How many times have any of you restarted a project? What was the reason?

[KevinXDE]

I had to restart three-four times. I first started RomHacking in Ruby, I put a lot of work in that Rom and I finally encountered a fatal bug, whenever I battled a Taillow the game crashed. I wanted to solved that really bad instead of getting rid of a Pokémon so I got really frustrated and I quitted.

I came a few years later and began RomHacking in Fire Red instead. Got quite more improvement in my project, but this time I was feeling so unmotivated for other reasons, so again, I quitted.

A year or so passed, I tried RPG Maker, cool, but that was not what I was looking for. More time passed and tried pokeemerald. I renewed my ideas and I started my project again and that's finally where I stayed.

To be honest, I appreciate having started from 0 a few times. Because of this I've learnt a lot and now I truly know what I want to do with my project. So if someone is having huge problems with theirs, I'd say maybe try looking into it from another perspective. Personally I don't think starting over is a waste of time, neither is working on a project that is already not as good as you can make it, though the last one I tried and got me no satisfaction, but I guess they are different forms of learning

 

[Meister_anon~Master_o f_None]

A lot of inspiring stories here; I think this my third comment in this thread, and ironically I'm now considering my third (ish) restart.

So since my last post, I did end up switching to cfru to do the majority of my work.
But since from the start my ideas were always ambitious I found myself needing to push the limits of what was possible.

I started romhacking with no knowledge just jumped straight in, read tutorials, learned hexadecimal, and on a whim made a small hack.

Was simple in concept but even getting that to execute correctly nearly blew my mind. lol

With that first one I became proficient with scripting, then I needed to learn even more, and I had to learn C, to figure out how to change functions in cfru.
I'm not what would be considered "good" by any means, but it got the job done.

Then I had to teach myself battle script for the next thing, where pretty much no tutorial existed.

At that point I started revealing the invisible walls all around me. In cfru I couldn't change everything with C, some things would require indepth battle script knowledge,
but also asm...

Other things I tried to change just constantly failed (by creating more and more bugs) with no clear reason why.

So hitting walls in what is possible with cfru, I decided to take a step back, and I just built my first decomp.

I'm going to mess around with that for a bit, see if I can't get some of those things to work in the decomp instead.

If so, then I may try to restructure and hopefully find a new way forward with all the tools available to me.


also I said this is my third-ish restart, because while this is pretty much my third change of method for working on my main hack.

The smaller hacks I've done were essentially proof of concepts for parts of the whole, and I'm pretty sure I completely broke things and had to redo, or tackle something in a completely different direction at least 5 times for each of those.

 

[DarkMadman_69]

I had to restart my project 4 times. I may end up doing it again. I'm working on my first hack and I want it to be of some good quality at least lol.
1st time was due to lack of knowledge, I started hacking about 3 months ago I think and after researching and trial and error I've learned ALOT about the basics, mapping, scripting, level scripts, items, pokemon, a little about ASM, applying custom features, etc.
2nd time was advance map 1.95 incorrectly wrote something and I didn't have a backup of my rom and one of the maps got corrupted. That's when I learned to backup every little change you make.
3rd time I rushed part of it and decided the story sucked and I had already scripted some of the story events, wasting free space. So I salvaged some maps to edit them a little and write a whole new story before scripting anything
4th draft I'm slowly working on, I'm slowly putting a story together while redoing the maps I salvaged and script after I rewrite the story.

 

[Lynker]

Lost my original project that had a fair amount of maps and progress made. I kind of don't even want to attempt to make another for this reason. Lost all my drive for it.

 

[KevinXDE]

I already posted but i recently discovered that I have ADHD and I'm starting to understand why I never succeeded in this. It's quite sad that my project has 10 years and I haven't released anything yet. Hopefully I'll be able to do so soon, as I'm working hard on it. Maybe it will be a few more years, but i'll do it for sure

 

[Mario60866]

I've restarted my Ultimate Platinum remake project about 100 times. I constantly struggle with development of this because I have such limited knowledge of how to rom hack, and I've gotten in trouble with my family and school for spending too much time trying to make it.