Shining Force romhacks, notes and other role-playing obsessions
This is a house with a few rooms in it. In each room sits a game I never really stopped playing — and everything that grew out of it: patches I wrote, mechanics I took apart to see how they tick, and the occasional long argument with myself about why a thirty-year-old strategy RPG still feels better than most things released last year.
Mega Drive · 1992
Shining Force is a classic tactical role-playing game (RPG) developed by Camelot Software Planning and published by SEGA in 1992 for the Mega Drive/Genesis console. It is widely considered one of the pioneers and most influential titles of the tactical RPG genre.
1 mod
Mega Drive · 1993
The sequel that gave the formula room to breathe: a world you cross on foot, thirty-odd recruits, and battles wide enough to lose a flank in. It is also the game this house takes its name from.
1 teardown
Vacant
Reserved for whatever eats the next six months of my evenings.
The dwarf smith in the hidden village does not roll once for your mithril weapon. He rolls up to four times, down a ladder of four weapons picked by the recipient's class, and stops at the first roll that comes up zero. Here is the routine, both ROM tables, the exact odds counted over all 65536 seeds instead of estimated, and a method that gets you the rarest weapon every single time.
Read the teardown ▸
A quality-of-life romhack for the US Mega Drive release. It puts the turn order on screen, lets you pick a difficulty when you start a new game, stops the game from throwing away surplus experience, and keeps a tally of every kill and every death for each member of the Force. Roughly three kilobytes of IPS patch, with not a single original byte moved.
Read the Turn Queue & Tactics write-up ▸
I play role-playing games and I write code, which is a combination that sooner or later leads you to open one of those games up and start moving instructions around inside it.
This is where everything that comes out of that ends up: the mods I build, notes on how these games are put together, thoughts on the ones I keep going back to, and the occasional long argument with myself about why a thirty-year-old strategy RPG still feels better than most things released last year. Whatever the next obsession turns out to be, it gets written up here too.
The name is borrowed, not invented: Creed's Mansion is a place you visit in Shining Force II, and it seemed like the right sign to hang over a house that collects old games.
Everything published here is either my own work or clearly credited. Patches are distributed as IPS files: bring your own ROM — no ROMs are hosted here, and they shouldn't be hosted anywhere else either.