So, I'm curious if anyone else gets totally sidetracked into making fancy utilities when they really should be actually hacking a game?

I've been coding up a script editor program lately, and its probably taken about as much time as actually dealing with the game since I'm not exactly a programmer. Been getting very sidetracked into wanting to add search functions, all sorts of statistics and other weird useless functions into it :banghead:

I do tend to write utilites when hacking games. However, usually the task they perform would be exceedingly tedious and error prone if done by hand. If it weren't for the level manipulation utility I wrote, SMBS would have way more work. My recent FF work has been made far easier by a text inserter (with pointer calculation) that I wrote. The GBA homebrew I do has been made immensly simpler by use of a graphics manipulation tool I wrote.

In other words, good utilites save work in the long run. Just imagine trying to do a graphics hack without a tile editor or a level hack without a level editor. It's possible, but nearly pointless. Furthermore, if you release your utilites, I would argue that you contribute more to the community than you would if you just released your hand hacked results.

However, you are right to worry about creeping featuritis, the bane of many a doomed programming project. Basically, if you aren't going to use it yourself (or there hasn't been a feature request, for released utils), don't do it. It pays to keep in mind on of the hacker mottos, "You aren't going to need it." Write code you need or want, not stuff that "may be useful someday" or things that are "cool".