[Discussion] Why did you choose Game Dev over ROM Hacking?

At least for those of us making Pokémon games, I'm curious to know your opinions on this. They definitely both have their advantages, and I personally chose Game Dev because I already had several years of experience with RPG Maker and preferred the additional tileset and graphical capacities compared to ROM Hacking.

As for the rest of you, what was it that caused you to make up your mind?

I chose Game Dev over ROM Hacking because with Rom Hacking, you're limited quite a bit more, by what the engine can handle. I hear ROM Hacking has only recently been able to pull off a reasonable approximation of real Mega Evolution, by making a new evolution of each Pokemon that can ME. I wasn't sure I could work with those kind of limits.

Because of the limitations of rom hacking. Mainly memory issues.
My game has Pokemon fusions and there are over 20,000 pokedex slots. I originally wanted it to be a rom hack, but having so many Pokemon would be impossible to achieve in a rom hack without some heavy modding.

It also helped that I already had some experience with RPG Maker before starting to work on it.
Also, while I'm not the biggest fan of Ruby, it's still infinitely better to work with than assembly.

Rainbow said:

I already had several years of experience with RPG Maker and preferred the additional tileset and graphical capacities compared to ROM Hacking.

As for the rest of you, what was it that caused you to make up your mind?

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This, plus Essentials was a lot of features/content and I like ruby language.

This is probably the newbie opinion, but I chose Essentials over ROM hacking because it seemed a hella lot easier.

"FREEDOM!!!"
Also because I've used Rpgmaker xp before essentials.
But manly because you can do just about what ever you like as long as you can code it...

I'm personally a ROM Hacker, but the definite lack of limits is extremely appealing to me. Being able to code what you want directly seems to be a lot better than does having to look for a function to branch off of or something...

BluRose said:

I'm personally a ROM Hacker, but the definite lack of limits is extremely appealing to me. Being able to code what you want directly seems to be a lot better than does having to look for a function to branch off of or something...

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This, is pretty much why I quit large scale ROM hacking. I got sick of having to keep track of offsets, pointers, all that stuff, not to mention if there was something you wanted to change then you have to place breakpoints on RAM values and reverse engineer ASM routines, it's just a huge pain in the ass compared to having all the source code ready at your fingertips.

Technically I started with Game Dev first, as I was part of the Sonic fangaming scene almost 10 years ago. It's what introduced me to Game Maker (back then the newest one was Game Maker 6), and I've been using Game Maker on-and-off since (even during my ROM hacking years from 2010-2014). Game Maker's coding language (GML, which is like a simplified Java) gave me a head start on learning Java, and once I actually started studying Java in college it made me able to do so much more with Game Maker Studio.

It's also fun to design your own menus and systems and it's nowhere near as frustrating as ASM hacking because with game dev you have the source code at your fingertips and you could easily change anything and you know how everything works because you wrote it yourself. Not to mention you don't have to worry about free space, color limitations, or really any limitations for that matter. It's fun to be able to make Pokemon sprites as big as I want and use as many colors I want in my tiles. With ROM hacking if you want to change something involving ASM, you have to edit the bytes to branch to a new offset and make sure once your custom routine is done it branches safely back, while with game dev you could simply just edit your code and not have to worry about branching, registers, offsets, etc.

I use essentials because i've already a lot of experience in rpg maker programs (xp wasn't my first) and because for what i wanted to do in the time frame i had originally planned it would take to long to learn rom hacking. Its still something i want to play with but i don't think i'll make a game with it

Basically what has already been said:
Freedom
Limitations
Accessibility
Prior knowledge with RPG Maker (Dunno how to code though :()
And also, when I was originally trying to make my Rom Hack, there weren't too many good tools for hacking. Of course I may have just not been looking well, but Essentials was far more developed and not held back by engine limitations. I could even expand my game past its original scope.

I didn't choose Game Dev over ROM Hacking, but seeing as there's not a similar thread for those that prefer ROM Hacking, I'll post here anyway.

I have no interest in making a game. Obviously, if making a game for people to play is your goal, having access to source code in a decent language (I'm not a huge Ruby fan, but it's okay) is a huge advantage. Productivity is probably a few orders of magnitude greater than in a ROM hack.

But that's not what I want to do. The thing that attracts me to ROM Hacking is the low level stuff. Reverse engineering and assembly code.

I came across this decision some weeks ago.

I chose Rom hacking.

Why? Because as an aspiring game dev myself, one of the main reasons I wanted to craft a Pokémon fangame in the first place was to practice on many aspects of design, such as pixel art, game mechanics edits, and my writing. A rom has already a working engine and a game for you to tinker with, to carry your material, as well as a good load of easy to use tools at your disposal to implement them.
Another reason would be that if I wanted to spend the effort to learn and code a game, I'd rather just make it an original work instead. When it comes to Pokémon, it's much less work to do- you are just editing from the game to your liking instead of making something from the ground up, and that lends itself well as a practice run, where you go for exactly what you want.

What else. Right. Limitations don't necessarily mean a negative, especially for a pixel artist. On the other hand, it somewhat forces you to be creative with what you can do, and narrow your focus to it. Usually for efficient and fast results.

Edit: OMG how could I forget the best part of this. Haha.
As a GBA rom hack, I can play it on my Game Boy Micro. Heh. This alone makes it all worth it.

Rom hacking cons-
Takes time to understand things in it while Game dev is comparatively User friendly
Rom hacling requires knowledge of different apps to insert different things while we can add things through a compact way
We have limitations in rom hacking whereas we can make our games as per as our imagination

They both have their advantages, and I started with ROM Hacking.
For a small project, I'd go with rom hacking as it takes less time to set up my workarea.
Though, for my current project, with my friends, I'm using Essentials because it would be easier for them to contribute resources since they are not used to the limitations I've gotten used to.
(I suppose it's nice to relax about the colour count of my sprites though.)

I've worked with RPGM before and I've worked with ROM hacking and I chose to go with Essentials on my current project due to memory limitations. Making a large full scale game is a lot more challenging with a ROM hack albeit it can be done, it you have to do a lot of extra work when you can just start up RPGM and work to your heart's content.

ROM hacking has a lot of limits, like size of Pokémon sprites and trainers.
Mapping is harder and there's a limit to the number of maps that you can mais.

RPG Maker doesn't care about how much big are your Sprites. And you can give more features to it using RGSS.

Pokemon Games are better with your own freedom as game freak is repetitive and who wants to replay the game they've completed 10 times ?

ROM hacking is way more limited, it's also really complicated and there aren't many games that actually have info on how to hack them. Meanwhile most big game engines have a large dedicated userbase that will help you if you have questions, and chances are your question has already been answered a lot of times before so you can find the answer fast. And then there are starter kits for fangames like Pokemon Essentials that tell you how to do everything and have everything you need in them.

First of all I had no coding knowledge. I started game developing with ROM hacking, slowly learning about routines, ASM, size limits and the advance map limitations when mapping. This kind of developed a strict forma mentis for everything I did. Then I just stumbled upon RPG maker and I was blown out by the liberty that the Ruby code could give me even though I only knew the basics. I just wish I didn't waste 1 year on rom hacking.