About: About Sideshow Showcase / Submission Guidelines

[Hiroshi Sotomura]

About Sideshow Showcase / Submission Guidelines

Welcome to Sideshow Showcase! This section plays host to fan games that are not significantly altered from their base game, and would otherwise be unsuitable for our Progressing ROM Hacks and ROM Hacks Studio sections.

Threads in this section are limited to ROM hacks, and are subject to approval — we review every ROM hack submitted in this section for its suitability and its adherence to the global PokéCommunity rules and Sideshow Showcase's submission guidelines (this thread). Threads requesting general help with your own hacks must be posted in their relevant sections — threads seeking ROM hacking help or help with specific hacks will be deleted from the moderation queue.

All posts in this section are also subject to the global PokéCommunity rules.

Submission Guidelines

All threads for hacks in this section must meet the following criteria. ROM hack threads may be rejected from the approval queue if they do not meet these requirements, or may be delisted if they fail to meet these requirements after the fact. The interpretation and qualification of this criteria is subject to moderator discretion.

A feature list or overview

Include some form of overview of your game — your goals in creating it, a list of features, etc. What does your game change? What do you bring to the table?

Screenshots

Hacks submitted to Sideshow Showcase should have at least two screenshots detailing changes made in the game. Screenshots appearing to be largely vanilla, or showcase nothing (i.e. a title screen) will not be counted.

Credits

Where applicable, submit explicit credits for all work by others, whether that be for art assets, music, custom code, maps, etc. The user which submits the thread should have contributed a significant amount of work to the ROM hack.

Additional restrictions

Download requirements

You are not required to include a download for games in this section, but if you do, these must be in the form of a patch (such as .bps, .ups or .xdelta) or a collection of files intended to replace the original game files (i.e. modified romFS files). ROMs, ISOs or otherwise complete playable copies of games are copyrighted content and are not permitted to be posted. You must also indicate the game being patched (the base game). This download must be in the form of a direct download link, an attachment, or a page on a website that provides the download. Affiliate links (including ad-supported pay-per-click links) are not permitted. Links to sites or online communities (i.e. other forums, Discord servers, etc.) that require a signup to download your game are not permitted. This can be supplemented with, but not replaced by, a link to the source code.

Downloads and game content may not be monetized

Submitted fan game content on PokéCommunity cannot include any form of monetization strategy. This includes microtransactions, linking to donation platforms such as PayPal, Ko-Fi, Kickstarter, and any other platform that allows you to make money. Any attempt to monetize your game will lead to the immediate delisting of your fan game, and your account may be actioned.

Optional Guidelines

These are not required in hacks you submit, but will greatly aid users in playing your games.

Include MD5 or CRC32 hashes

Patch formats such as BPS and UPS include hashes of the base game, which helps verify if users are patching the correct ROM. As well as including the game to be patched, the region/language and the version of the game (1.0, 1.1, etc.), consider including an MD5 or CRC32 hash of the base game and your compiled ROM. You can get a hash of your files using Get-FileHash (Windows), the crc32 or md5 tools on your Mac or Linux device, or the hashes provided by ROM Patcher JS.

Test your games on actual hardware, or accurate emulators

If you have a flashcart that matches the game cartridge your game was designed for, test it on them and make sure things work, so people aren't reporting glitches that shouldn't be happening. Do not test with VisualBoyAdvance (or VBA-M) exclusively, as it is considered obsolete and inaccurate. Crashes on hardware that don't occur in VBA are a VBA issue. Consider compatibility with emulators such as mGBA (for GB/GBA games) or MelonDS (for DS games).

Contact a moderator for help in this section

Feel free to get in touch with a moderator and we'll help you as best as we can if you need help with posting in this section, including the criteria shown above.

If you're waiting for your thread to be approved, and it has been more than 48 hours since submission, feel free to contact us so we can review it.