I’ve been recently asked by my friends what I’ve been working on lately and I said I’ve been trying to make my own Fire Emblem game. He was fascinated and proceed to ask more about it until I said “ROM hacking”. Then his face changed into something that people make when they hear that their favorite sports team winning was all just a hoax. Lol a bit hard to explain. He is a programmer so I’m thinking maybe he thought I managed to create something from scratch with no prior knowledge on the subject?
Is ROM hacking in some sort of different category when it comes to creating something? I know we’re ROM hacking, taking an existing engine and using that to create something. So are we technically not really creating something but just modifying things, so its nothing impressive to begin with? Is ROM hacking not something to be proud of?
It’s just something that’s been bothering me, neither good or bad, just something I’ve been curious about and just wondering what does everyone else think about this?
I personally enjoy the challenge of working within the confines of another framework and figuring out how to maximise performance. it’s boring when everything is easy.
Whether ROM hacking is simply modifying an existing work or not makes it no less impressive. I think a clear line has to be drawn at what you’re willing to take credit for, and you should be proud of whatever you accomplished. To me, hacking is like a puzzle. Puzzles give you that “ah ha!” moment when solved, and I can’t help but feel the same way when I understand a bit of code or get the game to do what I want.
There are plenty of opportunities to create things when hacking. Making a change to the ROM isn’t always just a modification. Entirely new stories, characters, and worlds develop in hacks. I’d say hacking is less of simply modifying and more of using something familiar to create a new experience.
That’s why I call it modding, not hacking: it’s still an accurate name for the hobby and makes it sound a lot less illegal. A lot of people, when they hear “hacking”, think “hijаcking someone’s hard work for kicks/for the sake of piracy/other bad stuff”. Funny thing is, mods are often just as illegal when they require cracks/DRM removal to be played or the game maker doesn’t approve of modification of their intellectual property. Example: Nintendo and Smash Bros. modding. Even though sometimes the mod is entirely loaded from an SD card and no downloading of the game’s iso is required whatsoever, Nintendo would still rather you did not do that.
It’s also one of the reasons why I’m trying to make the switch from modding roms to independent game dev: I wanna own my games. It sucks telling someone about the mod you’re so psyched about, but then having to explain that it requires an illegally downloaded rom to be played. Yes, it’s not technically illegal because all you’re distributing is a patch, but it scares laypeople away very quickly.
I see ROM hacking as a bit of a gateway to actually making games yourself 2bh. I myself no longer plan on doing it and am just in it for the qt anime grils, but modding games can get you acquainted to working with that particular genre.
Yes, but modifying is also some kind of creating. Its purpose is to breathe new life into a cherished old game. And it is nothing impressive if you just want to create a new fantasy world, so your friend is right. I don’t know if it is anything to be proud of but it is my hobby.
Sometimes it is much easier to create your own project than to hack a proprietary software which you cannot read its src. – However we enjoy the process. –
Half the fun is in seeing what you can do within the confines of the system, the other half is figuring out how the system works so you can change it.
To me, it’s a lot like playing with legos, except with enough research and work, you can make your own legos to fill in the holes.
So how does everyone explain this hobby to people/friends? Do you simply just say I’m making my own game even though your work is based on another engine? Anyone here worked with the unity engine before? Would that be a similar comparison?
Pretty much this.
I prefer using ‘mod’ because people seem to be more familiar with the term as opposed to “ROM hacking”. Like, I say mod and they know the gist of what I’m doing right off the bat.
I recently showed some screenshots of TRTR to a co-worker who’s only played Awakening and he thought it was pretty cool.
