A FireRed ROM hack that layers a Diablo-style gear & relic system on top of the vanilla game — drops, affixes, rarities, legendary uniques, and a five-tier endgame dungeon.
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01
01-the-idea-and-foundation.md
[day 1]
A decompiled ROM, a design on paper, and the first lines cut.
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02
02-the-ui-challenge.md
[day 1]
Seven screens cut from a codebase that never expected them.
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03
03-the-grey-screen.md
[day 1]
The stack had 140 bytes left.
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04
04-the-string-encoding-mystery.md
[day 1]
`"Hello"` doesn't mean `"Hello"` here.
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05
05-making-it-beautiful.md
[day 2]
Dark theme, transparent windows, and a custom palette — Diablo aesthetics on a GBA
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06
06-the-world-comes-alive.md
[day 2]
Lore, NPC dialogue, custom sprites, and finding an identity
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07
07-into-the-rift.md
[day 2]
Five dungeon floors. Thirty-five files. Three build errors.
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08
08-whats-next.md
[day 2]
What works, what doesn't, and what the numbers say.
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09
09-testing-the-untestable.md
[day 3]
No debugger, no console.log — so I made a cheat code.
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10
10-the-overnight-sprint.md
[day 3]
27 commits, 8 branches, zero sleep — what happens when you let the AI run unsupervised
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11
11-the-pixel-wars.md
[day 3]
18 commits, 4 crashes, 1 tile that kept destroying Charmander's name
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12
12-small-things-done-right.md
[day 4]
A new frame, a reusable API, and a character who turns around
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13
13-the-first-impression.md
[day 4]
One screen. Four layers. Eight commits before anything looked right.
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14
14-the-grind-continues.md
[day 4]
The overnight sprint, part two.
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15
15-the-overnight-forge.md
[day 4]
Transmuters, enchanters, augmenters — and the question of what makes a crafting system feel Diablo
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16
16-the-never-ending-forge.md
[day 4]
Quality of life, depth, and the third wave that made it feel complete
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17
17-the-palette-wars.md
[day 4]
Sixteen palette slots, sixteen problems, and the overnight sprint that broke the start menu.
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18
18-trust-but-verify.md
[day 4]
How reading the wrong memory for a week taught me to never trust manual offset math on ARM.
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19
19-playing-my-own-game.md
[day 4]
A dedicated play session turned up a list of things to fix.
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20
20-sharpening-the-axe.md
[day 4]
A session of cleanup, a new feature, and planning what comes next.
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21
21-what-the-night-built.md
[day 4]
An overnight run: battle feedback, hidden systems, and nine features that needed doing.
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22
22-the-long-way-back.md
[day 4]
The post-battle result bar worked in theory for weeks. Getting it to work in practice took nine fixes and a lesson in how many things can go wrong between winning a battle and showing a window on screen.
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23
23-the-yellow-screen.md
[day 4]
Three bugs walked into the title screen. None of them knocked.
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24
24-the-fix-was-already-there.md
[day 4]
Some bugs die quietly. The investigation is the noisy part.
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25
25-buried-three-deep.md
[day 4]
Three separate bugs, same symptom. The last one had been hiding since the project began.