So I haven't been posting here as much as I'd like to. I write quite a bit, but oftentimes it doesn't come out the way I want it to and I scrap the whole post, or I get distracted by something else and don't finish it. Here's hoping this escapes the drafts folder.
Project: CrystalDust
Status: Blocked by dependencies
An update on this is probably what everyone wants the most out of me right now, so I'll put it first. CrystalDust hasn't had any more concrete development progress since my last update, but fear not! Nuggets of ideas and plans for the next iteration of the hack are always forming in the back of my mind.
But what do I mean by "dependencies"? Essentially, my master plan for CrystalDust is to recreate it entirely from scratch within the Pokémon Emerald disassembly project, with the help of the Awesome Pokémon Editing Toolkit (name subject to change). The issue with this being, the Emerald disassembly is way too primitive at the moment to actually work on, and AME and ASE are currently half-formed piles of code waiting to be molded into the hacking powerhouses I know they can be.
Project: Awesome Map Editor
Status: Blocked by the Trifecta
This is a term I use frequently, at least inside my own head. The “Trifecta” is the combination of energy, passion, and time, and I need all three in decent amounts in order to work on any personal projects. Oftentimes I’m missing one of the three legs, and because of this everything takes ages to complete. Without energy, I laze around not doing anything but watch YouTube videos. Without passion, I start some new project I’m currently passionate about and worsen the whole problem. Without time, I have to stop myself from working if I want to hold my life together and not miss important assignment due dates or more. Right now, I’m working a full-time job as an intern, so when I come home in the evenings I’m always missing one of the three legs (usually energy). This is, however, my current first priority when it comes to these projects.
Project: Emerald Disassembly
Status: Not currently being worked on
The second of the two dependencies CrystalDust has is actually a team effort by members of PRET, the team behind Pokémon ROM disassemblies like pokered and pokecrystal. However, I’m putting this underneath my personal projects because I’m basically the only one ever working on it; the rest of PRET is focusing on fully disassembling Ruby first before transitioning to Emerald, but Ruby is too different from the engines I know well to want to make a sort of transitional version of CrystalDust to tide everyone over until the full Emerald version arrives. I just can’t compromise like that.
Project: Diego & Ray Play Game
Status: Small hiatus
This isn’t so much a project as it is an ongoing series, but editing for the show has come to a halt as I’ve moved across the country for an internship and severely underestimated how much TeamViewer’s lag would affect my ability to edit videos properly. Subsequently, new videos are on hold until my return to Texas.
Project: Freeman’s Mind Animated
Status: Occasional progress
This is a project I always come back to and work on in short bursts every few months. I have no idea why this is but I can’t seem to stay focused on this project for more than a week or two at a time. Thankfully, I have nobody breathing down my neck to get this done anytime soon so I can easily preempt it with other projects, but I know I’ll come back to it once Ian actually touches up Freeman’s face texture like I asked him to ages ago. Ian, if you’re reading this right now, I’d really appreciate a look.
Project: Shining Opal
Status: Indefinite hiatus
It gets extremely tiring to never be satisfied with your previous work on a project, then going back and redoing it. I never drew up a solid outline of how the game would work, so I kept coming up with new, better ideas and going back and refactoring parts of the game. Eventually this culminated in redoing so much work that I never got anywhere new, and as disheartening as this was, I just decided to forgo it for the projects that people actually care about.
Project: OakBrown
Status: Indefinite hiatus
Now this is something that probably nobody saw coming, probably because I never spoke about it online. But for about a week or so a few years back, I started working on a hack of FireRed that made Gary the main character. Yes, this has been done many times before, but I thought I could bring a new level of polish to the concept that hadn’t been seen before. This was promptly abandoned not soon after starting it, like so many of my projects before. I still have dibs on that name though (and I can’t believe there isn’t another hack named like that already!), and if anyone wants me to, I’d be happy to release the little I made.
Project: Steve
Status: Steve
Okay, now this is DEFINITELY something nobody outside a small circle of friends knew about. One of my friends back in high school one day had the strange idea to have a Pokémon game where everything and everyone was named Steve, for no real reason other than mass confusion and hysteria. I, of course, took this concept and ran with it, soon changing not only Pokémon and move names, but trainers, NPCs, items, everything I could find. It culminated in a bizarre unintelligible mush of the word Steve, which ended up suffering from semantic satiation and stopped meaning anything at all. Like OakBrown above, I’d be glad to release the unfinished version of Steve for anyone to mess around with, if so desired.
These are all the projects I can think of for the time being. Let me know if there’s something I forgot or which one of these you’re personally waiting for!