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

[Ace Trainer Slash]

Hello all,

I'm sure, along the lines of development of a hack, someone must have made an error, or created/thought of something not up to their standards, and decided to restart their project.

I for one have done it thrice for a Fire Red hack that I was making. The first version was really ugly, had references to things no one from my audience would recognise, and had a really high difficulty for no good reason, I was also very inexperienced in proper maps designs, balancing, and a genuine story. The second version was just me mucking around with music and maps, something happened with it, I think I overwrote something, and it caused the game to crash after choosing your gender, name and rival.

The third version is going ok, so far. I've rectified the balancing issues of the first attempt, and began to incorporate better map design into the hack, as well as the addition of references people from my audience actually understood. I also had to do this for my ideas document, many of my ideas being kinda stupid and impractical were scrapped, or otherwise refined in a way that I could incorporate it well into my hack. This was over the span of two years (and I still haven't finished anything beyond Route 2/Viridian Forest besides maps...)

What was everyone's story about their hacks? Was there a reason you had to restart, or have you not restarted at all?

 

[masterquestmq]

I'd say about twice.

Sometimes things can't be perfect, you just gotta do and run with it

 

[Nex]

Three times.

First time for lack of overall quality
Second time for the very same reason (although it was better than the first)
Third time because of major corruption being noticed way too late

 

[JordanB500]

i had to do this 3 times as well, and i found a better way to store all my progress without any losses afterwards every bit of progress was added via ips patches so i could use a base rom and apply all the patches independent of each other and i have also made composite patches to tyest how individual patches would work together

 

[BluRose]

imagine having gotten anywhere on a project to begin with

nah i've restarted mine a bunch of times
back on binary it was because it sucked and all i really had were tiles
and then mrds's rombase was bugged
and then on decomp all i really had were a ton of buggy features
this has been done twice
and now i'm looking to move over to nds hacking because of hgss' follower system if i'm being honest

 

[OmegaHysteria]

Once and i was makeing a rom hack called ''Pokemon Crimson''
I was about to launch it and i was fixing a small amount of things when the rom got corrupted,i cried a lot that day....

 

[Dr. Seuss]

It's been exactly three times I restart and move my current project to a new rombase:

First time was due to a bug with the Town Map that for some reason crashed the game whenever it was opened back in 2016.
The second one was due to a bug with new overworld sprites inserted and I didn't have any working backup back in 2017
The last one was a month ago when I realize my game was carrying several bugs since 2015 affecting real hardware emulation and I had to move an almost complete hack to a clean rom, but now taking advantage of the CFRU (I'm still working on it)

 

[Ioannillikq]

i could use a base rom and apply all the patches independent of each other and i have also made composite patches to tyest how individual patches would work together

 

[eatthepear]

I restarted my project a couple months ago because I realized it was too ambitious. I realized I actually wanted something much simpler to implement.

 

[tartarsauce]

feelsbadman :(

 

[Pyxal]

feelsbadman :(

whathappenedtospacesbetweenwords ?

But yes, it does.

 

[Burnt_Cheeseballs]

I didn't fully reset development of my fan game so far, but I did delete all the maps and rebuild them. Trust me, the maps I deleted sucked. My fan game's current maps are still kind of mediocre.

 

[Meister_anon~Master_o f_None]

I was slowly adding things to my rom as I figured out how to change what I wanted piece by piece, then I hit a wall.
took a break and made a different hack with cfru.

So I'm tentatively thinking of switching to cfru, to make adding some of the features I wanted easier.

So pretty much taking a hiatus, and just learning a lot more.

 

[FireFig]

My story was quite the crazy one lol!

Firstly, I started ROM hacking at 2017 when I wasn't even on this great community, so I knew nothing bout bases and stuff just Advance map, XSE, NSE and me.

Then, I took a huge break like three years cause I wasn't making any progress or more accurately I didn't have a strong idea, I was ever changing. And also I was falling behind on academics

Then I joined this community at June 2020, after a long time, I started going through the resource forum and found JPAN hacked engine and MrDS base. At that time CFRU didn't exist I presume? Unlike last time, this time I had an epic story! So I started making maps with ikarus tile set patch and put together a very small team for moral support only, lol. And I started scripting and stuff, but then after a few months...

I refreshed my project because there was a huge game crashing bug every time I encounter a Pokemon. So this time it was finally coming together. I inserted the maps again and I insert Pokemon till gen 7 manually and then it finally arrived...

CFRU So at first I didn't like it, I thought its better to stay with JPAN, not only it was easier to patch but also I don't have a WiFi or some kind of unlimited data, so I wasn't able to install devkit. But after a long heated conversation and constant blocking and unblocking with Upsurge on discord. And also by constant urging by my moral supports (teammates) I decided to go with ...CFRU.

Now finally I settled with CFRU with a brand new clean ROM. And am currently 5% into beta 1. Lol it has been a huge process of trials and errors. I suffered a heavy loss of time and constant scoldings from parents, lol. But still haven't given up!

 

[Le pug]

Hmm ... those that remember me know why I retired.
But with pokeemerald and porymap, hmm ... this might change things.

 

[Meister_anon~Master_o f_None]

But after a long heated conversation and constant blocking and unblocking with Upsurge on discord.

😂
I've never had to go that far when working with him, but I completely understand lol. He doesn't minx words. ;)

Anyway glad you're still with us on your project. Good luck. I've recently decided to take my main hack over to CFRU as well, that combined with Hex maniac advance has been all I need for practically everything/anything.

I kind of always knew I have to go into asm or decomp to get some of the stuff I wanted done. and I was just able to move forward again with some decomp by starting to learn C.

So if you need to rationalize this hobby and the time investment to anyone, you can say it teaches you several diverse skills that can be applied to other more professional endeavors. ;)

Project management, data organization, how to compile, programming language etc. Like I said I'm learning C++ just for my romhack.

I never would have thought to try learning a computer language otherwise.


Using C will help you edit the cfru files if you want to make any big mechanic or feature changes, since all the files are in C.

I recommend using notepad+ and visual studio community 2019. with the C++ workload.

 

[Outwitter]

Hmm ... those that remember me know why I retired.
But with pokeemerald and porymap, hmm ... this might change things.

So, Pokeemerald / CFRU is able to attract former stalwarts back to hacking again, huh? If everything turns out all right, is it going to be Fat Kid or Discovery that is going to be rebooted? Both were amazing pojects indeed! Hoping that things do change... :)

 

[Le pug]

Well with binary hacking, going through and doing everything again would've taken a lot of time. I can easily cut that time in half with the new resources from pokeemerald. If I were to reboot anything, it'd be Pokemon Discovery. Though I have had an idea floating around for awhile as well. Not sure yet what I'd go with. I see there is some interest in Discovery still, and the beta 2.0 that sadly was lost was going to be way more amazing that the first one ... so maybe that could be something I go for. We'll see :D

 

[Outwitter]

Well, Discovery was an amazing project for sure. It was genuinely giving vibes of a hack that was woven around the ideas of exploration and discovery! Everyone here on PC would have loved to see it to completion. Fat Kid, however, was outright hilarious! It made me giggle so many times, I had lost count. Every single dialogue was loaded with crispy humour and I made sure that I am not missing any one of them. It's pretty difficult to choose among the two, to be honest. Both were quite promising, and I hope that at least one of them sees the light of day. Looking forward for whatever you are planning to come up with...

 

[jojobear13]

It took me three or four tries to backport GBC colors from Yellow into Red/Blue. On each previous attempt I scrapped all my work and went on hiatus for a few weeks before starting over. Each attempt kept revealing more and more roadblocks: palette data not loading, palettes not converting, palettes not being written to the GBC, not enough bank space for the necessary functions, colors loading incorrectly in the OAM, not having the slightest inkling about what some functions are even doing and why. Yet each time I came back to it with a greater understanding of how things are supposed to work. I focused on implementing one function at a time and verifying that it was doing its job before moving on. Eventually, everything just started falling into place.