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Best (legal) way to get my hands dirty with coding

olderpokemonfan

    • 39
    Posts
    7
    Years
    • Seen Jul 30, 2022
    Hi,

    I'm really interested in creating my own games, and I've been interested in Pokemon ROM hacks, but obtaining the ROM, as I understand it, is illegal, so I don't really want to go that route.

    Plus, since this exercise is mainly to produce a nice looking game while learning advanced coding, I would like to know if there are any tutorials out there that would help me build something from near scratch, no ROMS, but something that shows me how to write something in the format of a ROM, that way hopefully I can side step that rule and create a good fan game.

    I realize that fan games in general may be frowned upon by game companies, but I think fan fiction and fan games are normally tolerated and not necessarily illegal, as long as the original creators are credited.
     
    Sigh, I hate the paradox that is fan game making. Technically, you aren't helping their companies make money, so it's illegal, but fan games are a good way to learn the mechanics of your favorite games and how they are made.

    Since fan games are technically illegal, is there a way to share them with other people without getting in trouble?
     
    You do realize that all of the fangames displayed here are in the form of patches right? Distributing modified ROMs is definitely illegal, but patches aren't as far as I know. Pokecommunity probably wouldn't exist if people were distributing ROMS of any kind. If you want to share your ROM hack, use a patcher such as Lunar IPS to create .IPS patches and share only the patch. Obtaining ROMs is nobody's business but one's own.

    edit: You could also look into Pokemon Essentials which is probably more "legal" for your taste. It won't require a ROM.
    https://pokemonessentials.wikia.com/wiki/About
     
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    Pokemon Essentials, as mentioned above, is probably what you're looking for. It's a fanmade engine of 3rd generation Pokemon that you can use for RPG Maker XP. Getting started with that would be the best course of action.
    If you want to start it from scratch then building your own engine in any game-making software to emulate whatever generation you want to emulate would be your best bet. Things like the aforementioned RMXP and Sphere being the two most popular. Some people used Unity as well.
     
    From what I understand, OP is looking for GBA Game development resource, as he wants to create a ROM from scratch. You'll have a hard time, but your best bet would probably be to read and reread the Tonc guides and perhaps use their public libraries and tools. GBATEK and cowbite are also good references to read while doing so. A lot of the knowledge from those days aren't around anymore, with older resources taken down.

    That said, GBA dev isn't very complicated and is mostly about basic C and learning the hardware. Good luck, and if you like programming close to the old metal, then you'll like GBA game dev :)
     
    Yes, I was considering trying to write a GBA hack from scratch, but, since I'm a beginner, I had no idea where to really start, so I gave in to downloading Pokemon Essentials. It's not too bad; it has almost all of the mechanics of the original GBA games, but I'm having trouble finding an active community of users to help with questions. Plus, I've found no complete tutorials for remaking a Fire Red Pokemon game using the software, and I did want to rewrite it into GBA so that I could distribute it as an ips patch, too. I'm really interested in the mechanics of the games and game development in general, but good solid resources that allow me to jump right into game development are hard to find. Programming resources provide a basic overview of programming in general, but I'm a hands-on kind of person.

    I've found some good GBA tutorials, though, so I'm planning to look over those and try to learn them. It would just be nice to be part of a community of learners I could share my questions, struggles, and demos with.

    I've heard that you can do a lot with Pokemon Essentials--I did manage to do some basic stuff, like create cutscenes, change the intro, make uncatchable Pokemon, create following Pokemon (although it glitches up), and add my own "fakemon," but working through bugs on my own is frustrating, and my enthusiasm for this project is waning. I'm not sure how much I'm learning about game programming in general, and the summer's almost over, so I'll have less time to play around anyway. A good active community to help me answer my questions quickly would be nice and would probably help keep me motivated.

    Yeah, the legalities of it all does kind of concern me, too, as fan games aren't always tolerated by Nintendo. Look at what happened to Pokemon Uranium as an example.

    I'm also not really sure how much this is helping me with learning game programming in general, as the GBA is an older system and modern games don't even use 2D graphics anymore.
     
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