[Other✓] I would love some guidance and wisdom from the veterans of this community

[reverentOne]

Hey all! I recently discovered the ROM Hacking community and can't believe I have missed out on it all these years! Pokémon Emerald was one of my favorite games growing up and basically every year I go back and play it again. I have a huge love for other Pokémon games too and just gaming in general. The last few years I have been playing a lot of League of Legends. After finding the ROM hacking community I discovered this Pokémon League of Legends Emerald Hack. I started playing it and it was way fun at first, but there where so many things wrong with it and if I didn't already Love Pokémon and League of Legends I probably would have thought it was a poorly made game. Part way through I got the grand idea to make my own version of the game.

I Want to change all the Pokémon up for League Characters, redo the map, Revise some of the story. Aside from a few quality of life changes, I don't want to change the mechanics, pacing, leveling, and really most aspects of the game that much. I think Emerald is a masterpiece and there is no way I can completely remake the game and make it better. Basically, I want to feel like I am playing Emerald just with league characters instead of Pokémon, a slightly different map and world, and new dialogue and story.

I would love some thoughts from veteran members of the community. I have quite a few questions.

First, how open is the community to hacks that change the Pokémon into something else? I understand that first and foremost everyone here are Pokémon fans, so I'm not sure how receptive and helpful the community will be because of the League of Legends theme.

Second, how long will it take and what chances do you give me for succeeding? It would be me and a buddy working on it. We are both college educated, he has a job as an electrical engineer and I am about to graduate in Economics and Math. Over the Summer I would probably put 20-30 hours a week in and my buddy would probably put 10 or so. After the summer I will have less time but still probably 10-20 hours a week. From what I have heard coding is not needed, but if it were, I can code in python, c++, stata, and java. My buddy is proficient in C and has worked with Assembly in the past. Money is not a huge issue as we can afford any software necessary, and may end up commissioning out the creation of the pixelated league characters as well.

Third, from your experience is ROM hacking worth it? I see it as a fun hobby to do with my good friend. It would be an absolutely magical thing if I could create a well polished, well balanced, fun to play game that fuses my 2 favorite games together. I will definitely publish it so others can enjoy it if they like, but that is not really my motivator. I love Pokémon, I love League of Legends, and I Love building and creating stuff.

Fourth, What resources do you recommend? There are a ton of tools out there and they are very hard to keep track of. Most tools have not been updated for at least 4 years and some tools are over 10 years without an update. I have read basically all the guides I could find. I read a couple guides going back to about 2010. I watched a really well made YouTube video series by Anthroid from 6 years ago. I read posts where people ask what tools to use as recently as a couple years ago, but there is no consistency in what people recommend. Even the beginners directory was posted over 4 years ago. What would I need for my purposes?

I am very serious about this project and have already spent a good amount of time thinking about it and trying to learn some of the tools needed. I would love some direction and guidance from a veteran of this community. You can direct message me. I am very active on reddit. I'm open to communicating over discord or any other way. If all you can offer is a link or a reference that is much appreciated as well. Thank you so much in advance!

 

[Asith]

First, how open is the community to hacks that change the Pokémon into something else? I understand that first and foremost everyone here are Pokémon fans, so I'm not sure how receptive and helpful the community will be because of the League of Legends theme.

Subjective, of course. But there are plenty of hacks that change pokemon into something else. I've seen everything from Digimon to Marios to Yu-Gi-Ohs to Dragon Ball. They are not looked down on by the community or anything of the sort. I will say that the popularity of those hacks is based on the latter franchise though. For example, I wouldn't play a hack that adds Yu Gi Oh monsters if I'm not already a Yu-Gi-Oh fan. That being said, league of legends is already very popular, so I think plenty of people would enjoy your hack. If you want more context, I'm making a hack that replaces pokemon with the most niche, completely unheard of franchise imaginable, Spectrobes, and the response has still been good. If that complete obscurity can make it, you have nothing to worry about.

Second, how long will it take and what chances do you give me for succeeding? It would be me and a buddy working on it. We are both college educated, he has a job as an electrical engineer and I am about to graduate in Economics and Math. Over the Summer I would probably put 20-30 hours a week in and my buddy would probably put 10 or so. After the summer I will have less time but still probably 10-20 hours a week. From what I have heard coding is not needed, but if it were, I can code in python, c++, stata, and java. My buddy is proficient in C and has worked with Assembly in the past. Money is not a huge issue as we can afford any software necessary, and may end up commissioning out the creation of the pixelated league characters as well.

There are two forms of pokemon rom hacking these days.
One is binary, where you take a ROM file and edit it. No coding required, unless you want to do some heavy mechanic editing in which case you'd use Assembly or the CFRU. Doesn't sound like you'll be needing either of those for your purposes though.
The second is decomp, which makes use of pokeemerald. It is a decompilation of emerald's source code in C. You don't start with a ROM, but rather you can change the source code just like developing any other program, and then build a brand new rom from source.
Both these methods are completely viable. At first I was going to recommend the decomp route for you since you are both experienced in programming already. However, if all you're doing is replacing pokemon, maps, story, and QoL, then that's arguably a much simpler process in binary than in decomp. Decomp gives you the freedom to do anything completely custom; binary is easy to grasp and allows you to do anything you need to make a game with the pokemon system at its heart. Binary also has the CFRU if you ever want to get a little more custom as a bonus. Essentially, decomp might be overkill for your purposes and tends to overcomplicate simple edits (for laymans, anyway). Either way, I do recommend doing your own research into both of these and deciding for yourself which would get you to your ideal end-goal with the least resistance.

Third, from your experience is ROM hacking worth it? I see it as a fun hobby to do with my good friend. It would be an absolutely magical thing if I could create a well polished, well balanced, fun to play game that fuses my 2 favorite games together. I will definitely publish it so others can enjoy it if they like, but that is not really my motivator. I love Pokémon, I love League of Legends, and I Love building and creating stuff.

It's worth it for people who enjoy it. Judging by your description, you don't even need to be asking this question ;)

Fourth, What resources do you recommend? There are a ton of tools out there and they are very hard to keep track of. Most tools have not been updated for at least 4 years and some tools are over 10 years without an update. I have read basically all the guides I could find. I read a couple guides going back to about 2010. I watched a really well made YouTube video series by Anthroid from 6 years ago. I read posts where people ask what tools to use as recently as a couple years ago, but there is no consistency in what people recommend. Even the beginners directory was posted over 4 years ago. What would I need for my purposes?

I mostly hack in binary, so I can tell you that all you'd really need (from what I understand of your vision) is:
1) HexManiacAdvance. It's a hex editor with a million additional functions for visualising the data inside pokemon roms. Editing all aspects of the monsters is super simple, and it handles all the tricky bug-causing areas for you, so you can focus on design. It can handle editing everything, except for:
2) AdvanceMap (version 1.92; later versions are buggy). Bit of a mess, but still the best map editor out there since HMA doesn't do maps. It'll get the job done, though. This is your tool for editing the world, combined with:
3) XSE. A script editor, for editing the story. HMA can also do scripts, but XSE is better right now. This is where a lot of people mess up, so please take the time to look at a tutorial before messing with your main project. It's very easy to break things here. Make it a habit to backup your rom often, so if something goes wrong (which it will) you can just roll back to the old version.

That might have been a bit overwhelming, but forum info dump posts usually are. Since you mentioned discord, I recommend joining Anthroyd's rom hacking server for an active community of both binary and decomp hackers. Might be useful to get more insight by asking questions there; people are always happy to help