Y Nouveau

My previous game, Ancestral X, was in many ways, a patchwork effort. From the beginning, there was a very loose vision, but the majority of changes and improvements I made were discovered one by one, as I would put out bi-weekly patches. I lay this out to compare against my philosophy with Y Nouveau.

Y Nouveau was a carefully crafted shadow project, designed over the course of 1.5 years. From its inception, I knew exactly how I wanted to craft the game, and that vision allowed me to carefully tie all of the various features together. No system was designed in a vacuum.

Y Nouveau 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 on both the website and its corresponding backup spreadsheet, but the changelog that encompasses every single change throughout the entire project's lifetime is available on the Patch Notes page of the website.

Additionally, the Ancestral X website laid the foundation for the vastly improved Y Nouveau website, which features the actual download directly through it, the damage calc, and every page of documentation. I also reworked the backend of the website, swapping over to TypeScript for more explicitly defined code, and improved the bundling process for files to upload to the web server.

As the game was designed with a clear vision in mind, I needed a concrete method of tracking what I had gotten done and what I needed to still get done. This, of course, led to me creating my own internal tasking system, which is a fancy way of saying I kept my todo list as a series of notes on my main spreadsheet. That said, I kept everything up to date, shifting things from progress to done columns as I went through, and this is a case where my overaggressive documentation came in handy, as those also effectively worked as progress markers to see how far down a given list .

I also kept a list of larger, end of project wrap up goals, which mainly included release-focused objectives, like contracting and working with my video editor to get the fun trailer at the top of this page, or contacting various streamers who are in the Pokemon ROM Hack gaming space.