I'm thinking of working off Fire Red to create a new adventure either using the first 150 or possibly making a new Pokedex.
Among other things, I need to be able to map edit, sprite edit, text edit, and POSSIBLY use a different VWF font.
This is where the "collaboration" comes in--besides Advance-Text (might see how it works soon) and EliteMap (Avira found a virus in it), are there any game-specific utilities I can use before I need to go to the usual suspect links that everyone posts when someone is like "HOW DO YOU HAX DA POGEYMANS FOR ME". I want to do a decent job for my first hack that I'll hopefully complete.

TL;DR: I'm going to attempt a Fire Red-based project, I need game-specific utilities and other resources so I can do it on my own.

Off the top of anyone's head, are there any decent scripting documents revolving around GBA games here before I go looking in-depth?

And I really don't know any good hex editors. And I also will probably need a decent tile editor.

As always for free hex editors, I recommend HxD. It's like Hex Workshop, but free and getting better and better with each release. The author is very open to suggestions as well.

Sorry, I meant TLP 1.1. Also, HxD is a good hex editor, though it takes some time getting into, but it's really powerful, too. It's just that I've been using HexWorkshopPro for a long time (though I bought version 6 and it doesn't work and their support is playing dead fish right now *argh*) and just tried 010 Editor, which is great, too.
HxD is free and good, so go with that, it's on a professional level.

cYa,

Tauwasser

I'm not sure if I'll be working on this still.

I've ran into the following problems:

I really need to start working on schoolwork and getting caught up.
I think a better first project might be a platformer of some sort for the SNES. I don't think I'm cut out for this sort of thing and never will be.
I suck at sprite editing.

I would encourage you to just do a little at a time. My house would never get cleaned if I did it all at once. But if I just pick up five items a day, it actually ends up not taking as long as I thought it would. The same is true of any project that is too big to do all at once. You will probably surprise yourself with what you do get done, and once you hit critical mass, you won’t want to quit.

For example, I’m working on beating the Touhou games in order, regardless of difficulty. When things get too hard, I take a break, because I’m doing it for fun, not for anything serious.

But if I’m doing it seriously, it’s still the same. I’m pretty out of shape (go fig, I’m a nerd who’s sat on his bum all his life), so I’ve actually been hitting the gym even though I find pretty much all exercise a chore at best and torture at its worst. But since I built up the habit of going, it just doesn’t feel right if I don’t do it, no matter how excruciatingly tired I am.

Plus, despite how ambitious the project is, you can probably attract people with the skills you lack if you get far enough along. I mean, you’re not the first person to want to hack together a new Pokémon game (or all those @#$% clones I played in 5th grade were figments of my imagination!). You just gotta find someone else who’s willing and able to help, and augments what you don’t already have.

This reminds me of a cool idea I once had for a Pokémon hack. I didn't get much further than the titlescreen:

I planned to replace the main character with Raidou Kuzunoha, and all the Pokémon with demons from the SMT series. I also wanted to make all 150 demons available in the one game, because it's easier to make, and because I always thought the trading was ridiculous ("Let's both go catch a ton of Pokémon we don't want, and trade them just to fill out our Pokédexes!"). I would have also liked to replace the Pokédex with a fully-functional Demon Compendium.

I'm probably never going to go through with it, though. I have plenty of other half-baked hack ideas, which I'm way too lazy to do. Whenever I try to do something as far as hacking or coding, I usually spend the afternoon playing DoomRL. I don't even like Pokémon that much.

You just get more and more awesome.

My main "barriers" are a few things:

• I can only do sprite recolors.
• Getting all the utilities/docs together (Pokecommunity was down when I was doing it)
• Schoolwork (primarily American Lit II) that needs to be caught up on

What I could do is a bit of planning before I actually start the work.