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Main - ROM Hacking - Puzzledude's seminar on romhacking New thread | New reply


puzzledude
Posted on 07-25-15 09:15 PM Link | Quote | ID: 160490


Porcupo
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Are you one of those retro fans who are actually capable of hacking and modifying games for old consoles, or do you want to become one? Why bother at all!

First of all, no matter how good your game is, someone will most certainly not like it.

If you make the game too difficult, someone will most certainly not like, but! if you make the game too easy or normally difficult someone will most certainly again not like it, claiming it is too easy.

You will even come across such paradoxes, that a fairly easy game will be regarded as too difficult by some and yet too easy by others. So to conclude: no matter the actual difficulty, you'll always get the difficulty of your game wrong.

If your designed levels are based on exploration, someone will certainly call your game boring due to so called Backtracking. If you then decide to change that onto the better, don't bother, your edited levels, which will remove the backtracking, will certainly be called too Linear, which is apparently again no good. So to conclude: no matter the actual exploration factor, you'll always get the level design wrong.

If you decide to change the gfx, someone will certainly not like it, since they will claim the old gfx was better and the new one is too radical, custom made and thus no good. If you however decide to keep the original gfx, your game will be called "vanilla". So to conclude: no matter what you do with the gfx, you'll always get it wrong.

If you decide to implement special new music engine called MSU-1, don't bother, someone will definitely like SPC better. If you however keep the SPC, they will certainly tell you, that you are out of date, not switching to MSU.

If you mannaged to actually finish the project, you will come across painful testing. You will test and test and test, but why do you bother, you will certainly miss a bug or two, and when a player will come across such a minor problem, he will call your game (which you painfully tested for bugs) bugged. So why bother: no matter how much debugging you'll make, someone will still call your game bugged.

No matter how much you will check the grammar of the texts in the game, you'll surely miss out something. So why bother: no matter how much you will try to find spelling mistakes, someone will most surely find some and call your game a spelling horror and then add: this is common in those "custom made fake games".

If you designed your game to be used with save states, someone will call this a poor design, if you designed your game to be used without save states, they will use them anyway, making your game too easy - again. So why do you bother?

No matter how much TXT info files you will write, someone will surely patch your game to the false original rom, claiming you did a poor job with your game, since it doesn't load.

No matter how much TXT info files you will write, someone will surely patch your game to the false original rom, claiming you did a poor job with your game, since the game crashes in the middle of the playing. If you tell them to obviously check the CRC before playing they will tell you, that they've never heard of such a thing. So why do you bother?

If you tell them, to patch to a non headered rom, someone will definitely patch to a headered rom and claim your game to be bugged or not working, not knowing what went wrong.


If someone by somesort of a miracle likes your game, they will surely abuse it, by putting it onto the cart and sell it for money, making you look like the bad guy, who promotes piracy, since you are making "hacked" games. Your txt warning of "fair use" and "personal use" and "no rom or cart distribution" would be like an ant yelling at the supernova.

No matter how "just" your intentions are, in the eyes of the authors who made the original game, you are a thief, who just abused their intellectual property. In their eyes you are a pest, who is responsible for illegal cart distribution, since you made it happen. You can also be regarded as the person, who gave their game a bad name, since your game can never match the original one. In their eyes you are thus producing illegal derivated work of a poor/false quality and trying to benefit of it. So why do you bother?


That's what you get because you have programing/level designing talent/non talent and simply like an old game. Maybe being smart is not a good thing at all.

Make your life complete and quit romhacking to save your self a lot of trouble. Don't bother.


32x1000
Posted on 07-25-15 10:51 PM Link | Quote | ID: 160491


Koopa
Level: 24

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Why so serious ?

RetroRain
Posted on 07-26-15 12:37 AM (rev. 7 of 07-26-15 04:19 AM) Link | Quote | ID: 160493


Fuzz Ball
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ROM hacking is something that should be fun, and something that you might find joy in doing. When it ceases being fun, take a break from it. If you come back later, and it still ceases to be fun, then consider another hobby, at least for the meantime. You might come back to it much later when you feel refreshed to get back into it again.

Nothing is perfect. NOTHING. Even commercial quality games have bugs, glitches, grammatical errors, and design flaws. I've seen it.

You're NEVER going to please everybody. Nor should you. ROM hacking is something that you should do for yourself, and don't worry about what anyone else thinks.

For instance, if one or more persons says that your font graphics look like crap, but you happen to like them, then that's all that should matter. We share our work because we want to share our creativity, and possibly inspire and motivate other people.

Look at my situation. I have OCD, the need to have things perfect. I have a lack of patience. I'm not that great with level design or graphics. And I too have questioned the legality and morality of hacking copyrighted material. I was even torn between ROM hacking and homebrew development.

ROM hacking has produced some really good hacks, such as Megaman Forever, Megaman Ultra 2, Mario in Some Usual Day, Mario Adventure, Zelda Outlands, Zelda: The Legend of Link, just to name a few.

Some people who have hacked games and have made some fan games have gotten noticed by some game companies, and some of these people even went on to work for these game companies. Not so much with Nintendo ROMs and most of the stuff in the ROM hacking community, but more so with PC mods.

I understand that you are not happy, but from reading your post, your issue is not with ROM hacking. It is with yourself. You have some doubts, possibly some insecurites, and are clearly feeling like crap. But believe me, you can turn that all around.

Just take some time away from ROM hacking, and do some soul searching. Even talk to other people about it, and get opinions from others, before jumping to conclusions.

I hope that you feel better, and I wish you luck.

____________________
My YouTube Channel

Zynk
Posted on 07-26-15 05:24 AM Link | Quote | ID: 160496


Purple Leever
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@op: RetroRain has a point.

____________________

MiniCompute
Posted on 07-26-15 06:02 AM Link | Quote | ID: 160497


Bubble
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Maybe so but you got to look at it from his point of view and look at his track record of rom hacking and many others.
Infildelt and many other close comrads of mine comes to mind after seing puzzledude message, but even after taking some grief and hell.
Infildelt still hacks which is a good thing but not to frequently as he use to do.
I don't mind waiting for the hack, as most people have a life to contend with every second.

@puzzle I don't know what made you post that but whatever is on your mind about rom hacking.
Either drop rom hacking temporarily or permanently, sounds like you got problems thats pissing you off.
Besides that I like to see what you do next besides zelda 3 hacking.
The last hack you issued out was good, if you really don't mind, mail me the rom privately.
That patcher you included makes me ill and I rather use lunar ips or download the rom privately without needing to patch it myself.


Quick Curly
Posted on 07-29-15 04:53 PM Link | Quote | ID: 160515


Giant Red Paratroopa
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Copied from my post in the Romhacking.net version of this thread:

It is understandable why the double standards explored in this topic are upsetting and discouraging.

Whether or not one works on and creates ROM hacking projects for themselves first, which is personally how I've always felt it should be, because ROM hacking grants us the opportunity to bring new life to our favourite childhood games and create even more great memories, it's still discouraging to put in all our time and effort - usually multiple years worth - to create a new experience, only for someone who likely wouldn't even know how to make a ROM hack to come along and only focus on what they didn't like about it, and make it seem like we didn't put any time and effort into it at all, to make the game that "they wanted".

True, you can't please everyone, but I do personally feel that people could generally be less judgmental.

Newbies are generally treated like they don't belong anymore, which probably discourages most from even posting at all after registering new accounts which will likely never even be used. Although, it goes both ways, because generally, new people hope for the simplest and swiftest solution, won't bother to attempt to do enough research on their own first, and will either ask for too much, not know how to make a "smart" post to elicit a positive and progressive response from more experienced users, and/or will not be as appreciative as they should be once they receive any potentially helpful information. It can be difficult to understand many of the processes involved, but effort is necessary and required in order to make any sort of progress. Most of us who have actually been around long enough to complete some projects are of a breed and mindset where we have the passion to bring our own visions to life that we are driven by what we believe we can achieve through dedication over time. Anymore, people seem to only show up because it's something to distract them for an afternoon until their attention redirects them to someone else, which means they will never put in the time themselves to become familiar with our passion, to fully understand and appreciate what we go through, and realize for themselves that their opinions are perhaps a bit too harsh or misguided in some situations (read, some).

It seemed like there were more newer users who made attempts to create ROM hacks years ago, at least, specifically at Board 2 in 2009, when it seemed like a pack of people interested in hacking SMB3 were considerably active. Even though they were new, and mistakes were made left and right, generally the positive was the main focus in being able to hopefully progress to more completed states for those projects. Anymore, if people see fewer actual releases, and from those releases, "reviews" that focus more on personal tastes in directing projects seemingly beyond the intended vision of the actual author(s), likely what seems to already be happening compared to years ago when it seemed like all the more familiar names in the ROM hacking community were still around, as opposed to now, will continue to happen even more so with fewer new people bothering to even try because it'll seem like an impossible task to please the continuously growing expectations of the vast, diverse opinions of the overall public.

However, for those truly passionate about their craft, they shouldn't be compromised by any potential negativity that comes their way, and while there will generally always be someone who will seemingly, absolutely refuse to be pleased no matter what, there should generally always be the folks out there who recognize and appreciate one's hard work and efforts, and those are the people who deserve to enjoy the fruits of our labour, in addition to first and foremost, ourselves.

Main - ROM Hacking - Puzzledude's seminar on romhacking New thread | New reply

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