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 could be: Rebalancing Pokemon, rebalancing moves, updating trainers, and redesigning anything else that I thought would make the game better.

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. Ultimately, the core of the mod work I've done is hex editing and byte manipulation, excepting for the AI, which is written in a C-like scripting language called Pawn. Community tools generally wrap all of the byte manipulation into a pretty interface.

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 subadventurers during the project's tenure, attempting to see what limits I could push further. One such endeavour involved created an application that hooked into the popular 3DS emulator, pulling game data from users who ran it while they played, and stored that data in a database. Some of that data you can see on the Ancestral X website's homepage. The rest of the data I have yet to do anything with, but it exists in case there might ever be some fun use for it.

While the Ancestral X website itself is only partially complete, and at this point will not be finished, as the project is in an archived state due to my follow-up project, Y Nouveau, it was a first stepping stone to the greatly improved Y Nouveau website. The website is built upon PHP, JS, and SCSS.

After the initial 3 month experiment to see if I could get the ORAS megas into X, I wanted to get as much feedback as I could, so I spent another 3 months fleshing out the first wave of changes - which were rather lightweight as I look back in retrospect - I released my first beta build of v0.1 in May of 2022. This first build only included content up to the first gym, and it was brutally hard. I made wild overestimations, and my players were very vocal in letting me know. From then on, I released a new section of the game every 2 weeks or so, and I would constantly be making retroactive edits along the way.

As I went through, I made multiple large-scale updates. Things like normalizing the move lists for every single Pokemon, while also customizing and reworking those lists. When I wasn't on the clock and working for my job, I spent the large majority of my time working on this game.

Eventually, I got to the point where I reworked the final section of the game, and released by Official v1.0 in March of 2023. After that point the content creators took notice, and the playerbase rose significantly. I kept making iterations over the course of the year, and released a v2.0 with custom, entirely deterministic battle AI. Along the way, I kept pushing limits, adding a Mobile PC, moves that only exist in Gen 7+, and with assistance from a popular tool creator, put together a damage calculator for the game (a necessity for the most hardcore of players).