So awhile back I started hacking and made a mistake that forced me to reset everything so I started to wonder what were your newbie mistakes.
I’m going to go first. I misunderstood how classes worked and for some reason thought that to change a character’s class you needed to edit the entire class they were linked to. So that’s how I wasted a few hours of work changing the paladin class into an archer. Thank god I realised that something wasen’t right before I changed every single class into something else.
I don’t understand how it takes people years to complete their romhacks. I bet I could make a 30 chapter hack with my own characters, maps, events, and dialogue in about a month.
My biggest mistake was starting waaaay too early, I wasn’t at all proficient in hacking when I first started my current project so when it was near completion… it was complete dogshit, I’m fixing it now soooo
also, this is more fit to be a community post, questions are for things with one specific answer, community posts are open ended like this.
Not really a newbie mistake but it’s all I remember right now. The fact that I just can’t stop starting new projects. Brain pls get distracted less by new shiny things.
It’s been like a decade since being a newbie so I can’t really use any of those old mistakes but I’ve like never especially got better so let’s just pretend every mistake is a newbie one.
Oh god you have no idea how much I can relate to you right now. It’s so annoying not being able to progress on the original idea because you got a new one.
Compared to other people here announcing things too early, I made what I consider to be a significant mistake in waiting too long to make my work-in-progress hack public. I didn’t release it to anyone but a couple friends until I already had 20+ chapters, was too nervous about making anything publicly available. Getting feedback is important, if not in a full release then at least in the playtesting channel of the FEU Discord, and the longer you wait the more you may end up having to change and the harder it is to ask for specific help.
I don’t know about mistake… but my biggest error was probably spending too much time reading on this site trying to learn everything instead of just making something in FEbuilder and then learning from it. FEbuilder wasn’t as advanced when I started so eventing was more daunting for a newcomer, but it still probably would’ve been better if I’d skimmed Arch’s event tutorial and then messed with FEB as opposed to painstakingly reading through everything in multiple tutorials/threads.
Even without that though, I remember it seemed like every edit I made broke something and I couldn’t get quick answers to help me. I’m not exactly the quickest learner, but the community definitely seems more streamlined about newbie help now than it was 4 years ago.
I knew going into it that it would have been sensible to play around with making a very short, 2-3 chapter hack before launching straight into The Project. But I also know that that… isn’t how my brain works. I can’t get excited about something if it isn’t The Project. Still, it would have been nice to learn a few things and establish a few more fundamentals; basically changing things as I went through has meant a lot of backtracking and double-checking.
Also, leaving up vanilla events as ‘scaffolding’. In practice, this lead to a lot of weird stuff and bizarre dependencies. Can’t even count how many times I’ve had a weird error show up and the cause has been that there’s some range condition dummy-event that does nothing but turn on a flag I’m counting on later. I don’t actually know how the Prologue works anymore, and the last time I tried pruning an innocuous minor event, it softlocked the game.
