What the TARC is Jurassic PokéPark?
What the TARC?
Well it’s that time of year again, summer rolls round and Team Leader Archie announces that it’s time for the annual Team Aqua Romhacking Competition, or TARC for short. Each year, the folk over in Team Aqua’s Hideout host a contest to make a short, small-scale, themed rom hack, in the spirit of completion and friendly competition. I was hesitant to enter and about the reserve myself to observing from afar, however, when Bivurnum asked if I wanted to join his team to help combat the burnout I was feeling, and told me that Nico would also be joining, it felt borderline rude to not jump on the opportunity to with the amount of talent between the two.
Regigigas: A Slow Start
The slight issue was, well, life. And here started the common theme, life will always find a way… to kick you in the ass. I was away for the first week of the competition, and I came back to a lot of Discord messages of Nico and Biv discussing the plans for our entry, so subsequently did a lot of backreading. When I tried to get started, I realised that I had not done any rom hacking for a while. So in order to get back into it, I did the simple task of creating some new animation tables and inserting a large Tyrantrum sprite from the Pokémon Mystery Dungeon Sprite Repository.
And as I did this… life happened.
We lost a team member, and all of a sudden had to find a replacement. Biv’s shoes are some large ones to fill, so we made the really bold decision… to not find a replacement because we really wanted to handicap ourselves. Okay, not quite, but Nico and I did struggle to find another teammate, but what was the worst that can happen.
- Optimism -
But it would be fine right? Yeah of course it would be. We still had a dynamic duo! We had some ideas about what we wanted battles to look like, so I braved the battle engine, starting small by adjusting the healthbox and battler positions. This changes were easy enough, we had an idea for our first puzzle