FireRed hack: Ghostchu

[longlostsoldier]

Legend of Ghostchu

Pikachu is dead.

After reaching the top, where is there left to go but down? What happens when you don't make it to the Pokemon Center in time?

After becoming the Champion and being defeated by Crystal/Gold, Red/Leaf was left with a fainted team out in the middle of the wilderness full of dangerous pokemon. And with Team Rocket sympathizers still lurking to this day, the ex-champ had plenty of enemies.

It was a recipe for disaster. In a single day, Red lost not only his crown as undefeated champion, but his entire team of Pokemon.

Snorlax, Espeon, Charizard, Venusaur, Blastiose and...

...Pikachu, are all dead.

But a certain rodent doesn't want to stay that way. And it wants revenge.

Hack of: Firered
Status: Not very far, has 1 boss fight

Screenies

oldish screenie of the first shiny I found, but I had no pokeballs >_>:

Features:

~ Ghostly Pikachu, of course, and Follow Me with said ghostie, in some areas. A little buggy admittedly, but functional.
~ The ghost haunts you... even if you try to release it. Forever. At least until a certain plot anyway. Why would you release pikablu pikachu anyway in a hack entirely about pikablu?
~ Speaking of said plot, you may have the choice at some point to try and get rid of the ghost pokemon haunting you.
~ Start higher level than level 5, because that is overdone and kinda boring. Also, two starters. If maxed out levels become a prob, I could always have a depowering event mwahahaha.
~ Talk to your ghost to see how it feels and to make sure it isn't trying to suck out your brains.
~ You are now an adult. So possibly jobs. Maybe get paid for filling out the pokedex.
~ Surf with Pikachu; workin' on a new minigame. After the first tournament, find a water spot Pikachu hangs out next to and you can surf!
~ More move tutoring items / people events, meaning more than 50 TM-type items. 16 new gen moves in new items / events, plus a few old TMs replaced by new gen moves:

Spoiler:

Dark Pulse
Rock Climb (Plus maybe also special rocks you can climb, altho I don't like spriting so this is only a maybe)
Roost
Shadow Claw
X Scissor
Venoshock
Stone Edge
Giga Impact
Flash Cannon
Dazzle (MrDollSteak's name for a new gen fairy move Dazzling Gleam; a fairy TM is I admit what I wanted most, since that'll really change play)
U Turn (this one will be teachable by a person, possib also an item if I feels it, tho not likely)
Wild Charge
Poison Jab
Focus Blast
Payback

Dragon Tail (replacing old tm 02 dragon claw)
Brine (replaces water pulse)
Ice Shard (replaces hail)
Hone Claws (I forget what I replaced. roar or something.)
Grass Knot (bullet seed)

Replaced moves, old tms and old move tutor moves, can be added as new move tutoring items / people events.

I chose these mainly for what they offer to bring balance and variety; the game really needed a bug TM, for instance, and with the physical special split some moar variety. Feel free to offer suggestions; currently I can't add any more newgen ones into new TM items, only replace old TMs with them, so they involve more work (since I probably would have to add a new TM with the old TM move, replace the description, etc).

I'll probably implement, tho' lower priority:
1 Bodyslam TM (already done, first one I tried, as such it's a little rough around the edges but it works. Teachable to all but Ditto, Smeargel, Magikarp.)
2 False Swipe TM (fake TM, but good enough; will be teachable to normal types, Scyther, Sandshrew and Sandslash, probably.)
3 Rock Slide TM (Teachable to ground/rocks. Higher priority, def on my to-do list.)
4 Dream Eater TM (Teachable to ghosts / psychics)
5 Mimic TM (Teachable to just about anyone)
6 Thunderwave TM (electric)
7 Sleep Talk TM (all)
8 Substitute TM (all)
9 Swords Dance TM (all)
10 Swagger TM (all)
11 Counter TM (fighting)
12 Will o Wisp TM (teachable to fire types)
13 Water Pulse (water pokemon, maybe normals too)
14 Hail (ice)
15 Bullet Seed
16 Mega Punch
17 Mega Kick
18 Seismic Toss
19 Double Edge
20 Metronome

I might call them MT (Move Tutoritems) to distinguish them from the normal 50 TMs, perhaps. Please tell me which you want to see most/first, so I know which ones to prioritize. 50 + 16 + 20 = 86 TMs, just 4 short of 100. >_> maybe I'll add 4 more, dunno. seems kinda a pain, and if the hack ends up being on the shorter side a little pointless to have 100 TMs.

~ Fairy type, obvs.
~ You've done the collect badge / become Champ thing already. Fight in tournaments instead, maybe with Anti-Grinding level-cap or all-opponents-same-level features, or other special styles like Double Battle Tourneys and Single Type Tourneys. Possibly face Other Champions in a World Tournament for the title of Pokemon Master / World Champion. First tournament is a 3 pokemon only tournament.
~ Some trainers will re-fight you if you talk to them again.
~ Shiny rates have been increased; amusingly I mostly encounter them on trainers. There is one trainer who says they don't have a shiny, but there is about a 255 chance that they do.
~ Pikachu and Raichu's stats have been slightly boosted, so even though lightball doesn't work with Raichu the attack power will stay the same, and Pikachu takes hits a little better (seriously, many people dumped their Pikachu in Yellow because Pikachu is as weak as Bellsprout. Splashing frikkin Bellsprout.) with higher health and defense (below Raichu's of course, which is unchanged). If I have Pikachu evolvable, I won't 'punish' you for evolving, altho the sprite probably won't change from pikachu >_>
~There will probably be an event where Pikachu explains why they refused to evolve before, and why they hated pokeballs and such.
~ On the off-chance people don't like blue pikachus, I've made shiny pikachu the blue ghostly one, and normal pikachu is yellow; by default your pikachu will be shiny. I will release a version where your pikachu is yellow/nonshiny if people want.
~ Splash, the worst move in the game, is now used by characters as a swear-word. 'You are splashing useless.' //for the lulz
~ Possibly you will be encouraged to form multiple pokemon teams for different tournaments, so easy team building with varying high to low level wild pokes and more species variety. At the least several Hoenn and Johto mons.
~ Maybe politics. What are the ramifications of science learning Mew is the ancestor of all pokemon, something not spoken of in any legend? (*this was canon at one point, I don't know if it still is)
~ Choose whether or not to get revenge on the people who killed your old team, maybe. As in, decide whether to murder them or not. If that's not too dark for a hack? :P And if it ends up not being too much of a pain to code in a alternate ending.
~ People/Pokemon may die in the story.
~ Form your own Team, like Rocket only Good*; in this darker world, one person can't do it all or be in every location at once. A smart Team would gang up on you or use one person to distract you while the rest carry out mischief in multiple locations.
~ In accordance with the above feature, I may implement playing as other characters with different pokemon, possibly ones that grow as your own normal team grows. Find people to recruit, and so on.

* - Well, okay, if you choose to murder people it won't be good. If so the police will go after ya. Although they'll probably do that anyway as you'd be vigilantes.

Known Bugs:
Followme sometimes spawns Pikachu a bit off position.
Followme sometimes makes Pikachu walk into you/other people.
Sometimes instead of black shadow Pikachu's reflection will look like a crazy hollow from bleach, red with a white mask. I consider this more a bonus.
Running with Pikachu makes Pikachu face the wrong way... >_>
Sometimes you can use Pikachu to walk through things. Awesome, but whatever.
If you use walk through walls you can sometimes get multiple Pikachu to follow you. Don't do that.
Game Breakers:
The move Toxic Spikes restarts the game[!]

Will probably not feature:

~ Lots of nice graphics, maps and sprites. I did go through the effort of making a titlescreen, but it's slightly glitchy just before it appears onscreen before some reason >_> so yeah, my skills are less than fantastical.
~ followme in many towns / near flypoints; if you go there your poke will stop following and refollow when you leave / or enter certain buildings. Makes logical sense the townspeople wouldn't want loose pokemon roaming their streets anyway; ever notice how trainers never challenge you right next to the pokecenter even though it would be an easy target? I bet it's illegal to do that. Less from being impossible and more being not my top priorities atm.
~ extreme length. I don't have the best attention span ever and also I'm just one person. So some plot elements may not end up being used 'cuz I'm easily bored.

Tools/Bases/Credits:

JPAN's Hacked Rom base
MrDollSteaks Fairy, Decap and Attack Rombase 1.5
Run Indoors Patch
Skip Controls Tutorial Patch
hackmews' checklevel ASM (I may or may not be using this, but crediting here anyway so I don't forget)
Possibly FBI Agent's Store Pokemon System asm at some point
Possibly FBI Agent's Change Level and Evolve asm
Touched and FBI Agent's Check Type ASM
Shiny Quagsire and Touched's followme asm (Sans warp. yeah, I know, my method of spamming follows everywhere is a pain in the butt, whatever)
Thumb Assembly Compiler
XSE
Gen 3 Suite
Gen 3 Tools
Icon Editor
LSA complete item editor
Nameless Sprite Editor (NSE 2)
Overworld Editor-Reborn
A-map
unlz-gba
A-text (for intro, finding text)
MEH (for connection edits)
transl-hexion hex editor
Pokecommunity Tutorials for teaching me.
VBA
Gamefreaks' Firered 1.0, of course

Hopefully I didn't forget anything.

Team:

Just me, Lost Soldier.

I came up with the expanded TM methods and the (kinda awful, and fairly obvious, it's just showsprite hidesprite spamming, except for the special surf, but whatever) longer followme script (not the asm!) myself. Currently I'm working on a surfing minigame and improving my TM item script (functional but kinda sucks), and maybe other new items.

About

Pikachu was my first starter. My very first. Always will be. Now the battery on my Yellow Cartridge is dying soon, after over 14 years. R.I.P Pikachu.

I'm a very, very shy person, but tentatively thought I'd share a hack with you all: my homage to my 'dead' starter. Posting now before I lose confidence and hide forever. This is also really just an excuse to play with Follow Me, because while I love Yellow, it gets a little boring playing the same thing over and over, and there aren't many (any?) hacks with a follow me script since it was just recently developed.

I might make a companion version prequel to this hack, which would be mostly a Yellow remake, although at this point I find replaying Yellow a little boring so it would not be exactly the same (and if a prequel to this, the ending might be, well, heh, quite a downer...)

Also, obligatory Pikablu joke. That is all.

Questions For Players:

How developed do you want a demo (or 'alpha/beta' if that's what they call it) to be? Do you care overly if the maps and graphics aren't super-messed with very much (not my favorite part)? Technically I could post a demo now if folks really wanted, there's just enough for a bit of a basic taster I guess. Or should I just wait until I have a huge chunk of the hack done?
Do you prefer a blue, gray, black or yellow Pikachu?
How difficult should the game be? I'm aiming for some degree of difficulty (and on my first playthrough soloing with just pikachu I died a lot, less after I buffed pika's stats so she gets OHKOed less often :P then again pikablu isn't really meant to solo, being more of a glass canon, but it still got pretty ridiculous when rattatas were one-shotting my chu with bite)
Would you prefer a typing other than Ghost/Electric? Maybe just electric? The ghost marowak was not a ghost type. Fairy / fey would also work, due to the mythical connections of fey with death and Pikachu being in the fairy egg group. Being part ghost increases the difficulty quite a lot due to the prevalence of dark and ghost type moves in this hack.

 

[Drake93]

??? your hack looks different, wait the beta 1

 

[anonyboy]

Well the concept looks good... FR tiles are great but you should replace buildings since they're overused... realy looking forward for this hack!

 

[Logical Cabbage]

I love the plot to this! I am so supporting this hack!

 

[esperance]

Oh, wow. This is a really neat idea!
The mapping isn't too bad either, although there are a few tile errors.

I look forward to seeing where you take this!

 

[AmazingCharizard]

Wow, this is much. And it like it, really a nasty(in a good way) idea you got there with Pikablu.

 

[Unbalanced]

Pikachu looks too cute to be a scary ghost are you going to change the sprite?
And blue color doesnt make it look like a ghost :D

 

[The ???]

That's kind of dark.. I love it!

 

[Red John]

Oh my gosh.... WHAT THE PIKABLU? Awesome plot and mapping i must say! I am lovin' this!

 

[longlostsoldier]

Goodness am I a newb, I thought there hadn't been any replies because I didn't get any notifications.

Anyway, thanks so much for the support you guys. My shyness was really eating at me but the responses have been nothing but nice (my brain convinced me you were going to bite me). Okay, I see I have a vote (or two?) for changing Pikachu's sprite, although I'm uncertain about how to make it menacing or ghostly if blue doesn't do the trick. Any thoughts on that would be appreciated - darker grayer coloring and red eyes maybe? Although red eyes is pretty dang corny, so maybe not. Since people seem to want sprite changes, I may get around to doing those, although I am not very good :P. I am glad you all like the dark plot and don't think it's too gruesome for a pokemon hack.

The Surf Minigame proved to be a massive pain, so while I finished it today (yay!), it's very, very simplistic (maze/race thingymaboble) and a little silly (hopefully not too silly for the dark theme). Now that I've finished that surf game I should be able to do a lot more a lot faster, since that was really a giant pain in the butt.

edit: Okay, so, I got a PM suggesting I disappear parts of body parts for Ghostchu's sprite, and I am thinking perhaps an aura like Gastly's would really make it look more other-worldly, although spriting really isn't my favorite thing I think that would not be tooooo obnoxious to do. I am kind of attached to the blue coloration due to the silly pikablu phenomena way back, but again, I can just make that a special shiny.