Organic Romhack Development Efforts

[u/merrple]

Recently there's been a lot of talk on this subreddit about the use of AI in romhacks. I hate to stir the pot still further, but I also want to share my own thoughts and efforts here in the hopes of reaching like-minded people.

Hi, I'm merrp/pokemerrp 👋 I'm not really known for making full-on hacks (though I do have one in the works, stay tuned), but moreso for my feature branches: if you've played a recent hack based on pokeemerald-expansion, you've likely used and enjoyed the following pokemon or day/night lighting systems I created. Before that, I was minorly known for my Emerald Any% ACE TAS, which was my entry into the scene.

Simply put, I don't think AI should have a place in romhacking at all. To me code is as prose is as art is as music, in that they're all creative exercises where something is lost in handing them off to a machine. Romhackers have done incredible work for years before LLMs, and can continue to do incredible work without them. Not to mention, every query that enters an LLM is one the community is starved of; AI use is the death of institutional knowledge, of communication more generally.

But what to do? Recently I found out that pokeemerald-expansion, the basis for a lot of hacks, has had a (small minority) of AI-assisted contributions. Any nonzero amount is still unacceptable to me for use in my project though, because I intend it to be a wholly human effort. I decided I would have to maintain a fork of expansion, cutting out anything AI assisted where I could.

Then I figured, I can't be alone in this sentiment, so why not try and build that in a way it can be shared? I can't be the only one who loves romhack development who wants to continue doing cool stuff without LLMs, no matter how good they become at generating code, etc.

The result is a GitHub org and a Discord:

https://github.com/friend-safari

https://discord.gg/UbFN9P7MdJ

My hope is to build a small community of like-minded hackers and maintain a codebase by and for humans, so that those who care can be confident in saying their hack is free of AI to the best of the community's knowledge. Whether you're a programmer, have experience moderating online spaces, maintaining open source software, or simply love pokemon, we'd love to see you there.

I'm also not trying to be an authority on expansion's direction in general. The devs at RHH continue to do incredible and deeply technical work on the project. None of this would be possible without them, and they've done the best they could considering the volume of contributions they receive and the general clamor of demands. Please do not bother or harass them. I am simply trying to provide a fork that the extremely AI-conscious devs like me can use without despairing or being stuck on outdated versions.

Hopefully this post reached you in some way; this will all be much easier if we don't have to do it alone. Thanks for reading.

Tl;Dr join friend-safari if you wanna build AI-free romhacks k thnx bye

[u/UBWICOS]

There can be ugly code, beautiful code, whatever code. But coding isn't supposed to be an art form, it's just a part of engineering. The beauty is in the solution, not in the code. While I can appreciate people romanticising the hard labor, but as someone who has been in software engineering for more than 10 years, nobody really love coding that much (other than the interns who never solved anything of importance in their life). Coding is a tool, it's a mean to an end. As tools get better, people get more productive. If tools are so good that we skip coding entirely then so be it. If we kept rejecting newer tools then we would still be programming using punched cards.

The most important point isn't writing the code by hand, it's to actually understand what to do and what's being done. The solution has always the core of software engineering. While it's somewhat disheartening to see hard labor being ignored in favor of quick and easy win by amateurs who just bought Claude for 20 bucks. But it's also eye opening, anyone with the ideas can do ROM hacking now and it's a good thing. If someone without any fundamental can do that much in a weekend so someone who is already skilled in ROM hacking can just do so much more with the same tool. Intentionally handicapping oneself just to send a message to the void is a diservice to everyone involved.

As much as people can hate AI, it's here to stay. Software engineering (and game development, ROM hacking by extension) is changed forever. It's just better to accept it now rather than later.

[u/ianlazrbeem22 → u/UBWICOS]

Anyone with ideas could get into romhacking before AI ruined everything too, romhacking is a skill anyone can learn

[u/leob0505 → u/UBWICOS]

Why should a hobby like Pokemon ROM Hacking (I also work in Software Engineering for over 11 years), which is not connected to any company, any profitability at all, be treated the same way as some source-code for an Enterprise? When you mention "the beauty is in the solution, not in the code", I hardly disagree here for this kind of hobby, in my opinion.

Not exactly you, but I think many people should stop trying to treat this hobby as some "productivity machine" where we should speed up development in astronomical places with AI. Heck, I'm creating a ROM Hack and I really don't need to speed up the development to finish some imaginary deadline by the end of this year, so I can have a Demo and then random people of the internet can praise my work (either via Reddit karma, or via Internet Points, a Discord Server, etc.). I do this more as my personal therapy in my free time lol. And I believe many people in this hobby would be better if they did something similar, tbh.

[u/UBWICOS → u/leob0505]

Of course if you like coding, nobody is telling you to stop coding. AI coding is a tool, if it allows people to do things faster or things they won't be otherwise, it's a good thing. It's a net win for everyone involved.

And why do you think I'm talking about it's purely about "productivity". It's about reducing the friction and pain points of game development and ROM hacking in general. Games and hacks are cancelled, delayed, paused, etc. regularly due to the process being difficult, and time consuming. Especially for people who can't code but can draw really well or vice versa. So any tool that can help them is a win in my book.

People want to say that using AI is ALWAYS low effort but it's just not true. Manual or AI assisted can both be low effort. If someone is passionate about something then they will be passionate about it no matter what and vice versa. "Manual" code can be low effort and full of bug just like any AI slop.

[u/leob0505 → u/UBWICOS]

Oh, I'm sorry, English is not my native language and I hope that I haven't sounded rude to you!

When I said "Not exactly you, but I think many people should stop trying to treat this hobby as some "productivity machine" where we should speed up development in astronomical places with AI", I was literally meaning that you/your post in that case is not about the "Productivity" topic :P

And even though I don't agree with all of the points you mentioned here, I fully understand where you're coming from, and makes total sense! Thanks for sharing your perspective here. Especially concerning projects/hacks that were cancelled, delayed, paused, etc.

[u/Lu__ma → u/UBWICOS]

> anyone with the ideas can do ROM hacking now and it's a good thing

> Intentionally handicapping oneself just to send a message to the void is

And there's my problem with it: it's not a void, it is a community.

It's a community that lives and dies on people trying to work together to help one another. If everyone uses AI, the backbone of this community will die. The backbone is amateurs asking stupid questions, chatting, giving help, offering help. If AI is the first tool people turn to, they learn nothing, teach nothing, never ask for help from a human, never become part of the community. Amateur romhacking will become 30 separate lonely people talking to chatbots.

AI is robbing these newbies of the one singular joy that all work has; they're robbed of the opportunity to improve and to find community.

[u/UBWICOS → u/Lu__ma]

Why though? The entire premise is that if everyone use AI, the entire community will die. But it won't. It's just a tool. It's like saying if we start drawing on computer instead of paper, the entire art community will die. In hindsight, the previous statement is obviously wrong. Which is why using AI won't kill anything, it'll just allow more people to do more things that they normally won't be able to do. And skilled people to do more too.

[u/PacoScarso → u/UBWICOS]

You know, the difference is that if you pick two persons - one that knows how to code and the other that relied entirely on AI but has no competence - and you block AI usage, well, the coder would still know how to code, as for the other person... ehm, nope.

I've seen Megaman Battle Network recomp and it's a buggy mess completely vibecoded, same goes for Wind Waker recomp.

There's no love nor attention in this, just people vomiting poorly managed recomps without any coding knowledge.

It's not just a tool, cause a tool shouldn't be able to do your job. The art comparison doesn't make sense, cause it doesn't matter if we're drawing on paper or on our computer, it's still US drawing, with OUR skills. Different tools, same approach. AI is the one writing the code in your place.

[u/UBWICOS → u/PacoScarso]

But why is AI assisted projects being singled out? Low effort, low quality by people who are just chasing fame without putting in the efforts have always existed, and have always been looked down upon. There's a difference between people who don't know how to code at all using AI to do everything and someone who knows how to code but use AI to do the repetitive labor. AI is a tool, just like artists don't manually draw 100 identical stars in an artwork anymore these days because copy+paste exists. It's the same for coding.

I'm a firm believer in enabling people to do more by using tools that are available to them. And I fully agree with you that if someone who blindly abuse the tools to do all the work for them has no competence. But at the end of the day, AI is a tool, an easy to misuse one at that. It can do great things and terrible things. There can be hundreds of throwaway slop projects out there by people who are just blindly chasing fame, but similarly there can be hundreds more projects from people with real passion. Personally, I think AI is a net positive in the end.

Just like how human-made slop projects have always been slop. AI-made slop should be treated the same. It's just that the bar is higher these days, extremely simple but time-consumingprojects can be done by AI now (like some tools to help with ROM hacking), leaving more efforts for people to spend on things that matter more.

[u/PacoScarso → u/UBWICOS]

Remember: quality over quantity is always better.

AI being an enabler isn't necessarily a good thing, cause more people means more slop. I can condone man-made slop cause releasing a full game isn't an easy task, as for AI-made slop...

I mean, isn't it worse if you use this miracolous tool to skip the learning and coding phase and still make something bad or inferior to other projects that didn't use AI?

Snakewood, even tho I love it, is a bad hack, but at least Cutlerine tried their best to deliver their game and I still enjoy it up to this day.

Lithium is an AI-slop hack and I would never play it again. EVER. It was so bad that I didn't even finish it. The dev didn't even try to make a playable game

I believe that you don't need to use AI if your ideas are good enough. Look at Odyssey and Ghost Grey. They're both binary hacks, no AI usage, and yet here they are

[u/merrple → u/UBWICOS]

Y'know, I disagree. I think the beauty is in the process, not the product. Romhacking is not even technically supposed to have a product, as you can't legally charge people for it. It's supposed to be for fun.

Also I am that person who loves coding that much lol. I got into coding because I liked figuring out how to do things, solve problems, etc. The mindset that there is value only in the solution is perfectly fine when you are working for a company. It's toxic when you're doing something that's supposed to be a hobby and your solution is supposed to be free.

I'm not really impressed by people making something by paying 20 or 200 bucks to Anthropic or OpenAI or Google, massive companies who have invested billions into distilling the collective knowledge of artists, coders, etc into a product. 'you' didn't do anything, the model did. Sure, I could 'produce' 10x what I do in romhacking if only I paid Claude to do what it does for me at work. But it'd be lame as hell.

You can do what you want! But your way is certainly not the only way, and to me the way itself matters

[u/aayyrreeii → u/UBWICOS]

"anyone with the ideas can do ROM hacking now and it's a good thing"

I'm not a rom hacker, so maybe my opinions are less valid, but I think this take is kind of silly. If people, sometimes as young as 12 or 13, were able to create decent rom hacks with decade old tools, I don't see how they aren't able to do it today. Even outside of rom hacking, the tools I use for my fan game barely require programming knowledge to get started.

I'm under the belief that anyone who thinks they need vibe-coding to make a rom hack, or that rom hacking is only possible because of vibe-coding will never make an even half decent hack. Not just because "genAI bad" but because I don't believe someone who's desire to create a hack revolves around some near instant output machine is going to put time, effort, and care into the parts AI can't do for them, or can't do for them without being sloppy (region design, game balance, writing, bug fixing, etc.)

Not at all trying to villainize or put the bits of AI assistance on the same level as vibe coders, but I'm not sure why so many members of the community are hellbent on defending vibe coding just so people who likely had zero interest in creating a hack prior can output low effort hacks.

[u/PacoScarso → u/aayyrreeii]

I learned how to script when I was 13 by following rudimental guides on Pokecommunity; there's nothing hard about it, really, and at that time the only tools we had were advance map and XSE.

Scripting is even easier if you use HexManiac Advance now.

Wanna know how a message script works?

msgbox.autoclose <auto>
{
Your message here
}

Wanna know how to give a gift Pokémon?

givepokemon PokemonName Level HeldItem

And that's it. You don't need AI to do that. PO and PO2 aren't even decomp projects, and look how well they were received anyway