Making Pokemon Fan games is hard when you are an adult…

As I have mentioned previously, I have been working on a couple of games with a team called ROMbusters. At this point not much work gets done on the games as it is pretty much just one other person (Ray Maverick) and I. At this point it is safe to say that the games will never be completed. In this post, I will talk about what has gotten me to this point and give some information on those games.

When I first started ROM hacking in 2008, I was just like most people; I had played a few ROM hacks and wanted to make my own game. I had ambitious goals for my games and always wanted to create the “Ultimate” ROM hack. Since I eventually realized the programs at the time were limited and couldn’t accomplish what I wanted so I started making tools/programs. I made many friends along the way, most I don’t even talk to anymore. They all left this hobby years ago and perhaps I should have to. Wherever they are, I hope they are doing well with their lives. I will mention some here but I am sure I will forget people cause it’s been so long. HackMew, Halfshadow, Jambo51, Linkandzelda, Synyster Zeikku, Shiny Quagsire, Sierraffinity, Darthatron, TyHawk, userpr and many others.

Eventually, I created PGE which I consider to be one of the best ROM Pokemon hacking programs ever made, despite how badly coded it may be. I wanted to make the ultimate ROM hacking tool to help me make my idea of a ROM hack come to life. PGE was great for the time and still has it’s place in traditional Pokemon ROM hacking to this day. Others have even copied the idea of an all in one program into their own programs. Unfortunately, I spent most of my good years working on it and I never got to make my own ROM hack. While I didn’t reach my goal in the end, PGE has collectively had over 1 million downloads over the last 13 years and it has helped to create other people’s games so I guess that should be the accomplishment I take away from that.

These days we have the decomps, which just shows how much the community has adapted over the years. I remember when I was younger messing around with the official GBA SDK and DevkitARM wishing that I had the source code to the GBA Pokemon games. These days we literally have it cause of all the great people working on the PRET projects. (We also have the source code leaks out there somewhere lol) There are so many possibilities these days that I wish I had access to 15 years ago. If I was a teenager with what we have today, I’m sure that I would be able to create the games I wanted. I feel that current generation of people in the community are doing a great job and I have no time to contribute anything.

I am a 31 year old adult now with a pretty demanding career. Between that and other projects I am working on I don’t think I can make any fan games. I have tried but doing some programming every few months is not consistent enough to make games of the caliber that I want to make. As of right now I am abandoning the idea that I will ever release my own Pokemon fan games. Another thing to mention to is that I have spent so much free time with ROM hacking that I actually didn’t spend enough time playing Pokemon games. I will try to play all the Pokemon games at some point to try to get the joy of playing them back. (I haven’t even played Scarlet and Violet.) I think abandoning the game projects will give me the time to do that. As far as Pokemerald goes, while I won’t be creating any games, maybe I will mess around with it from time to time. I am not opposed to helping others with things here and there, I just can’t dedicate myself to any big projects.

But enough about me, let’s start talking about the games I had planned to create with Pokeemerald. I will be posting sprites that I had commissioned. (Yes, I paid actual money for them.) Please note that the sprites themselves I am allowing to be used by anyone for other projects. Please credit the artist and myself since I paid for them. Any map screenshots posted are not to be reused, these are so you can see them. None of these would be the final versions but they should give you an idea of what was planned.

Pokemon Luna Argento

This is pretty much a Silver remake. Back in the day I wanted to make my own Silver remake since everyone was remaking Pokemon Gold. I always preferred Lugia over Ho-oh and thought it would be a good project since we all pretty much know the story. Learning this HackMew had asked me to help him with his hack Oro Sole. We became friends and he shared a lot of things with me for his vision of the game. There was a decent amount of work done on Oro Sole but as we all know HackMew eventually decided to step away from the scene. Luna Argento would have been a Silver remake made with trying to honor his vision and mine. I was even planning on touching up and using maps that we made for Oro Sole.

Luna Argento Sprites – Made by wilsonscarloxy on Fiverr

Luna Argento Maps

Pokemon Colosseum Advance

Pokemon Colosseum is my favorite Pokemon game and I literally use Wes as my avatar. This one should be no surprise. It is a Pokemon Colosseum remake that is faithful to everything. (Yes, even shadow Pokemon.)

Pokemon Colosseum Advance Sprites – Made by wilsonscarloxy on Fiverr

Pokemon Colosseum Advance Maps – Made by Ray Maverick

Pokemon XD Advance

This would have been the sequel to Pokemon Colosseum Advance. This game would also have been completely faithful to the original.

Pokemon XD Advance Sprites – Made by wilsonscarloxy on Fiverr

Where is the rest of it?

As far as the code goes, I won’t be releasing any of it. I feel that those that would properly use it can write better code themselves and those that can’t would just steal it as is. I don’t consider myself a good programmer at all, I’ve just been dealing with these games so long that I know a lot of things.