Sounds like a really, really good idea to me.

I've been playing around with a hack of Dragon Warrior called "ROM Hack Warrior" in which all of the townspeople spout of ROM hacking related information and the quests are geared towards teaching actual techniques... for instance, instead of finding the Princess,  you have to find the Pointer. I hadn't thought about putting in something that would require actual hacking of the game in progress, however.

While the RPG route makes a lot of sense, an action game would also have strong potential. For instance, you could place an unsurmountable object in the player's path and they would have to hack it to get around it.

This is a fantastic idea.


-A king won't say the speech to start a quest. The people in the castle teach you how to set his speech pointer to the correct, quest activating, text.

-An item at a shop where you have to change the prices to afford anything.

-Monsters in a dungeon you have to edit before you can beat them.

-Armor you have to hack into your inventory.

-A weapon whose properties you must change to be effective.

-Two identical map tiles where one is passable and the other is not. You have to change the graphics to see the path.

-Final boss? A small routine you have to write in asm before you can finish.


The game should use a built in save system so you don't have to rely on save states to save progress. But that probably wouldn't cause too much trouble if someone used save states.

This sounds like a great idea and an awesome way to introduce beginning romhacking (or for that matter some more advanced topics). I hope somebody picks this up and runs with it.

A rom hack game that turns ROM hacking into a game?  Revolutionary!  When you save your game before editing the game or the save, a guy can tell you to make a backup copy of your files, which is in effect, saving your saves.  There is SO much you can do with this concept.  I wonder if it should be written heavily in ASM, so that you can program ways to outsmart the player if he is cheating at cheating.  For example, there can be a guard that won't allow admission into the Mushroom Castle to anyone except Mario, but an NPC tells you that if you use Mario's SMB3 sprite and palette he won't know the difference.  Then you'll need clever code to inspect your tile bank to confirm the player's Mario-esque verisimilitude.  NPCs may even tell byte addresses.  If the player tries to cheat by removing the guard, either try outsmart the player, or just approvingly accept that the player is thinking outside the box.  Maybe for the guard obstacle the player is SUPPOSED to use out-of-the-box sleaze tactics. 
This is the most innovative concept I've heard in a long time.  Basically you'd be making a game that is self-aware - you'd be making SkyNet.  Designing obstacles can be mad fun, but coding them is another story. 

I love ETG's obstacle ideas, especially the item price one.  You should sequence the obstacles in a way so that newbies wouldn't know how to get around them.  For example, teach price editing BEFORE inventory editing, otherwise the player would have no need to bother with the price mod. 

It's interesting that I found this post right after starting a topic about making hacks of hacks.