ROM Hacking Diary - Entry Three

A ton of busy work later and I finally accomplished adding in every evolution introduced in generation four! ... With some minor exceptions. First, some of the sprites didn't really hold up very well during the conversion process. Almost all of them were "good enough" (I'm still hoping to find some way to fix them but for now, eh) except for Gallade. Just... Look at him.

Yeah, not pretty. So I've held off on inserting him, but all the other evolutions from gen four are in, plus Sylveon even! Of course, that was just the sprites. So I had to go back to that G3HS program to actually input the Pokemon data. Tedium. Endless amounts of tedium.

So I've learned, finally, to manually back up my current ROM in case I fuck everything up. I'm on version 9 right now, with shockingly only one completely broken iteration! I'll talk about that in a bit. This stage consists solely of referencing information from the web and copying it into boxes. It's slow, to say the least. Hell, versions 2-4 and 6-9 have all been solely dedicated to filling this data out. It's easy work, just mind numbingly dull, and worse, this is still technically just a test run, which might mean I have to go through this all over again.

The only major problem I've run into is that for whatever reason Pokedex editing doesn't work from the same program. Messing with the habitat feature of the Pokedex is what killed one of my iterations, which is why I've just been ignoring that part for now, but it's the next step. That and a massive reorganizing of the Pokedex overall. Figuring out sprites for the party icons and the height difference might prove to be annoying too. I need to figure out how to add additional kinds of evolutions as well, I've found some pre-written scripts already, thankfully, but I'm not sure if they cover everything I'm looking for.

Either way, everything's still moving along really nicely! I apologize for how frequent these are right now, since I'm still learning something new every time I get into this I'm going to be talking about what I've been up to more. Once I've learned everything I need to I'll mostly shut up and keep it behind the scenes. I also promise these aren't going to be replacing other blog posts. Not that I really have a schedule or post frequently anyway.

Resources Mentioned Above
Tutorial - PNG to In-Game Sprites in 3 Steps
Decreases colors - Irfanview
Organize Palette's - Gimp
Sprite Editor - Wichu's Sprite Editors
All Sorts of Features - Generation III Hacking Suite