Huzzah! One of my first major hurdles was passed today, adding in new Pokemon. Wow, what a bitch that turned out to be. I don't want to add in new Pokemon, but as Fire Red is a third generation game any Pokemon introduced from the fourth generation up are left out. Really, I just want to add evolutions of Pokemon already present in the game.
The first problem is the size of the sprites in the DS era of Pokemon games are larger than the GBA games, which is an obvious first problem. Luckily I found a complete database of DS era sprites resized without artifacts on the Pokecommunity, a great forum that I've sporadically followed since I've had internet access really.
That wasn't enough though, the sprites needed to be converted to .bmp's in Paint, indexed with Irfanview, and then have their palette's organized by Gimp. I think I got all this right the first time actually, but a problem down the line made me repeat these steps - several - times. After they're formatted correctly a sprite editor is needed to actually insert the new sprites in. The tutorial I was following suggested some specific ones created by someone named Wichu. It took a little digging, but I managed to find them. After some initial snafu's with failing to save palette changes, everything was in order.
As it stands, for some reason, there are about twenty five empty Pokemon slots. I think expanding the size of available Pokemon isn't too difficult, but for right now I'm just replacing these open slots. Getting the sprite in place is great, but actually getting all the Pokemon data requires yet another program. I tried using a thing called G3T, but after fumbling with that for a while I switched over to something called G3HS, which went fairly smoothly.
It took some doing, figuring out all the menu's and options and how to save changes. But finally, there it was. A wild Electivire appearing in the wild in a new route to the West of Pallet town. By George, I'd done it. I'm going to keep messing around with adding in Pokemon until I get a good feel for it, then I'll probably create a hack adding in the fourth generation evolutions as a better base for my (hopefully) near future project.
It took a couple hours, but I cannot deny this feeling of accomplishment, regardless of how minor.
Resources Mentioned Above
Tutorial - DS Style 64x64 Sprite Resource
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
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