FFVI: Divergent Paths

I am a professional board game developer, and for the past month I've been (poorly) running double duty on this hack and a game I'm designing/developing under contract. I need to be focused on that. (The game is Space Base if anyone is wondering. I am on a handshake agreement to develop the next 2 mini-expansions and the next boxed expansion.)

I plan to let this be the last big romhack, at least for a while. Since I started working on Divergent Paths, I have gotten a promotion, a second job, and jumped from 2 kids to 4. The time just isn't there anymore. I've only been able to finish it in these past 5 months because my second job is contract-based, and contracts were on pause while the manufacturing and shipping caught up from Covid. My wife asked me at the beginning of that time if there was anything that felt like "unfinished business", and I answered, "My FF6 hack."

As far as romhacks that I might be doing, there are 2 that I think are doable:
1. I have a hack for A Link to the Past that re-arranges the dungeon items and a select handful of overworld tiles to make the game non-linear in 3 sections: (1) The Light World Dungeons can be done in any order, (2) The first 4 dungeons of the Dark World can be done in any order, and (3) Dark World Dungeons 5 & 6 can be done out of order, but require items from the first 4 dungeons.
2. I am considering a hack to Chrono Trigger that separates Water and Ice into separate elements, and re-arranges the tech list to make each character feel more unique.

There is one BIG romhack on the level of Divergent Paths (or maybe even more) that I may just release my documents and plans for, and then people can do with that what they will. It is for Chrono Cross, and it is a rewrite of the story for a cast of 8 well-developed characters. It rewrites the backstory to make the events of the game feel less random, and adds a level of cosmology that drives the game towards its conclusion. I'd be willing to come along as the script writer for that project, but I don't think I'd be willing to do it as a coder.

I'd encourage making your work for this hack public.  It'll most likely cause quite a stir on romhacking.org.  Besides, Justin recently made his work for MMX3 - Zero Project public and it's been a 'ground swell' of innovation for the other games in the series.  We might just get a Capsule Remix of MMX2 with Zero playable during a newgame+ save...that last thought is ONLY speculation on my part...

At any rate, it'd help a great deal providing source code and personal notes on the project once it's released.  I couldn't find any problems during the minor play-through that I did for the hack...just using your savefiles.  I'm currently scripting a draft for your Divergent Paths hack (NO changes will be made to your portion of the script).  I may not have an adequate grasp of assembly language yet, but I've got a decent amount of talent when writing.  I never fully realized just how much of the vanilla script I disliked until I discovered I could make changes to it.  I'll get a decent script update out there for you (at least for the vanilla portions)...maybe late this Summer or early Fall...it all depends on my free time.  I'll NEED help turning it into an .ips after the work has been done because I want it to be available for general use.  I can always ask for help with that around here when I'm done with the rough draft.

Oh!  Finally, I'd encourage you to drop a message over on Zeldix to see if they'd be interested in making an MSU-1 file for your new song.  They're pretty upstanding characters over there so I'd be surprised if they didn't put it on their list of things to do.  Also, instructions on how to inject Leo's theme song into a vanilla rom might be helpful to some of us...honestly, I haven't tried that yet.

If you ever get a chance to make time for the Zelda hack, then zeldix.com is the place to go to get people excited about the project.  There's one patch on the site that I haven't gotten to play with...it turns the Book into a useful item on the battlefield (i.e. fighting monsters).