Ancestral X

Ancestral X was the result of my playing a different Pokemon X ROM Hack and being disappointed in the features within. Most notably, Pokemon Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire (ORAS), the Gen 3 remakes for the Nintendo 3DS, added new Mega Pokemon, building off the expansion feature released with Pokemon X & Y. However, those Megas were never backported to X & Y themselves.

After searching the web, poking previous creators, and experimenting myself, I was the first to bring the ORAS Megas into X & Y, bringing 3 months of work to fruition. After that, I continued on in creating my vision of what Pokemon X had the potential to be by rebalancing Pokemon, rebalancing moves, updating trainers, and altering anything and everything that I felt would improve the quality of the game.

Ancestral X was developed solely by myself. While there are no official tools for this kind of modding work, the Pokemon modding community has created a variety of tools for creators to use, many of which I happily took advantage of. The majority of the community tools generally wrap byte manipulation into a pretty interface, but ultimately, the core of the mod work I've done is hex editing and byte manipulation, excepting for the Battle AI, which is written in a C-like scripting language called Pawn.

The game features a wide array of changes, including, but not limited to: Full Pokemon Rebalancing (Stats, Abilities, Typings), Encounter Design, Trainer Design, Item Adjustments, Move Rebalancing, and the ORAS Megas. Additionally, throughout the project, I maintained incredibly meticulous documentation. Not only is every active change documented across multiple spreadsheets, and eventually the Ancestral X website, but I kept a changelog that encompasses every single change throughout the entire project's lifetime.

I also went on a lot of various sub-adventurers during the project's tenure, attempting to see what other limits I could push further. One such endeavour involved created an companion application that hooked into the commonly used 3DS emulator that most players play on, took snapshots of battle data from users who ran it while they played, and then stored that data in a database. You can visualize that data yourself right now on the Ancestral X website's home page, although it's only a fraction of the data that was collected. The rest of the data I've yet to do anything with, but it exists in case there might ever be some fun use for it.

Another endeavour I undertook was the creation of the Ancestral X website itself. While my vision for it at the time eclipsed the work I would put into it, it was ultimately the framework for the significantly improved website for Y Nouveau, Ancestral X's successor.

After the initial 3 month experiment to see if I could get the ORAS megas into X, I was itching to put my game out to the masses and collect as much feedback as possible, so I spent another frenzied 3 months fleshing out the first wave of changes - which were rather lightweight compared to my output today. I released my first beta build of v0.1 in May of 2022, which only included content up to the first gym, was brutally hard. As is no surprise to a first attempt, I made wild overestimations, and my players were very vocal in letting me know.

From then on, I kept to a mostly consistent release schedule, offering the next segments of the game every 2-ish weeks, with each patch full of wide-spanning changes, some of which were very large-scale updates, like customizing the move lists for each Pokemon, while cross referencing between different Pokemon to aim for balance.

Eventually, I reached the point I'd been striving towards - the release of the Pokemon League Champion, i.e. the end of the game. I released Ancestral X v1.0 in March of 2023, and was fortunate enough to have some notable content creators in the space take notice, which resulted in the playerbase growing at a steady pace.

I continued to make iterations over the course of the year, and even released a v2.0 with custom, entirely deterministic Battle AI. Along the way, I kept pushing limits as much as I could, adding Quality of Life features like a Mobile PC, entirely new moves from future Pokemon games, and with assistance from a popular tools creator, put together a damage calculator for the game - a necessity for the hardcore players.