Closing, and Possible Future

Over the course of 20 months (22 months if counting updates), I was experimenting with editing the Mega Drive version of Super Street Fighter II. I was showing these edits on Twitter, and some people started taking notice of them, which encouraged me to do even more experimentation on the matter. However, as time went by, I grew more and more ambitious for the ROM Hack.

I first released the ROM Hack in a pretty rocky state, where the command to Sagat's Tiger Uppercut  would always get mangled, preventing players from being able to use the move. There's a couple of other bugs that I don't know how to fix, such as the one where if Avra or Belva get hit at the same time that they recover all their health, their lifebar might freeze.

But the worst of all the issues is the slowdown that I introduced by mistake. Ken and Boxer's stages have among the most severe lag in the hack. I've tried so many different solutions to fix the slowdown while still running the massive amounts of code that I newly inserted. It is advised to play in stages with the least amount of lag, such as Blanka (Roll), Dhalsim (Mai) or Fei Long (Emily)'s stages.

Over the 2 months that I spent updating this hack, I made a few system changes as well as several character tweaks, including changes made in response to videos of the hack where external cheats are used. Some combos from certain characters were also patched out. However, there's still a lot of problematic matchups such as Chun-Li vs. Madonna, where Chun-Li can win simply by spamming jump-ins, as Madonna doesn't have good anti-airs against her. I think the updates should be more about major fixes than balance changes.

As it stands right now, I think it's too late to update this ROM Hack any further without major fixes such as alleviating the slowdown, unless someone can submit those fixes to me, which is extremely unlikely.

Making this ROM Hack completely changed my tweeting habits, and I certainly could use a break from all that manual tile work I did. When people continue to make videos about this hack, it makes it hard for me to move on from it. So it feels like I'm stuck in some sort of limbo situation when it comes to content creation across several different platforms.

So what do I do after this? As much as I would like for this ROM Hack to get added to Fightcade, the updates to the client itself have been extremely sporadic, ever since the year of 2022 ended. Unfortunately, I do not see a bright future ahead of the production of this hack, at least not for me. I kept going about promoting my Discord server for this ROM Hack in the worst way possible. After dealing with some spam that can't create any actual conversations on the server, I decided to increase its verification level to keep users in check.

At this rate, I'm not exactly inclined to make another one of these, especially when it comes to the process I use for inserting sprites. If I do ever get around to making another SF2 ROM Hack, I hope I don't create tons of slowdown with excessive amounts of ROM location jumps like I did here. Just to make myself clear, I am only an amateur at these things, like with my other hobbies such as creating games in Game Maker.