>>25259102I second this. It takes hours making a satisfactory map, and that's (imo) the easy part. Hours and hours of scripting, testing, searching for solutions to and fixing bugs, editing encounters and creating trainer rosters with hand picked moves-most hacks become dead in the water when (usually a kid or teen) discovers rom hacking, sees all the flashy working hacks that were finished years ago or the current big projects (such as Liquid Crystal) and get ambitious notions. They make a couple of cool maps, they might script a couple of signs and NPCs and make every starter available in the first route (because it's a novelty to catch starters), change the lab starters, maybe even give Brock a Vulpix but sooner or later they give up because it's tedious, it's time consuming, and if you aren't careful, if you don't do rigorous testing at every turn, then you may have to restart completely and that's daunting as all hell.
Every day on forums dedicated to romhacking you see flash in the pan ideas with (honestly) shit stories and delusional grandiose ambitions and promises that die in a matter of days or weeks before any real progress is made. I know this because I started 3 or 4 hacks in that way before my current hack which is two weeks into production and I know may never actually see the light of day or fulfill every ambition I wish for it. Best case scenario the maps are done, the encounters changed, and a few trainers and gym leaders/elite four are different and a dozen people play it for a couple of hours before losing interest.
Any moron with a spark of creativity can stick Oak's Lab on a hill or turn Brock's gym into a cave, it takes discipline and attention to make something worth playing.
