What's your creative process when creating hacks?

[FrigginNeato]

I've loved playing romhacks for pretty much as long as they've existed, but I've never really gotten the chance to pick the brains of the people who create these awesome hacks for people to play.

So I'm curious, what is your goal when creating a hack? Is it to pay respect to the original approaches that the developers had in mind while improving on a few things now that technology has evolved to accommodate patching? Or is it more of a personal vision for what you think the game should have been?

[FAST6191]

My goal when creating a hack? Usually to achieve the change in the game I want to achieve, in most cases as quickly and easily as I can but I might occasionally pause to consider any later efforts.

Less snarkily I may one day miss something but I am a firm enjoyer of game theory and it seems many a game dev is not. Playing games usually sees me spot where that might have failed, or reveal something that annoys me such that removing it or tweaking it might not do that.

Original vision of the devs is something I give absolutely no credit nor value to.

As far as technology accommodating patching... that has been the case for many many years, and if not while it was contemporary for the given console (though my general focuses of the GBA and DS have had emulation and flash carts happily during their lifetime) then it was for a contemporary device to the console. Technology is more stable not but other than decompilation technology has only really given me the option to be a bit silly with searches (some of the hardcore tracing sessions wherein you take essentially a savestate every frame and compare accordingly not really being an option without modern 2006 ish storage and bandwidth).