Trying to make small RomHack for SO, but I am little out of the loop. What do I need to know/have?

[Sul_Silver]

Yes, it's an odd request. just bear with me.

A little bit of background, my girlfriend constantly makes nice things for me. She knows how to play instruments, how to make jewelry, and how to bake really well. She has made me countless nice things before, but I feel like I often can't quite make as many or as nice of things in return. I can write relatively well, and I know my way around computers, but I still find it hard to come up with things to surprise her with.

But a couple of weeks back, I had an Idea. I dabbled with Rom hacks in the past, both in playing and making them (didn't end up well, but it was a nice experience). We both are big Pokémon fans, so I thought about making a small hack for her. It's unique, interesting, and extremely nerdy.

I don't plan on making a whole game, but updating sprites, battle mechanics, adding a few unique encounters here and there and adding a couple of areas would be nice. I am willing to make more changes, but I don't want it to take me a year to get it done.

So if any of you can help me finding the software and/or patches that I need to make this, that would be great. Seriously, any help is appreciated. I know this may sound weird, but I think this is genuinely something she'll enjoy. Thanks!

EDIT: I should add, I plan on using Emerald as a base, since I know she doesn't have a whole lot of experience with Hoenn in general and Emerald is just good to begin with.

 

[longlostsoldier]

Look up the disassembly.
It makes everything much easier, imo, even if you don't have much coding experience. For sprite swaps, all you literately have to do is go to the image and replace it with a different one of the same size (make sure the colors aren't too high also, of course, I think I remember them being restricted to 256ish colors; if you just edit the original image and make sure to always use the same palette from before or completely swap out one color for another that will work). There are a whole bunch of tutorials on how to use the Emerald disassembly, but I find with a disassembly the easiest way to learn is to just leap into the folders and start clicking around to see how things are structured, or look at someone's github that uses it as a base and see how they made their changes.
You can make literately any change that is actually possible with the Emerald disassembly. With tools, I'm not sure something like changing battle mechanics would really be possible unless you loooove digging into hexcode and adding ASM by hand (with you still having to figure out where the heck things are located), at which point you'd probably have a less stressful time just using the disassembly.

 

[Sul_Silver]

Look up the disassembly.
It makes everything much easier, imo, even if you don't have much coding experience. For sprite swaps, all you literately have to do is go to the image and replace it with a different one of the same size (make sure the colors aren't too high also, of course, I think I remember them being restricted to 256ish colors; if you just edit the original image and make sure to always use the same palette from before or completely swap out one color for another that will work). There are a whole bunch of tutorials on how to use the Emerald disassembly, but I find with a disassembly the easiest way to learn is to just leap into the folders and start clicking around to see how things are structured, or look at someone's github that uses it as a base and see how they made their changes.
You can make literately any change that is actually possible with the Emerald disassembly. With tools, I'm not sure something like changing battle mechanics would really be possible unless you loooove digging into hexcode and adding ASM by hand (with you still having to figure out where the heck things are located), at which point you'd probably have a less stressful time just using the disassembly.

Hey, thanks! I'll have a look for it. I remember trying to do some basic Hex editing and that was NOT very fun, so if something like changing the battle mechanics requires a lot of hexcode editing, I might avoid it.

Anyways, thanks again!