Game Over
Hey all, welcome to the final installment of the blog. In this post, I will be going over everything we have accomplished throughout the blog's history, running the edited game for myself, and discussing a bit about the future of ROM hacking.
To begin, I want to reiterate that this is the first time I have ever attempted ROM hacking. I am no prodigy when it comes to this medium; there are countless ROM hacks out there that make the work I have accomplished look like a teaspoon of water in the Pacific Ocean. This blog was a learning exercise for myself, and I wanted to convey what I had learned to you, dear reader. Though I have covered a fair deal of ground in hacking Pokemon FireRed, I have hardly scratched the surface in the sheer amount of depth and effort that goes into ROM hacking.
Although development in hacking the game could be difficult and even aggravating at times - getting Snappy to work and adjusting my MIDI instruments took me hours to complete and figure out - it was overall a very rewarding experience.
With this blog, I have covered how to edit and create your own Pokemon, transform any map and area in the game, implement customized music, and even develop our own custom scripted NPC complete with dialogue.
Here are some screenshots I took in-game to show off some of what we've accomplished!
Naturally, I named my character CS-475 to reference my class.
Behold, our rival character's lackluster homestead! We are able to move around in the spaces the house's previous roof tiles were. We are also still able to move around inside the house since I made sure to keep the door and the warping script for it intact.
Here we can meet our custom NPC! I happened to neglect assigning him a new sprite, so he shares the male player sprite by default. Fortunately, this helps him stick out more from the rest of the folk in Pallet Town, making him easy to spot on the map.
Our custom dialogue script worked! Upon interacting with the NPC, he spouts this line of dialogue. Pressing "A" will proceed with the script and close the dialogue box. He functions completely without error, making our experience with scripting a resounding success!
Unfortunately, I could not record footage in-game of our custom music in action. My recording software was very finicky for some reason when recording video footage of the game. I can report, however, that some of the instruments were not playing and the song did not loop properly. I was not using the All-Instruments patch with the copy of the ROM I was using, so its likely that my instruments did not sync up with the assigned voicegroup. As I noted in my post concerning custom music, implementing custom music is both a very tricky and time-consuming task. If you plan to use custom music in your ROM, I would prioritize it to the very latter portion of development as I don't think its worth all the effort.
I put a decent sum of time into hacking my FireRed ROM, and the output is very minute compared to other ROM hacks available online.
The above photo is from one of my favorite Pokemon ROM hacks of all time, Pokemon Adventure Red. The hack features customized sprites, new Pokemon, abilities, and evolutions originally not featured in Pokemon FireRed, a new title screen and introduction sequence, and a story and world map heavily inspired by the "Pokemon Adventures" Japanese manga. Information on the hack can be found here. This hack began production in 2013 and is still being updated and worked on to the present day. That is almost seven years of dedicated development to a ROM hack.
Despite being small and rather unheard of, the ROM hacking community is still very active to this day. The ROM hacking community consists of some of the most dedicated and passionate fans of their respective series. In more recent years, the community has grown under a surge of popularity and interest from aging fans (ironically, the poor reception of the latest Pokemon games led to an influx of people checking out the ROM hacking scene). I have no doubt in my mind that ROM hacking will only continue to flourish in the future.
Thus, this brings my blog to an end. Thank you all for tuning in!
To begin, I want to reiterate that this is the first time I have ever attempted ROM hacking. I am no prodigy when it comes to this medium; there are countless ROM hacks out there that make the work I have accomplished look like a teaspoon of water in the Pacific Ocean. This blog was a learning exercise for myself, and I wanted to convey what I had learned to you, dear reader. Though I have covered a fair deal of ground in hacking Pokemon FireRed, I have hardly scratched the surface in the sheer amount of depth and effort that goes into ROM hacking.
Although development in hacking the game could be difficult and even aggravating at times - getting Snappy to work and adjusting my MIDI instruments took me hours to complete and figure out - it was overall a very rewarding experience.
With this blog, I have covered how to edit and create your own Pokemon, transform any map and area in the game, implement customized music, and even develop our own custom scripted NPC complete with dialogue.
Here are some screenshots I took in-game to show off some of what we've accomplished!
 |
| Starting the game up for the first time |
 | |
| Behold, our rival character's lackluster homestead! Point and laugh at his lack of windows |
 |
| I'd reference Persona 4 here, but I don't think anyone reading this blog would get it |
 |
| He speaks! |
Unfortunately, I could not record footage in-game of our custom music in action. My recording software was very finicky for some reason when recording video footage of the game. I can report, however, that some of the instruments were not playing and the song did not loop properly. I was not using the All-Instruments patch with the copy of the ROM I was using, so its likely that my instruments did not sync up with the assigned voicegroup. As I noted in my post concerning custom music, implementing custom music is both a very tricky and time-consuming task. If you plan to use custom music in your ROM, I would prioritize it to the very latter portion of development as I don't think its worth all the effort.
I put a decent sum of time into hacking my FireRed ROM, and the output is very minute compared to other ROM hacks available online.
The above photo is from one of my favorite Pokemon ROM hacks of all time, Pokemon Adventure Red. The hack features customized sprites, new Pokemon, abilities, and evolutions originally not featured in Pokemon FireRed, a new title screen and introduction sequence, and a story and world map heavily inspired by the "Pokemon Adventures" Japanese manga. Information on the hack can be found here. This hack began production in 2013 and is still being updated and worked on to the present day. That is almost seven years of dedicated development to a ROM hack.
Despite being small and rather unheard of, the ROM hacking community is still very active to this day. The ROM hacking community consists of some of the most dedicated and passionate fans of their respective series. In more recent years, the community has grown under a surge of popularity and interest from aging fans (ironically, the poor reception of the latest Pokemon games led to an influx of people checking out the ROM hacking scene). I have no doubt in my mind that ROM hacking will only continue to flourish in the future.
Thus, this brings my blog to an end. Thank you all for tuning in!
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