This is almost exactly why I hack. I want to go into a career in genetics, and the more I think about it, the more I can relate ROM hacking to genetics and biology. It’s like a science. I can research how an ASM function works and why it works, and I can tell it in its own language to do my bidding. I find this incredible, and it’s so similar to genetic engineering.
This kind of process just makes me immensely happy. I love to figure out how abstract things work.
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I sometimes feel the need to create a game instead of just playing a game. This urge tends to appear when I look at other FE hacks or play FE hacks. Though I have made maps already, I think it would be cool to have something for the community to play, as thanks for all the knowledge and help everyone provides (and hopefully add one more mod to the list of things to play).
As for what I enjoy about hacking, it feels really satisfying to see something that you’ve been working on…work, especially if you had to do some troubleshooting. All the time that you pour into that feels worth it, whether it’s as small as a chapter’s map, or a mechanic that’s present for the whole game.
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ROM hacking is fun!!! Im starting out small, like writing about what it is I have dreamed! Each character is unique…but how??? It helps me to expand my imagination, even if naming characters is the toughest part.
It puts me in the perspective of the creator, instead of the player. This is why i LOVE ROM hacking!
[details=Backstory]I used to be avid reader when I was younger, but as I got older and moved away from books, I found myself spending time on my DS, then eventually mostly my laptop. While I did have a Gameboy when I was younger, I had one of those cartridges with like 100 or something games on it which pretty much shared one save for the entire thing, so saving in another game would overwrite any save data from another game, so when I played Pokemon and then try something else, I would lose my progress. For whatever reason, my parents’ computers had an emulator and some GBA games(Pokemon is one I remember the most), but for whatever reason, the emulator and games/saves were lost, so I pretty much forgot about the emulator until my father picked up Days of Ruin on the DS I gave him(a hand-me-down), then found an emulator on the computer to play as well(he was way better than I).
I played Minecraft on my laptop for a while first before “re-finding” emulators and GBA games.[/details]
When I was younger, reading about the different worlds contained within books fascinated me. Of course, being young and imaginative, I thought it would be cool to actually get to be in some sort of fictional world(or at least experience). Several years later, I stumble upon FE12, which is the first to have a customizable player unit that participates in the story as well(or at least the first game I played that featured something of the sort).
Thus, when I somehow stumbled upon Fire Emblem hacking, I knew this would be the right pastime for me. It took me a while(perhaps too long) to acquire a decent understanding and then a true comprehension of more than just the basics. In fact, I still have many unfinished hacks sitting around(with myself and @CM9 as the protagonists) in my folders that I started years ago but then stopped due to knowledge limitations then(tilechanges, tile configuration corruption, etc.).
However, before we knew about screen-sharing, I would have @CM9 video record himself testing whatever I had sent his way and receive feedback that way.
Other information
Then during one Christmas break, I decided it would be more fun if we worked together on some hack to kill time and have some fun with hacking and Fire Emblem(we even set some rules/guidelines to prevent clashing with one another and to differentiate our work[in a sense]). We encountered some obstacles along the way(battles failing to work properly, thus forcing me to redo the entire hack up to that point), had our fair of arguments over various aspects, and made some questionable decisions(we lacked maturity then, for one, since we were younger then). But in the end, even if the hack is mostly rejected and our reputations tarnished, we still had some fun with it- insulting one another, getting revenge(in a friendly way), being a bunch of immature, foolish teenagers, etc.; we learned some as well throughout the process, developing our hacking skills.
I still hack today because I enjoy the aspect of creating alternate universes where I can work/aspire to be something more than just an average person or to live out something that I would be unable to otherwise in the real world. I have tried getting other friends to hack with me, but we have made minimal progress in the span of a year, though I may try again sometime. Plus, creating something that others can enjoy and critique can leave a sense of satisfaction and something to be proud of.
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my love with Camus 
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Why I hacked in the past:
- I wanted people to acknowledge me.
- I wanted to fulfill my childish dream of making my own game and play it on my GBASP.
- I wanted to give life to my characters and my story.
Why I hack now:
- I’m probably a masochist.
- I want people to quit acknowledging me.
- Hacking sucks, see point 1.
Jk I don’t even hack anymore, don’t mind me and forget this post xoxo
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Haha, yeah you said it buddy.
Haha.
Wink.
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I hack mainly because it’s a stress reliver and it’s an output for my creative imagination. I also like the community a lot so there’s that
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I started hacking because, not unlike probably a lot of people, I had a stupid concept in mind and wanted to make it a thing. About 2 years later; This concept has long been thrown where it always belonged (in the trash) yet somehow I’m still here doing stuff (sometimes).
Having been into various kinds of programming for a while; I kind of “naturally” got into doing some asm things. I was confused about some of the existing documentation on something (namely, the “Spell Association Table/Editor”), and wanted to know more; So I silently followed @circleseverywhere (
) helping someone else (@Solum ()) learn debugging and did my own thing. This led into me making my first asm hack (the “Class-based Alternative Spell Animations” one, which is really just a generalization of the whole javelin thing; but details).
The more I started looking into how the game actually worked, the more I grew even more fascinated by all of that; I eventually ended up looking into things that weren’t properly documented anywhere and wrote (and shared) my own doc; And suddenly I was being helpful to other people.
And that being helpful to other people part is probably one of the big reasons why I’m still hacking FE8/GBAFE specifically. Seeing your stuff being used and referenced by fellow hackers; and being able to answer asked questions about the game’s internals feels good (I love you all).
But even without the community thing; figuring out how something works internally to the point where you feel you can mix it up however you want feels very rewarding even if I don’t end up doing anything with what I learned. This is why I also ended up delving into other games at some occasions (the biggest one probably being Harvest Moon (M)FOMT which I actually never played seriously; aka vtables and dynamic memory allocation hell (hell can also be kind of fascinating)).
I also find interest in looking at “the way we hack”; aka the “methods” if that makes sense. The whole history of hackers starting with hex editors into nightmare + FEditor + other tools into either EA Buildfiles or FEBuilder is fascinating to me. And I want to participate in that; invent better ways of doing some of the things we do. This is what led me writing lyn and putting the whole make+EA thing together (in the form of CHAX) for example.
So tl;dr: I like understanding how shit works, and I like the feeling of being helpful.
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Conquering hell is the most rewarding feeling, and is one of the things that keeps me interested in things even when they seem too complicated to work with.
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More Power to the mod hacker hope to have more FE mod hack…
Love FE as a story telling mechanism and also for gameplay. The game by nature is ripe for customization, and it’s always been enjoyable to think of all the possibilities.
For myself, I like to think I have unusal taste in FE and stories and am motivated to make things that wouldn’t be made commercially. Figuring out how the game works and how to build stuff is also a rewarding feeling, especially if other people enjoy it.
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Wew, >18 days notification
I really hate the university :c i don’t have time for nothing.
UwU
Also
I ever wanted to create my own videogame, and my favorite genre is tactic, FE is one of my favorite games and have a good engine for creating games, when I discovered the FE Hacking Community, I wanted to do my own Fire Emblem.
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I do it mostly because it lets me put my sprites in something usable, rather than just being stagnant sprites. Gives me a giddy feeling whenever I see someone using something I’ve worked on, personally.
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because i feel like it
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For fun, and because I really like how Fire Emblem is designed, it’s a lot of fun to play when they do it right.
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