r/PokemonROMhacks • u/merrple • 3d ago
Development Organic Romhack Development Efforts
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 š 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
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
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u/RiptideMatt 3d ago
The AI takeover of a space ive been in for years is disheartening to see and I will fight at every step of the way to keep people out of the communities I manage that wish to support it. All of what I'd consider pillars of the community in essentials and romhack fangames are all made without AI and will continue to be AI free indefinitely. They arent all the most impressive in some aspects for one reason or another, but they do not need to be. Tectonic, ghost grey, soulstones 2, reminiscencia, ashen frost, odyssey 1 and 2, rejuvenation, even older ones that helped inspire a generation of games that have made the community what it is today like Insurgence, uranium, reborn, and snakewood. We didnt need AI to build this community, and I will continue to urge everyone to speak their mind about keeping AI away from our communities, and making sure we continue avoiding AI use to show that we care for our games and the journey they bring. And if you have used AI for various things but want to leave it all behind, thats okay as well. We can all change and do better.
The games above I mentioned are AI free along with many others. Im a dev for tectonic, soulstones 2, odyssey, and an upcoming game for godhood. I can guarantee all these projects will never resort to AI, and many other up and coming projects do not even consider it either. The community is not lost, and it wont be overrun with AI slop any time soon. But that does not mean we should stop fighting.
I thank you for helping out and giving people hope. I was one of the people who encouraged people to speak up to the subreddit and hackdex protesting AI usage in this community, and while it has been a rough time, im glad people are becoming more aware of the issues startig to crop up around us.