Backstage Pass #57

On this edition of Backstage Pass, I'll be talking about...

Porting OBT's save from physical to ROM! While not technically a difficult process, it still took me several months to finally complete this project, hehe.

I've mentioned before that OBT has largely been played on a physical copy of PMD: Explorers of Sky since I started my current iteration of the run in 2017. I chose to play on hardware because I had a tendency to move around a lot, and wanted something a little more portable so I could play between college lectures. That, and my laptop at the time had a difficult time running even pretty basic emulators.

Alolan Vulpix had recently been announced when I started my new run for OBT, and I wanted to play through the game with as close of an approximation as I could get for it, which I achieved by using an Action Replay to modify Rune's type, abilities, and moves to that of an Alolan Vulpix (a bit difficult, since a big chunk of Alolan Vulpix's moveset has moves not included in gen 4). There was one big roadblock with this method, however; every time I entered a dungeon, the game would activate flags that would restore Rune's modifications (except for moveset) back to what they originally were. This meant a lot of code reactivation, and keeping my Action Replay connected to my DS was pretty much mandatory at all times. If that didn't already complicate things, the hardware in my Action Replay started to deteriorate with age- which made sense, given that it was already a 7 year old device when I started the run. These compounding issues made it difficult for me to want to continue my run, until I ended up taking a hiatus from it by the time I hit Chapter 11 in the story.

As weeks slipped into months and months slipped into years, I realized I couldn't keep putting off playing the game forever. So my solution? Creating a modded version of Sky using Skytemple so I wouldn't have to keep resetting dungeon flags!

Those of you who are familiar with the PMD romhacking scene may wonder why I didn't just start off with a modded version of Sky to begin with to avoid all this hassle. And the answer to that is... when I started OBT's current run, Skytemple wouldn't be publicly released for another 3 years! I had looked into modding Sky before that point, but without much coding knowledge and the attention span of a paperclip, it wasn't going to happen. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with the PMD romhacking scene, Skytemple is a very user-friendly ROM editor for PMD: EOS. I cannot express enough how easy it was to use for the edits I needed for OBT's run- it's an absolute lifesaver! I also employed the use of the SkyEditor which, as the name implies, edits saves for PMD: EOS with relative ease, and another editor made by frequent stream-goer RokaVoros called SkyEdit which has more save edit options that I used to make more precise tweaks while they guided me in stream chat to the correct menus for what I wanted to change.

However, even with these tools available to me, that left the issue of setting off the story flags needed to get back to the point where I left off in my original save. As far as I knew, there was no way to achieve this with Skytemple or either of the save editors, so I had to play the game from scratch. It wasn't a huge ordeal thankfully (the process sped up by the turbo button on emulator), and after a few weeks, my emulated run was at the same point I left off with my physical run! And after a whole lot of cross-referencing later (cataloguing over 300 something items I had in storage was a bit of an ordeal), I had a near perfect replica of my physical run, now safely on my computer. And with the help of a flashcart, I can still play on hardware and take my game on-the-go whenever I need! It's a dream come true.

... But it doesn't end there! I also made a few tiny tweaks in the way of custom sprites, in-dungeon dialogue from teammates, and changing Milotic's body size so Eilwyn can come on more adventures with the team (I understand the body size mechanic as a means to prevent you from taking a team of 4 box legends in a dungeon with you, but I promise you Milotic is like, probably weaker than a lot of pokemon you can recruit in PMD lmao). My favorite I think is the quick and sloppy edits I made to Rune's sprite. While she appears to be a Ninetales, it's purely for aesthetic, and she still has the normal stats of a Vulpix.

And speaking of Rune, here's a peek at her modified learnset! These moves took inspiration from the Alolan Vulpix moveset from the romhack Explorers of Skies, which put a lot more thought into the moveset than I did with my Action Replay haha

Additionally, I added fairy-typing to the game using a patch provided by the SkyTemple community! I spent something like 2 seconds trying to figure it out myself before my brain overheated, hehe. It still catches me off guard in places like Treeshroud Forest, where I'm wondering why Crunch does barely anything to the Ralts running around all over the place. Having all of these custom tweaks has made the game fun and refreshing to play, and I really look forward to my play sessions now! Maybe one of these days I'll post a patch download for folks who want to play through the same mod I used... after I play around more with custom sprites ;)