta-challenges unlocks bonus score multipliers, as well as starting vehicles.

What makes that last bit remarkable is that it bucks the all-too-common trend of using real money to fund quick unlocking of features. Interpreted charitably, real money transactions let players in a hurry support developers and get fun stuff for a few bucks.

I played an endless runner like that earlier today called Burrito Bison Revenge, which unfortunately seemed less about "give your character a power boost for more fun" and more about "pay money to remove the unnecessary gameplay flaws we introduced".

I'm not going to say that real money transactions are inherently dishonest, but there are way too many games with purposely-tedious progression curves being used to exploit people.

Anyway, back to Ski Safari. There's an issue with many iOS games where a player's settings are not kept in sync between devices, which means you could unlock something on your phone, but not have access to it on your tablet. Apple has introduced a syncing API, but apparently it has some flaws.

In the course of messing around with the ski Safari's data files (I was hoping to modify the mountain data), I put together some preferences data that unlocks all of the starting vehicles:

Comments

[Luke]

Damn, that's really cool. I had no idea that app preference data was so easy to get to.