Project Goals - danenders/pkedx GitHub Wiki

Emerald DX was born out of combination of my desire to create a rom hack and a realization that I've never actually played the original Hoenn games. Before I changed everything about a game, I figured I should preserve as much of the original game as I could while practicing how to implement modern mechanics.

As a result, I consider Emerald DX a "Quality of Life" update to Emerald. I wanted to focus on introducing some more modern mechanics, like the Physical/Special Split, Fairy Type, and improved control over your mon's stats. I wanted every Pokemon to be available, included Legendaries/Mythicals, and to assist with that a Day & Night system was added to allow for more natural mon variations on encounter tables. Full art battle backgrounds were added to give the game more life. I also implemented smaller changes, such as repeating repels or buying premier balls in bulk, as well as a variety of minor bugfixes and edits.

The most controversial change, I think, is that I've added Gen 4 style overworlds while retaining Gen 3 tilesets. I understand that not everyone may like the way this looks, but personally, I find Emerald's art direction to be very unappealing (especially its menus). I am not a fan of the original overworlds, but I think the Gen 4 assets do not look out of place against Gen 3 tiles. It has a kind of 'super-deformed' charm to the overworld and I think gives the game a little more life. It also looks nice with the following pokemon.

Hopefully, the game has retained enough of the original feel of Emerald while adding enough new features/content to be worth your time! I look forward to getting feedback, and am already working on taking what I've learned here to begin development of a new hack.