Introduction
Recently, we’ve interviewed several people who have marked the history of WAH, such as Serg!o, Alexmad, gameboy_cl, and Ulquiorra (Gary93).
This time, we shifted the focus a bit to bring you an international interview: we sat down with two big names from the scene, Ghoulslash and Klemniops, who are leading one of the most ambitious and innovative projects in terms of mechanics within romhacking: Pokémon Voyager.
In this exclusive interview, they shared everything about their experience in the world of rom hacking, what keeps them motivated even during difficult times, and what the journey of developing a hack that aims to go beyond what we’ve seen in the official games has been like. We also talked about the innovative mechanics that set it apart and, of course, got some news on the upcoming version 0.4, which promises to bring even more surprises and raise Pokémon Voyager as one of the most complete and original hacks out there.
Interview with Ghoulslash and Klemniops
1st question: To start, tell us a little about yourself. How did you get into the world of romhacking, and what inspired you to create Pokémon Voyager?
Ghoulslash:
I loved playing the gen3 games as a kid and for some reason never really was into Gen4+. I first heard about nuzlockes and rom hacks in college and started having fun playing those and just got inspired to try and make a hack myself. I ended up combining forces with klemniops, who had developed some maps but without a story, and the rest is history.
Klemniops:
Before I found my way to the ROM scene I had a lot of fun derping around with GameMaker (this would be mid-to-late aughts) so I always had been inclined towards the creation aspect of gaming. When I stumbled into Pokémon Quartz I was fascinated and really wanted to create something kind of like it! A new adventure with custom everything!
At the time the best tool available was AdvanceMap, so I doodled up a region (which is actually most of what we see in Voyager 0.3, it survived!). I had only the vaguest notions of a storyline. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion had a side quest in a village called Hackdirt where the villagers turn out to all be cultists of some kind, scorning outsiders. And then Pokémon Marble had some mysterious rival character whose intentions are never revealed. I wanted to derive something from these pieces.
That didn't happen while I was going solo, partially because my life moved to another stage, but also because I didn't really have the skills to do any of the other aspects of the ROM development. Then Ghoulslash found his way to the scene and asked about the work I had done. His space story ideas combined with the vague notions I had and we plodded along, but I wasn't really fully devoted at this point.
Decomp coming along completely revitalized everything for me since I had studied programming and it was a great fit for my skill set. Now it is possible to realize all of the features I could only have imagined. And Ghoulslash being more involved in the community than I brought in some folks who made some really amazing art!
Over the years we've had demos I have loved it when someone joins our server with praise for the game and excitement for the next demo. It's really rewarding to see our creativity bringing joy to people.
Xiros:
Great introduction! For many of us, myself included, decomp was what finally allowed us to dream of creating our own story in the Pokémon universe... It’s so exciting to see how you met and managed to shape a great game out of those ideas that were once just floating around in your heads!
And how interesting it is to see that Baro’s hacks (Pokémon Quartz and Pokémon Marble), the founder of WAH, have been such a source of inspiration. If you want to know more about him, you can read the interview we did with Baro a few years ago (in spanish).
2nd question: Developing a hackrom is a long and complex process. What has been the biggest challenge you've faced so far? And what has been the most rewarding moment in development?
Ghoulslash:
I think the biggest challenge has been finding the free time in order to develop it! There are definitely some discussions about storyline or battle engine development that can take a while to iterate on, and some of the more complex story events can take a long time to design, script, code, and test. But these also tend to be the most rewarding, since those tend to become bigger sources of pride in the game. Its extremely rewarding to see complex ideas come to fruition on screen. Its also very rewarding to see how much excitement the players have for the game.
Klemniops:
Until decomp I think we would have struggled a lot to get to the quality of project we're now striving for. Many of our scripts and functions are really complex and I just don't see how we could possibly have maintained the complexity without decomp. Even with it we're having lots of trouble (but major, major kudos to the unit test infrastructure from RHH!).
With decomp we've also had some trouble with scope creep. We've often worked with Ghoulslash writing the first drafts of our story events and then I would revise them. But we both really like writing new features and engine changes! So while Ghoulslash would wait for me to revise we would both be implementing new features because that's what was most exciting. And that leads to more work to quality check them. Or, we would really go ham on the story events themselves - I've been making commits to one of the next Team Nova events off and on for 8-10 months with still a bit more to do because decomp enabled us to do some very interesting things with it.
And now we've both had some life changes and simply don't have the time that we used to. So we're moving slowly but we're taking this into account to be more focused on only (well, mostly) what we need to get to the next demo. And right now that's not just story stuff!
Xiros:
It’s the truth—time is the final boss. When we have plenty of it, it’s normal to think we can bring millions of ideas to life, but once it starts running short, we need to prioritize and focus... Stay sharp, readers, there are many lessons here!
3rd question: Balancing personal life, professional life, and a project of this magnitude can’t be easy. How do you manage your time to keep progressing without affecting other aspects of your life?
Ghoulslash:
This balance has definitely gotten more difficult as time has passed (hence why this last update has been taking so long). When I was in school and starting out at work I had fewer responsibilities and could spend more time hacking. But as personal and professional life responsibilities add up it becomes a lot harder to sink fully into game development, which can make it take longer to develop more complicated aspects of the game. For example, its hard to come up with a puzzle design when you've got 30 minutes here and there to hack! In general it has helped me to try and plan out what I want to work on before I have time to sit down and hack. That way I can maximize the free time I do get.
Klemniops:
During the pandemic time for Voyager was plentiful and we got our first demos out very quickly! Now of course there are significantly more demands on my time. Mostly now I trade an hour of sleep for time spent on Voyager since the other things are not negotiable. Or sneaking something in while work is slow. This is why it's going to be 3+ years to get 0.4 out the door!
Xiros:
Planning before sitting down to hack: pure gold. We’ve all lived through those “random 30 minutes.”
Great strategy, Ghoulslash, to make the most of them!
4th question: You've been working on Pokémon Voyager for quite some time. How has this project influenced your professional life? Do you think it has opened up opportunities for you in the world of game development or programming?
Ghoulslash:
I actually learned the majority of my coding knowledge through hacking. As an engineer I only ever learned MATLAB but through hacking I've gotten extremely comfortable with C and had more experiences writing python scripts. Conveniently, these are two languages I use at work now, as well! I've also just gotten more confident with reading and writing code that I think would extend well to learning other languages if I needed to (such as C++).
Klemniops:
I am a professional software developer, so it's more that decomp let me hack sort of fluently. And some hopefully good habits bleed in.
Most of the Python code I've written has been for Voyager actually which turned out to be useful during my most recent job interviewing. I wrote Python scripts to generate our wiki and the multiple-abilities feature in our next demo is heavily managed via Python scripts.
Xiros:
How nice to read that RH has helped in your professional career! Let’s move on with the questions.
5th question: Every creator has something that drives them. What motivates you to keep working on Pokémon Voyager, even during difficult moments?
Ghoulslash:
The biggest motivator is that its just fun to develop. I get bursts of passion to develop various aspects of the game (e.g. sometimes its scripting, other times mapping, coding etc). So the fact that there are so many aspects of designing a game means there's almost always something keeping me inspired.c
Klemniops:
The positive comments we've had in our Discord always make me smile. Several folks specifically have appreciated the gender options we have and I'm glad to bring those folks a little bit of extra positivity and acknowledgement.
The folks who have joined the team to do custom art have put a lot of effort in and I really want them to see a final product so they can see their creations in action.
When 0.2 was out we had a few Youtubers do Let's Plays and I'm definitely going to watch every second of whatever gets put up for 0.4.
Xiros:
The passion shows in every mechanic—when creators enjoy themselves, it makes players want to join in too. And I agree with you, Klemniops, it’s so much fun to watch videos of people playing your hackrom.
6th question: Each hackrom has a unique identity. How did the idea for Pokémon Voyager come about, and how has it evolved over time?
Ghoulslash:
I started out wanting to develop a hack and had a basic story idea. Klemniops had developed a bunch of maps at the time and so we basically combined the two aspects and took it from there! We definitely had some early, long discussions on what the storyline would look like, and while we have mostly stuck to that we've definitely deviated and expanded upon various parts here and there, primarily when it comes time to close out certain side character storylines, etc.
Klemniops:
I think I accidentally covered most of this above with the genesis of the storyline! I brought some initial points and then Ghoulslash suggested the space theming and then we worked together to come up with our story. Gen 3 is very nostalgic for me, so Team Nova is definitely an homage to Team Aqua and Team Magma, and the Fornax Village parts of the storyline are us trying to do something fresh (although as I mentioned this is sort of derivative of a few other things).
At all points we both were committed to pushing the boundaries of what's possible in terms of features and QOL and scope, which was probably a bad idea for a first ROM hack, but we're in too deep now! I view our work as a new generation of Pokemon game running on the Gen 3 engine, and I hope that's how the community will see what we're doing too.
Xiros:
Very interesting! Next question.
7th question: The pace of progress in Voyager is impressive. Do you follow any particular method of organization or planning to maintain a steady workflow? (For example, weekly objectives, priority tasks, etc.)
Ghoulslash:
Not really. After designing the overall storyline, klemniops and I have been able to work mostly indepedently and trust one another to add features, NPCs, etc without too much need for oversight. We usually discuss the high level aspects over discord channels as needed.
Klemniops:
For most of the development we have been pretty ad hoc, just setting the highest level goals ("storyline for gym 2 for 0.1" or "storyline for gym 5 for 0.3" etc). A lot of what fills that in ends up being us working on what we find interesting. The 6+6 vs. 6+6 battles was something I thought "hmm, we should be able to do this, and it fits a few places in our story..." and then it happened. This is also why Ghoulslash implemented rotation battles (featured in gym 5 in 0.3 already) as well as triple battles and royale battles (which will both be prominent in 0.4!). And we're not afraid to revise some of our existing story events when we make something new that's a good fit.
We are trying to be more focused on the remaining things we want to do for 0.4 so we are having occasional calls and such to do more specific planning. The things I'm working on now are hard requirements for it.
Xiros:
Fully trusting the people on your team is essential and incredibly powerful when there’s a shared vision—only then can something this good be achieved!
8th question: You've introduced many innovative mechanics in Pokémon Voyager. Is there one that you're particularly proud of or that was especially difficult to implement?
Ghoulslash:
I think I am proud of the way we've utilized the Pokedex, in particular the undiscovered Pokemon feature. For those unfamiliar, there are Pokemon you encounter in the game that your Pokedex doesn't recognize, and you are able to encounter them later and do 'research' on them to fill in their Pokedex details. In all Pokemon games there is a main Professor character, so why do you never get to actually engage in the research elements in gameplay? And I would also say I'm proud of a lot of the custom battle types and facilities, particularly triple battles.
Klemniops:
One of the first things I did when we got onto decomp was re-write a ton of the build system so that our Pokemon and trainer data and more would be in JSON files which are used to generate C source code. This was a big up-front cost but it is so efficient now to manipulate and bulk process Pokemon data. The wiki generator was built off of this as well, and the multiple abilities feature is also heavily dependent upon it.
Speaking of the multiple abilities feature... it was pretty tedious to get the battle engine to support it but I am hoping that it will be an interesting new element for players! Our system is that each Pokemon can have up to four abilities, as long as they don't exceed a total "capacity" where each ability has a "cost" to use. Determining costs and capacities is a complex problem - this is one of our Python scripts! I think I've seen multiple abilities in other hacks but I'm proud of the way we're approaching it.
The 6+6 vs. 6+6 battles feature was surprisingly not terribly difficult to do. Although we have a major bug in it that many players have stumbled into so maybe I shouldn't be so confident. I really like that this lets our partner battles feel a bit more realistic.
Eventually we're going to open source and I would be thrilled to see our features used in other ROMs and even more thrilled to see someone implement a difficulty hack on top of Voyager which really uses the custom battle mechanics.
Xiros:
Amazing and very interesting mechanics you’ve implemented—no doubt you’re not afraid to innovate :).
9th question: Some hackroms feature deeper or darker stories than official Pokémon games. How would you describe the story of Pokémon Voyager, and what kind of emotions or reflections do you aim to evoke?
Ghoulslash:
In general we're trying to develop a game that feels like a regular Pokemon game. There is still some silly dialogue, the evil team can be unserious at times but is also meant to pose more of a threat than those in the official games. There are some darker aspects but we are trying hard not to be edgy or over the top. It's definitely a fine line to walk, especially when conveying emotion is difficult with dialogue only. I would say our first and foremost goal is just creating an engaging story, and if some aspects end up being more serious and/or edgy that's okay as long as the experience is fun.
Klemniops:
We want something which is a bit more mature but ideally not edgy. Team Nova is an homage to Team Aqua and Team Magma with their silly motivations, but we're trying to make them seem a little more compotent and threatening. Phobos Forest is definitely also trying to do something mysterious and unsettling that I don't think I've seen in another Pokemon game - I'm very proud that some of our players have specifically praised this part of our game! I don't think it's unfair to say that we're writing a Pokemon game for adults, but not in a weird way. I hope.
We've also wanted the storyline to feel sort of like things that actually make sense, like the 6+6 vs. 6+6 partner battles, and triple battles, and various partner tag-alongs. We've definitely been willing to implement new mechanics to get there. The climax of the storyline is definitely not going to be a one-shot encounter with a supposedly powerful legendary Pokemon.
Xiros:
How hard it is to make something more “mature” without falling into edgy! But I’m confident you’ll pull it off—the most important thing is that the game is fun!
10th question: Developing a hackrom is not just about coding and graphics—community plays a big role. How has your relationship with players and testers been? Have any of their reactions or suggestions surprised you?
Ghoulslash:
Pokemon Voyager definitely wouldnt be the same game without the community! We tend to take honest suggestions from players and especially playtesters seriously, since two people developing a game definitely cannot account for all play styles. The game also wouldnt be where it is today without the spriting team. Klemniops and I have pretty similar skillsets in regards to hacking, so having some dedicated spriters to help polish our original ideas has been extremely useful, and we tend to encourage them to design their own fakemon for the game as thanks for their awesome work.
Klemniops:
Some of the fakemon designs which were suggested found their way into our storyline! Voyager has benefited a ton from having the community get on board. We're going to have following Pokemon in 0.4 and that's only possible because we have reached a critical mass of overworld art for our fakemon!
We've revised a few things here and there as a response to common questions or confusion. Watching some Let's Plays on Youtube was a great source of feedback. One in particular I remember got to the absolute end of the demo and was messing around and looked at one of the city map signs and was impressed and wished they had seen it earlier! So we added a little scene towards the beginning of the game to show them off.
Ultimately I want to create a Pokemon game that I would have loved playing when I was younger, so we have made some decisions which are at odds with what the community might expect. Sometimes are configuration options can address that but not always.
Playtesters are heroes and I am eternally grateful for the time they have spent reporting bugs or suggesting other improvements. I think our demos have been pretty polished; we want the next one to be as well and that just isn't possible without that kind of community input.
Xiros:
This is proof that a strong community is what makes games improve and evolve to the level they’re at today… You should never work in the dark!
11th question: When the project is finally completed, what’s next for you? Rest, another hackrom, or maybe even developing an original game?
Ghoulslash:
I think once the main storyline for Voyager is complete, I suspect we will keep working to polish/refine various details and spend time adding new side quests or mini games. We have a whole list of side quest ideas that will be fun to implement when we won't have to worry about story development or bug fixing.
Klemniops:
When we finish the main story I will probably spend a bunch more time adding side quests which feel like they belong but there's no way there's another hack in me.
Maybe I'll have time to up my involvement in the community and I can contribute some code to other projects here and there.
Xiros:
I love that “finishing the story” doesn’t mean “closing the door.” I can see you’re aiming to create the ultimate hack, and I’m definitely looking forward to the day I can play the final version.
12th question: We love exclusives. Can you share any sneak peek or exclusive news about the future of Pokémon Voyager?
Klemniops:
I'm gonna let Ghoulslash handle this one!
Ghoulslash:
I think mentioning triples above might've been a sneak peek. Our discord channel also includes a few spoilers of maps or upcoming features. I think one of the more exciting things about the development over the past year is that every original Fakemon in the game has have had their battles sprites revamped by our dedicated spriters. So I'm very excited to see everyone's reactions to higher quality fakemon sprites in the next release.
Xiros:
So we can expect a big quality boost in the next demo!
13th question: To get to know you a little better, tell us two qualities or characteristics that you believe define you as a developer and creator.
Ghoulslash:
I tend to engage in 'whimsical development' where if I get excited by an idea I just start to develop it and see where it goes
I can be pretty detail-oriented when it comes to world building or story building. It's important to me that it feels like playing Voyager is like exploring a whole world rather than just playing a game along some pre-defined, constrained path.
Klemniops:
If I have a cool idea I always want to spend at least a little bit of time exploring it!
I think I've also been quite thorough with details and polish, which slows us down but is a defining aspect of Voyager which many players have praised.
Xiros:
When I tried the beta some time ago, I was surprised by the level of polish—it definitely makes the game feel more alive and real. And that “whimsical development” happens to me too… though I admit it sometimes backfires on me :).
14th question: Finally, what advice would you give to someone who wants to start making their own hackrom or video game?
Ghoulslash:
Design loose goals for the game but be flexible with the scope of your game/story. We've rewritten/expanded several story events and had feature refactors etc because having a cohesive storyline is more important than finishing a game quickly, and the players will appreciate the attention to detail.
Klemniops:
If you are able to write unit tests then definitely do it! Large projects have a habit of breaking themselves eventually and if you have unit tests in place then it will be much easier to notice.
Don't be afraid to toss out your old work if you have come up with something better. Your vision of what you want your project to be will evolve over time, and scrapping some pieces you started with might be your only way to realize the new vision.
Xiros:
Advice worth framing! Thank you both for the time and for such great, thorough answers. This will definitely help many get to know you better and see the behind-the-scenes of creating Pokémon Voyager!
Pokémon Voyager Frontier Demo
Since I’m publishing this interview a few months after it was conducted (sorry for the delay!), I want to mention that Klemniops and Ghoulslash have recently released the Pokémon Voyager Frontier Demo.
With the addition of new mechanics and battle types, as well as several new Frontier facilities, this demo aims to showcase and polish these features without having to wait for the main storyline to progress further.
Some of the most notable features include:
- Multi-ability system with a linear programming approach to costs and capacities.
- Triple battles, including epic 18 vs 18 matches in the Battle Tower.
- Royale battles and 3 vs 1 battles.
- 5 new facilities: Battle Royale, Battle Arcade, Battle Library, Battle Barn, Battle Satellite, and Battle Rink.
You can find the patch and full release info in the official repository, and more details on the project wiki.
And that’s all for today—see you next time!
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