Making a Pokemon Hack where the Bugs can shine

 A few months back I found out that the entire code base of the Pokemon games for the Game Boy Advance have been de-compiled, complete with documentation and fancy tools for making any sorts of edits you want pretty dang easily. I started playing around and it completely blew my mind. Suddenly, I could make any Pokemon experience I wanted, with custom moves, abilities, and maps, in a way that was far more flexible than any binary rom-hacking tool I'd used in the past. And the icing on the cake was that a group of dedicated fans had even created an expansion that ported in every single Pokemon, move, ability and item up to the most recent game that has come out, Scarlet and Violet. I've been a huge Pokemon fan since I was a kid, but the most recent games had been lackluster at best. Now I could make a game that ticked all my personal boxes? I was hooked!

In a few weeks I pretty easily made a simple hack where I had to go through the Hoenn region with only access to Bug Types. They have been some of my favorite Pokemon since all the way back from Red and Blue versions, but nearly all of them have been pretty bad to use in battle and the Type as a whole is considered the worst in the whole game from a Double Battle perspective, which is the main mode used in competitive Pokemon battling. With this simple hack, I was able to substantially buff a lot of individual Bug Types and make improvements to abilities, moves, and the Type Chart that controls which Types are strong or weak against other Types. It was a ton of fun, and I ran through the new ROM within a week or two on my phone. I knew that I wanted to expand this quick hack into something slightly more comprehensive that I could share around, and this thought happened to coincide with the most recent big update for the Pokemon Emerald Expansion project I mentioned earlier. The time was right for my first official project.

Since both the vanilla Emerald de-compilation and the Emerald Expansion were on GitHub, it was a great opportunity to finally learn some Git. I dusted off an old account I had never actually used, cloned the Expansion repository, and set up my computer to be able to push to my own personal repository on my account. I'll be using this blog to showcase bits of my design philosophy and explain the changes I'm making to the base game, feel free to follow the actual code updates at the GitHub here: https://github.com/mattjrand/bugmerald