How to Enhance an SNES Game With the MSU-1 - Part 3: Failure and Success

Previous entries in this series are part 1 and part 2!

Utter Failure

In my first post in this series, I said I was going to document my foray into the world of SNES romhacking and I did. I learned a lot of assembly and had fun for the most part. But did I successfully create a patch for Zelda 3 to use MSU-1 music? As you may have guessed by the 2+ years between the last entry in this series and this one, the answer is a resounding "no." And that's okay.

It's Not So Bad

Frankly, I just didn't know enough about what I was doing. I didn't know enough about the MSU-1. I didn't know enough about the implementation of it in the SD2SNES. I didn't know enough about the SNES assembly language. I still don't know enough to do this sort of thing! That's okay, I've got plenty of other interests to pursue.

So why am I posting again after all this time? Well, I did want to document what has happened since I wrote the last entry in this series since those two posts are by far the most popular on this blog (and rightly so). I feel obligated. It's just taken me a while to get around to it. If you're reading this to attempt writing your own MSU-1 patch, perhaps I can offer you just a bit more guidance.

What Little Advice I Can Give: Ask For Help

The one thing I didn't do enough of was asking for help. There are plenty of people in the romhacking community who have already done this sort of thing. There are forums where you can post and ask them questions. There is absolutely no guarantee that they'll respond, and nor should there be. I didn't ask for help almost exclusively because I didn't want to bother these people. What right did I, a total newbie, have to ask for help if I hadn't tried myself first? Well, I did try and I wasn't getting anywhere. I should've asked for help. 

I want to stress that I am not one of the people you should ask for help. Everything I know about the MSU-1 I've documented here in these articles. I've provided links to everything I found. Ikari_01, developer of the SD2SNES even reached out to me on the comments offering to help. I should've taken them up on it, but by the time they reached out to me, I was already fed up with romhacking and had moved on to other things. If you're reading this, Ikari, thank you for your offer. If I ever try this sort of thing again, I'll not pass up such opportunities. As it stands, though, I got so frustrated with my lack of knowledge and progress that there's no way I can bring myself to try again.

A Link to the MSU-1

So where does this leave Zelda 3? It's gotten the patch that I always hoped it would, actually! Back in October 2014, Conn79 got in touch with me over GitHub where I'd posted my patch source code telling me that he'd been working (with others) on a similar patch. Luckily for everyone, he had succeeded where I'd failed! You can check out the thread about his patch here!

It turns out that all my work wasn't entirely pointless though, as it gave him the clue they needed to get SD2SNES working. You can read our discussion, with a bit more technical details of how it was accomplished as well as a link to the disassembled patch that was finally produced. And did you catch that bit at the end of our discussion? They asked for help.

Final Thoughts

Romhacking is super cool and I'd love to learn more about it and give it another shot some day, but for now I'm happy to sit on the sidelines as folks who have more experience than I do crank out great translations and cool patches. I'm perfectly happy to focus more on my programming craft for my day job and my hobby game development that I've covered elsewhere on this blog.

If there's any questions I can answer or any notes I can publish from my romhacking attempt, please let me know and I'll make it happen.

Good luck, all you MSU-1 folks! Please make lots of great music patches for me to play!

End of June Progress Report: I'm taking a break

This'll be a short post.

I'm taking a break from game development for the month, even though it's killing me to do so. My day job has been really stressful and consequently I haven't had a lot of time to do game development in my free time. This has really sucked, but there's been no way around it and I keep beating myself up about not doing more, but that really doesn't help with my stress levels (and I would like to note here that I feel I am typically quite good at dealing with stress).

I'm feeling burnt out and work isn't going to be less stressful for another month at least, so I'm giving myself permission to not work on game development. In fact, I'm going to force myself not to work on it with the assumption that this break is just for the month of July and that this will help me be more energized to do the work in August.

No small part of me worries that not being able to handle this all at the same time means that I could never make it in the games industry. However, I've been reminding myself that if I were in the games industry, I (probably) wouldn't be working literally all day for six days of the week.

I don't know. Guess this is just another part of my grand experiment. Feeling kind of down this month.

On a positive note, I finished my first playthrough of Analogue: A Hate Story tonight and it was great! Also, I'll have some more things to post about the MSU-1 soon, so hopefully people will look forward to that; especially the people who have been posting in the comments of part 2 of that article series!

End of March Progress Report

Oh wow! March just flew by didn't it? Well, time to put our best foot forward and work hard this April. It's going to be a month full of hard work and-

Oh... geez, April's already half over...
Well, uh, I guess I've been making good progress on my "Power Game" prototype that I've been documenting all year. Yeah, let's take a look at the progress I've made on that!

Uh... well, shit.

Real Talk

So, what happened?

The answer is a lot of things happened. Work at my day job started to get really hectic towards the end of February and that's still going strong, so I've had a lot less energy by the time I get home each night. Then there's been some tough times for friends of mine, so I wanted to be available to them, further diminishing time I had for working on the adventure portion of my game. When I did work on my game, I managed to make it really tedious to put text into the game and since my plan had been to write out the story, that made me loathe to work on the game. 

Perhaps the biggest problem though, is taking a step back and looking at my project's scope. I've designed an art heavy game and I have no means of making the art. I mean, I've been making do with my horrible approximations of art, but it really doesn't do much for morale. I see what other people are doing in less time and I feel like their smaller, simpler (graphically) games are doing more for them because they're actually learning things and making finished projects.

I haven't been completely delinquent in my game development though. I've created a few small projects experimenting with different parts of Unity, and while that's been fun it hasn't created anything very impressive or fruitful.

So What Now?

Well, I've identified my problems, and I've taken some time this past week or two to recuperate. I'll probably take most of next week easy as well, but my goal for April is to have a small finished game. There are three things I think will propel me towards hitting this goal:

1. Greatly reduced scope. Despite my best attempts to check myself before I wreck myself, I keep trying to make games that are beyond the amount of time I have available. So part of what I'm doing with these small projects I've been making is busting myself down to the smallest possible scope I can let myself have. It sucks, but it has to be done.
2. Ludum Dare 29 is happening on the 25th of the month. I'm going to participate and make a small game in 48 hours. The last time I did this, I actually came out of it with something, so hopefully a small scope and a hard deadline will kick me out of this slump.
3. There was a job opening at XSEED Games for a Localization Editor. From the job description, it sounded like a dream job for me. I thought I met all the qualifications rather well and then some, but they told me that my background was too technical for that position and that I didn't have any sort of English degree or professional writing background. They're absolutely right, of course! I've taken five years of creative writing classes throughout high school and college, I've completed nine first drafts of novels in the last ten years and written several short stories, but none of it has ever been published! Tons of people have done this as well, so I'm really not special in that regard. If I want to get that sort of dream job in the future, I need to get published. I need to have work I can point to and say "I don't have a degree in English, but this is what I've done and here's how people have responded to it." Basically, I'm disappointed but determined to not miss out on such a chance in the future.

So for now, I'm going to try to relax and be in a good place for Ludum Dare on the 25th, keep up on my small projects in Unity, and come May 1st I'll reassess where I am and figure out what I can do to make a game in eight months. I'm down, but I'm not out yet.

February RPG: "Red Strings of Fate" Not Being Released!

Well that month went by quickly.

Sadly, February was a spectacular failure on my part to actually put rubber to the pavement and get the work done. It's so embarassingly unfinished that I can't even bring myself to put what little there is up for download. Instead, I'll use this post to explain what my goals were and what actually managed to get done. Since February has Valentines Day in it, I decided that it'd be great to do some sort of romance themed game.

Here's some pictures of my failure in progress.

The Plan

In my head, you'd be able to choose between a few different characters or create your own of either gender and then select one of 4 - 6 romantic interests (also spanning both genders). The story would begin with your character lamenting their lack of high school love life in the way that teenagers do, but then your character would mention finding a summoning spell.

At this point the lights come up on the protagonist's room where we find that you've already managed to summon Cupid to your aid. Cupid, being trapped until you fulfill your goal, lends you the power to see and manipulate (to an extent) the red strings of fate that attach soulmates to each other in myth and legend.

She's such a unique character.

Your choices are so diverse.

Then you are fully equipped to set out on your quest to woo your chosen one. You set out and endear yourself to them with the aid of "endearment points" which let you see a bit into the future relating to your loved one. So for example, in the screenshot below, Helen is about to run out of fabric for a sewing project. Wouldn't it be so handy if you were just passing by later with the fabric she needed? So you go out and grab some fabric and after you give it to her your red strings of fate are closer together. After you repeat this twice more (giving me a nice three act character arc for each romantic interest) your strings are close enough that you can go to an endearment point at a location close to your interest's heart and twist your strings together, thus binding the two of you together for eternity.

Now what I wanted to do here was let you get to the point where you are about to twist those strings and then decide that you're manipulating their feelings towards your end and that's not how relationships should work. Your character dismisses Cupid and works towards a lasting relationship with the romantic interest the old fashioned way: without super powers. The game ends on a positive note.

This screenshot shows you being far off from some lovin'.

Initially I was going to just have some sort of "bad end" where you ended up with this more or less completely devoted love-slave and your character goes on doing their thing. The more I thought about it, the more this didn't sit well with me because in a lot of games where pursuing a romantic interest is the goal the player doesn't consider the feelings of the (fictional) character that they're pursuing and wouldn't this be a great place to say something about that?

My revised "bad end" wasn't an ending at all. Instead, your character would throttle Cupid and take his powers for yourself and select a new romantic interest from the previous list (minus your new boy/girlfriend who is totally okay with this because they're your mind-slave) and continue the game with your previous conquest at your side. Eventually this would again escalate and- well, I won't bore you with all the details but you get the idea.

What Went Wrong

I am a master map designer.

There were three major problems that led to my disaster this month. The first is that, as you may have guessed, my scope was WAY too big. There's just no way I could've done all that work in one month; not that I expected to in the first place, but just having such lofty goals can be discouraging. The second was wanting to use art assets I didn't have. I envisioned this as a modern day setting RPG and I couldn't see it working any other way. I didn't have art for that setting already, so I had to go and get some because as I've mentioned elsewhere on this blog, art creation is not my strength. Not having acceptable art led to me spending way too much time looking around on the internet for proper art assets and then fiddling with them to get the art just right and then trying to build maps so that I could build the rest of the game. The result was incomplete maps that I wasn't happy with and no game.

This map isn't so bad though. Just not good.

Finally, I just didn't put in enough time. At the start of the month I knocked out the red string of fate interface pretty quickly and was happy with that, but then I stopped working on the project for most of the rest of the month. There were days here and there where I'd pick it up and do a bit of work, but it was never enough to actually get anywhere. Then, when I was reaching the end of the month in the past few days I was panicking and cutting scope drastically but there just wasn't enough to build on.

I can blame things like Fire Emblem Awakening coming out or claim that maybe I had some burnout or something, but at the end of the day the fact is that I just didn't put in the time to make it good. Which sucks, but I guess that's the lesson I need to take away from this: just because I'm using a tool (RPG Maker) that does a whole lot for me up front, doesn't mean that I can slack off on working consistently. Like Perry Dawsey would say, "Ya got to have discipline."

This is the point last night where I gave up.

Looking Ahead

So even though I'm a bit dejected from my failure this month, I'm mustering up hope for March. I want to do something that doesn't require any extraneous art assets and something that can keep me motivated from month to month. I think this means that I should shoot for some sort of episodic thing. I don't know. Gonna keep thinking about it and worst case, I'll just wing it tomorrow. Whatever I do, I want to make more blog posts about what I'm up to, so stay tuned.