The common pitfalls of ROM hacks

What are some common pitfalls that you think ROM hacks fall into?

For me personally, it's difficulty. I just want to experience what a hack has to offer, and one thing hindering me from getting to those good parts of a ROM hack is an unfair difficulty curve, or a random difficulty spike. I believe this is caused by lack of trainers to fight before facing the gym.

There's nothing wrong with challenge, but when a game throws insanely high levels that make you have to grind your team up. It bogs down the experience considerably. If I want challenge, I will play a hack that advertises itself as challenging. But if I play some random hack or game that I think looks interesting, only to find out how hard it is. It just turns me off of the experience, because I want to get to the good parts of a game and not have to grind up my team to level 16 to face the first gym.

One hack I think does this well is Pokemon Bronze. It gives you sufficient trainers to fight before facing the gyms, and the gyms never feel over leveled compared to you. So you can just experience the game.

But those are just my gripes. So what do you think are some common ROM hack pitfalls?

I personally do not like easy ROMhacks where you can just spam your starter early. They have to purposely frustrate the player to keep the spices hot.
Easy to say, DARK SOULS kinda like.

It is understandable for a ROMhack to be difficult, because they waste their time and passion into it. And i believe people won't want their ROMhack to be finished just in 3 hours. While they perfected it for months or even years.
Personally i don't mind grinding as long as it is reasonable. Early battles should be fair, they have to be beatable. (No stronger moves like Earthquake, Flamethrower, or etc)

hey guys! I am new here and I want to learn about basics of pokemon rom hacking! I mean how I can create my own rom. Can someone help me.

Child Amnesiac said:

So what do you think are some common ROM hack pitfalls?

Click to expand...

Ambition vastly exceeding skill. I said it elsewhere, but Pokemon ROM hacking is awash with heartbreakers - grand designs which are destined to crash fatally against the rocks of reality.

I think this is true, be ambitious. But be realistic.
I'm not going to fit 8 regions into my game with a 100 hour Shakespearian story.

For instance, one thing I'm trying to be mindful of is while writing the story for my game. Is to not make it too too complicated.
I definitely want discussions of philosophy and such but I don't want to go so out there with the story that it loses people's interest.
The best way I can think to achieve this is by grounding my story into interesting characters.

It's not a bad thing to make art, or Rom hacks. Just for yourself and what you want. But if you are interested in having an audience for your hack you need to keep in mind that not everyone likes the same things you do or is looking for the same things out of a Rom hack
Basically striking a balance between making the game you want to make and not alienating most of the people who you want playing your hack.

Too many rom hacks try to "fix" the level curve or "adjust" the level curve for difficulty without really understanding what really goes into the default level curve and why it was done that way. EXP gained from trainers along the way is a huge factor. Yeah you can up the levels in Crystal, but then you leave the player with needing to grind gravelers in victory road for hours. I'm sitting here looking at a statistical analysis of Crystal vs Red, and I'm seeing some interesting patterns in Crystal.

jojobear13. Yeah I somewhat agree with this, I think upping the curve is ok if it's not ridiculous. Especially considering most people have options to speed up the gameplay on their GBA/DS simulator of choice. Many people find grinding out levels to be tedious while some don't mind as much.
Good to strike a balance I think.

Seems honestly like balance is the key. Knowing if your game is too hard or too easy is very important. Even if the aim is for the game to be "hard" there's a fine line between hard and not-fun/unfair. Also, mis-matching assets also is odd to me. If someone created a trainer sprite from scratch, it tends to clash with the rest and the same goes for tilesets. Whenever I see someone has put in the effort to create most non-story trainer sprites and entire tilesets from scratch, or to re-use most tilesets and trainers from the basegame, I feel more immersed by what I'm doing.

Funny thing I noticed about Crystal version. You might have heard a rumor that Gen 2 is meant to be played with a team of 3 instead of 6. Well, there's actually something to that. Turns out the total amount of exp gained from trainer battles up to the E4 is a bit under half the amount from Gen 1. I don't think it was intended to have a team of 3 though. I suspect it to be a result of saving space on the cartridge and trying to stuff in the post-game. The lower exp potential pre-E4 is due to there being far fewer trainers in Johto than in Gen 1 Kanto, and their parties are slightly smaller. Raising levels is actually a really inefficient way to provide more exp (enemy 'mon strength rises far faster than exp as level increases). All you end up with is a region of over-leveled 'mons beating on your exp-starved party. The best way to inject exp into the region and fix a level curve is to add more enemy trainer 'mons: either add more trainers or increase the parties of existing trainers. Johto would see a huge improvement if every enemy trainer carried 4 to 6 pokemon with no change to the actual level curve.

Hubris. All too often I see things that shoot for the moon yet never ask themselves if it would work well in Pokemon, let alone any game. Yet even then they don't really have the knowlege or any steps towards reconciling old and new ideas.

Heck, I've made that mistake too.