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Survey: How hard is it creating a rom alone?

GoingToHaveABadTime

GoingToHaveABadTime

    • 25
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    9
    Years
    • Seen Dec 2, 2016
    so earlier maybe a month or two ago i was learning how to rom hack but the sheer overwhelmingness of it all eventually turned me off, learning how to add tilesets was hard enough. often enough the rom hacks i see often have many people who had worked on scripting or tiles and such, which takes months or years to fully complete.

    on a scale of 1/10 how hard is it to work on game alone then?
     
    Creating "teams" will hardly ever get you anywhere.
    Try learning a little bit of everything and keep improving. With time, you will be able to handle it by yourself.
     
    Yesterday i slammed by laptop shut because i was annoyed at Advance map 1.92.

    I was thinking "if its that hard to understand how to slightly edit Pallet Town how could i ever do a hack myself?" I ended up opening my laptop and mapping all night long. It doesn't look like much but it is mine and i am happy. Even if I am only remapping FireRed entirely without touching a script im happy. Baby steps is the key.

    Tbh its a question of motivation. Do you REALLY wanna learn or is it just a small spark of interest that will fade away.

    This will probably help you as much as it has helped me;

    https://www.pokecommunity.com/threads/369646

    https://www.pokecommunity.com/threads/161616

    I would say if you are learning from scratch and you are working alone. it would take maybe 2-3 years to get a final release ROM Hack out.
     
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    I did some ROM hacking, and honestly the only hard part about it is mapping, because of GBA limitations and just getting ideas. That's why for my upcoming ROM hack I'm making the story so that I can use Kanto again, but with a slight redo.
     
    If you try to make a big team, you're GoingToHaveABadTime. You're better off doing most things yourself. There's nothing wrong with having someone help you every now and then, but you've gotta have everything down if you actually want to make a hack.
     
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    Once you get over that initial learning curve and can do a bit of everything yourself you'll find that ROM hacking itself isn't that difficult. For myself, it's the other aspects of making a hack that are difficult: music composition, spriting, etc. Give me a completed sprite and I have no problems, but asking me to make one myself? Not so easy.

    As far as teams go, I think the fact that you rarely ever see team hacks go far should be telling enough of the problems faced by them. Working by yourself you have complete control over the design of the game. In a team, you have to split not only work but the creative process and it is this and commitment issues that I see as the main issues with teams.
     
    Not going to lie mate, it is HARD. That being said, it is doable, and a lot more rewarding. Just choose one thing to learn/focus on at a time, make yourself a test ROM you can try new things on. Slowly but surely you'll get the hang of it.

    Hard as in it's all on you, and your time only. Sure, progress would go faster having a team I suppose, since you can have one person focus on each task, but this could get messy pretty quickly. Plus, as it's already been said, if you've got a team you won't just lose a bit of creative control - you lose all of it. Nobody, literally nobody, would work on a hack having everything dictated exactly as things should be when they might not even like the idea therefore won't be motivated to do it, plus there's the chance of clashing over ideas. If you go it alone, you can do what you want the way you want to do it =)

    EDIT: Slightly off topic (?) but still a good point to make imo, especially when alone ~

    Hacks don't happen overnight. Sure, you can make some types of hack quickly, but that depends on what kind of hack you want to make - the faster-progressing ones being things like 386 patches or increased difficulty. If you want a hack with a new region/story/characters/the works, it's going to take a LOT longer. The comments I'm making next are referring to the latter.

    For example, you don't need new tilesets. I don't care what anyone says on this subject; you don't, you can make a perfectly decent game using original tiles. Graphics don't make a game. That'd cut the development time, as would things like keeping original sprites and features, etc. Sadly, if you do want those kinda things, gotta put time into it. There aren't any public tiles for what you wanted in your map? Better learn to draw them yourself then, etc. Development time really does depend on what you want to do. You need to know that it could take over a year, and you need to be okay with that. =)
     
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