Accomplishment.
I’m writing this while super sleepy so there’s probably gonna be some grammatical error here lol
During my time as a high schooler, I went through a lot of internal struggles involving purpose in my life and generally just feeling like my life was fairly empty. I was a career AP student and Asian tryhard, but the one thing missing from my life was a sense that I had accomplished anything by myself and of my own volition and desire.
And then I met some friends.
During the start of the pandemic, I started getting more into Fire Emblem. The series has been a beloved part of my childhood and getting deeper into stuff like romhacks was frankly the next natural progression.
I’ve always been someone who’s been very imaginative. As in the “so lost in his thoughts he’ll space out in the middle of a situation just because he had a great idea for something”. I’ve gone through so many hypothetical ideas for creations in my head. Until romhacking, I never really had an outlet for these ideas, so I was just content with daydreaming.
Then I met the Stoned Stoners.
It started out as a ragtag group of romhackers from a certain unnamable Discord server. We wanted to create a hack. Frankly, I barely even knew what we were doing, I was just excited to get involved into something.
After a lot of ideas being thrown around and positions shifting, eventually a main group was formed with my good friend @MemeTzar at the head of the entire operation. We were working on the start of what would eventually become…
Grug’s Primitive Disadventure
The start of Grug was rough. Tzar was basically a beginner in FEBuilder and none of us had ever tried a serious hack before. The game was suuuper rough and didn’t really play well. But, to me, who came on at first as a writer, that was everything to me. It was community. It was something to do.
Unfortunately, in these early days, Tzar got very busy and thus didn’t have enough time to really make progress. We’d go weeks on end without progress. At a certain point, it seemed that the project would fall apart like most projects usually do; fading into the background of obscurity.
It was then that I, inadvertently, taught myself my first extremely important lesson:
Lesson 1: Sometimes, you just need to step up and take the wheel.
The way I figured it, if there wasn’t any progress that was going on, I’d make my own progress. It was a weird process. I had never touched FEBuilder in my life but the logic behind how the system worked was generally pretty simple. I learned entirely by cross referencing eventing from Tzar and other hacks. By the end of the week, I was pretty proficient in the basics of FEBuilder and had gone from editing numbers to starting on working on new chapters for Grug.
A week seems like a pretty quick time, but what makes a project aren’t these small eureka moments, but the grind game that is development, and that was a lesson I hadn’t learned yet. As a teen with too much time, I was making a lot of progress super fast, and I eventually got into the expectation that romhacking was always this “easy”; that everybody else was just slow for no reason.
Of course, I’d learn a lesson about people having lives later, but that’s a story after this next segment.
After months of development, we finished Grug. It was frankly a bizarre moment. I’d never taken the initiative and lead a project to completion before. I’d never stepped up to become a leader. It was a foreign feeling, but I liked it. And for once in my life, I could tell myself that it was something I wanted to do, and not just something imposed on me by my parents.
Off that high, I wanted something more…something bigger.
Grug 1 was a rough work, but had a lot of spunk. Naturally, I thought the next conclusion was to make a Grug 2.
I had a lot of ideas for Grug 2. I had been cooking up Grug lore for a long ass time, I had a very good idea of the characters and how the world worked. Now was the time to execute.
Of course, instead of a shorter 15 chapter hack, this was planned to be double that size.
I had a lot of high concept ideas but it was up to time to see if I could execute them.
Grug 2: Grug’s Prehistoric Truancy*
was a project that leaves a lot of joy and regret in my heart today. There are many things I love about what I did and things I wish I did differently. Let’s go through the whole story first.
So after declaring I was gonna start on the project, I went in full speed ahead. A chapter a day. Two chapters a day. Fast. Fast. Fast.
By the end of 3 weeks I was done with 16 chapters.
I thought I was unstoppable, but then I hit something I hadn’t really had to worry about before as someone who’d never really committed himself to a project enough for it to matter.
Artist’s Block.
For the first time in my life, a lack of idea of what to do really hit me. Or, well, a lack of motivation. I had ideas, I just didn’t want to act on them. It was bizarre and I felt that I had no way forward. I didn’t like any of the ideas I had currently. I needed to step back.
Of course, it wasn’t easy. I didn’t want to step away. Romhacking at that point had become my life. It was one of the few things I had 100% control over and I didn’t want to give that up completely.
This was me learning my second big lesson.
Lesson 2: Sometimes, it’s better to step away and do something else.
I didn’t step away from romhacking completely. I’ll get to that later. But here’s a few things I did inbetween me stopping Grug 2’s development and when I picked up again.
I started playing more multiplayer Minecraft. I got on geopol servers and ran with a nation called Crimson Imperia. It was fun. We were absolute menaces.
I rekindled an interest in Pokemon again, I played more pokemon romhacks and fangames.
and I got outside more and talked with my irl friends that I had lost connection with over the pandemic.
and smack dab in the middle of this:
Touhou Emblem 1.
If you’ve looked on Touhou Emblem 1’s thread before, you know the life story. I played a shitty touhou FE-like fangame. I hated it. I wanted to make a better game.
This was the first time in awhile I had gotten the motivation to work on something. I was swept up in the feeling that I could do something again.
Now, the last two projects I had started were with a team, Team Stoned Stoners. I had a lot of people helping me out with that one. @LonkFC, @LunaProc, @MemeTzar are just a few examples. I cannot thank those people enough.
However, Touhou Emblem 1 was mostly a solo gig. I had another friend help me format Touhou Puppet Dance Performance sprites as portraits, but everything else from writing to game design to mapping, etc, was done completely on my own.
And managing game development as a solo creator was a new task for me. There wasn’t anybody else to really help me select music, manage graphics, all the stuff. I had to decide on these things on my own and it really opened my eyes as to how much help I had gotten from various people along the path to Grug 1. I was considering parts of design I never really had to think about.
Touhou Emblem 1 was probably the most constructive for my own development cycle as a romhacker. It gave me new independent action and a penchant for my own feel in design. Most of all, it’s trailblazed my more soloist style that I like to carry, even with team projects.
So what did this experience teach me?
Lesson 3: When you have a feeling, grasp it by the horns.
Touhou Emblem 1 was a spite project. It was that powerful emotion that got me through the whole thing and let me make something constructive out of that.
Lesson 4: You never really appreciate friends until you don’t have them.
In a certain @BigMood’s words, I’m a “notorious soloist”, but having a team is honestly a much better feeling than I appreciated before going off on this little side project.
Anyways I completed the project in 2-3 months so suck it I’m the unemployed MASTER
Back to Grug 2.
I went back to Grug 2 with new ideas, an improved skillset, and a drive to push forward. And I did. I pushed forward a lot, to create a project with lofty ideals.
I think, sometime along the way, I got lost in the sauce of all the Grug lore in my head and forgot that Grug was first and foremost a joke.
I got way too serious, I wanted this and that, but ultimately by the end of it, even with an entire training arc behind my back, I never really accomplished everything I wanted, or really anything to the fullest extent I wanted. A lot of my plans were shelved or forgotten.
I was very proud of Grug 2 when it dropped, and a lot of people say I should be. It’s a full length project with a lot of polish, but I felt like I gave up a little bit of myself and Grug (as a series)'s identity with all my high and mighty lofty ideals of what a full length Grug game should be.
I’d forgotten why I started romhacking in the first place, not to create art with a message, but to create fun games. It was a hobby, not a job, or some sort of project made to impress.
There’s a lot of more specific stuff I could say I regret about Grug 2, but I think my biggest is not putting my 100% in having fun while doing it after a certain point. Which is…
Lesson 5: Your work will never be truly great if you can’t even enjoy it yourself.
And it’s a lesson I carry with me to this day. I need to have fun doing something, or I won’t do it. I won’t drag my work or my conscience through the mud if I’m not feeling a project.
It’s driven my design a lot. I now only make design choices I want to make or am comfortable with making. No more forcing myself to try and do things that would “appeal” to a market or whatever. Not like I’m making money anyway. This isn’t about the popularity. (it’s totally about the popularity)
And I feel like that’s a lesson a lot of us could stand to live by. This is a hobby after all, and we should have fun.
Anyways that’s my hack life story I’m currently working on something too big for my scale and it’s gonna be awesome lol bye