History

SaveTailor is an app made by Steffen André Langnes. It aims to be an all-in-one, evolving suite of save editors for video games, starting with Techland's zombie game series.

To understand its history, we need to go back to 2011, the year a new chapter began in my life.

As a self-taught programmer with limited experience, I started my first major project that year while on a solo vacation with more spare time than I knew what to do with. That project was the Dead Island Save Editor (DISE).

When Dead Island Riptide was released in 2013, the save file format was similar enough that I was able to add support for it without too much effort.

When Dying Light was released in 2015, I invested a significant amount of effort into expanding DISE to support it. Unfortunately, the rework attempt was a major failure. The effort was abandoned after leaving everything in shambles, with rubble everywhere and nothing working.

Support for Dead Island & Riptide Definitive Edition was added in 2019.

The work I started for Dying Light, which was originally a failure, evolved into an independent, cross-platform CLI tool in 2020. I wanted to try building a web-based frontend that only required JSON manipulation. Something of that nature could either be hosted online or used offline. While the idea worked, I lost interest in web technologies, so it remained a CLI tool.

I started working on the Dying Light 2 Save Editor in 2023. This time I wanted to do better, with a familiar GUI, cross-platform support, and a cleaner, more flexible codebase—whether it holds water remains to be proven.

The Dead Island 2 Save Editor was also a cross-platform CLI tool I started working on that same year. It has remained a CLI tool due to time constraints.

When Dying Light The Beast was released in 2025, it was finally time to revisit the idea that had failed a decade earlier.

This led to splitting the Dying Light 2 Save Editor. The Dying Light The Beast Save Editor reused its codebase, the reusable parts became the basis for SaveTailor, and the game-specific parts turned into plugins for SaveTailor.

Although my earlier attempt at expanding DISE failed, SaveTailor is a renewed effort, with a better foundation than what I had before.

I don't know if I'll accomplish everything I want to do, but I hope to build SaveTailor into something special, and would like to invite you to come along for the ride.