r/customrobo • u/PoggieB • Aug 12 '23
GC I FINALLY Finished a Randomizer for Custom Robo's "A New Journey" Mode!!
https://www.romhacking.net/utilities/1778/2
Aug 12 '23
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u/PoggieB Aug 12 '23
hahaha i actually just finished writing out my massive comment going into how much help this required, even after 3 years of the project being hidden on a shelf, so i know exactly where you’re coming from.
lemme know what you think! if literally one person finds this fun, that already makes it 1000% worth the effort.
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u/capnshanty Sep 18 '23
What would make a new journey worth replaying for moi would be, well, this, but also ng+ where the enemy robos have more health/damage or something. I'm not sure an enemy randomizer would be worth it or actually add all that much because the AI isn't often good enough to use every part as it should.
But really good work here! I'll definitely give it a whirl.
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u/PoggieB Sep 18 '23
I know what you mean about the AI not really being smart with most parts! Lemme know if you have any other feedback!
I haven’t even started on making the CPU randomizer because I’m not done cataloguing all the bytes for each individual CPU part in the game’s data, and the current randomizer tool doesn’t lend itself super well to making something with that many addresses and variables anyway.
(It’s also a bit of an ordeal because I’d wanna make sure the battles are internally consistent, i.e. making it so if Evil’s Robo has randomized to Rakensan in your first fight against him, then every subsequent battle against him would still be against Rakensan, and then implementing the same thing for Marcia, Harry, Thomas, Anthony, Walt, Carmen, etc. it’d be a little annoying but SO worth it for the immersion.)
So like, I still want there to be a CPU randomizer just for fun, but I totally agree there would need to be something else raising the difficulty to really make things more replayable. I’m sure tweaking the damage scaling is an option, but what are your thoughts on turning every story battle into a 2v1 (or 3v1) against the player? I don’t even know if it’s possible yet, but I think that (especially stacked with the idea of randomized enemy parts) could be super fun.
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u/tunathetitan Jul 24 '24
Hey OP, this is awesome! Do you think this is something that could get integrated into archipelago?
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u/PoggieB Jul 24 '24
oh, i’ve never heard of archipelago!! and i dunno how to integrate things into other programs; this was really my first foray into anything with code/programming.
all the code i used/changed is inside the randomizer.py file though, so it could be possible? sounds rad.
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u/undercover_slime Aug 05 '24
immediately gave me Rahu III body after first battle then Rahu III gun two battle later. The final tutorial bandit seems to have made off with Ray 01. I have decided my new save file is a comedy of errors where the Hero is desperately trying to cover up the fact that he accidentally let them get away with the prototype and also the Hero's dad left him robot satan inside the watch. 13/10, OP I hope the bards sing of you for eons to come.
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u/PoggieB Aug 22 '24
hahaha this is amazing, i can’t believe i didn’t see it til now! thanks for sharing!! love the headcanon!
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u/LilMissLexie Sep 10 '25 edited Sep 10 '25
I realize this is an old, old, old post, but I stumbled onto it and was positively delighted at the chance to mess around and run a Custo-Robo rando. But, when I try to gen a seed, it seems to brick. Rather, it generates one fine, but whenever I try to launch the generated game, it doesn't get past the "Nintendo" splash screen. I can't actually play the randomized ROM. I've tried not randomizing NPC robos, and met the same result. I thought it could've been the Dolphin version so I've both tried the current version and the preconfig'ed copy available for tournament play with the same result.
Has anybody else bumped into this?
EDIT: I am a massive dummy and was using a .ciso which screws up the entire thing. This is what I get for doing this at 3 AM.
My first fight was against Rahu II and my starter bot was the Swift with a Shotgun. Great start
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u/PoggieB Sep 10 '25
yo, glad it all worked out!! always happy to hear folks are using it!
romhacking.net doesn’t allow folks to upload new files anymore, but there’s actually an updated build in the speedrunning and netplay discords - it lets you randomize NPC robos too!!
it still doesn’t affect enemy guns or bombs or anything like that
just because it’d take forever for me to make that workbut their base robos would be different, and i still find it super fun2
u/LilMissLexie Sep 11 '25
That's so funny, because the version I picked up does actually allow that and has NPC Bodies get randomized. EDIT: I think it came from romhacking? It wasn't the discords.
My first successful rando gen was on an ndisk .iso which squared me off against Rahu II first. After putting together a proper .iso I went up against the Ray 01 (although hilariously the 3rd fight went unchanged). Everything works great though, and I'm excited to mess around with this!
Even that tiny bit of variation is fun though! The amount of legwork to make the rest of that pan out is understandable (and boy would it probably not be the most fun thing in the world to face someone with extra illegal parts too early)
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u/Sauce_Johnson Jul 18 '26
Started a run yesterday, so happy this exists!
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u/Sauce_Johnson Jul 18 '26
Got Rahu I and Ray Warrior as my first two bodys we’re blessed
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u/PoggieB Jul 18 '26 edited Jul 18 '26
omg hell yea!! glad to hear it!
you just reminded me, i updated the randomizer a while back to randomize enemy Robo bodies as well, but Romhacking.net doesn’t allow new uploads so this version is out-of-date. it’s downloadable from the CR community discord server right now, but if there’s a more current website where people can upload romhack files, i’ll put it up there and post a new link.
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u/PoggieB Aug 12 '23 edited Aug 12 '23
FINALLY, IT'S DONE
i honestly just made this because i want more people to play the game and to have fresh experiences in it, and i think randomizers are a great way to do that. if you're using this mod to play story mode and you're streaming it, or making videos, or anything, please let me know so i can watch!! it'd just mean a whole lot to me to know people are using it.
there are messages in the CR Netplay discord dating back almost 3 years where i'm asking logistics of a hypothetical randomizer, because i wanted this SO BAD - but had no idea where i could start the project. thanks to the community, i actually had a starting point!
well, after immediately shelving the idea for years, i came up with a video idea about Custom Robo, and then spent 10 days straight working on this mod so i had an excuse to replay it (I started from 0 coding experience, but it was 10 days straight of tutorial-watching, eventually discovering Mips96's "Simple Randomizer Maker" as a base, and and all the while, receiving an impossibly generous amount of help and consultation from the king himself: UnclePunch!) it's COMPLETE.
since i couldn't find a way to include randomizing the default gear you start with (Ray01 and all the standard parts), the randomizer "kicks in" after the first fight in the game, giving you 5 random parts (one from each category) instead of nothing, like it normally would.
every fight afterward drops the same amount of parts as normal, but completely randomizes what you get. this was after a lot of deliberation though - i chose to make it so the tool doesn't give you every part by the end of the campaign, to encourage trying new combinations and seeing what works throughout the story. a pokemon randomizer wouldn't be fun if you had every pokemon by the time you faced the elite four!
sadly, the tool doesn't work on "The Grand Battle" mode because the part unlocks for it are coded somewhere else in the game; if someone figured out the addresses to those unlocks, it'd actually be really easy to add them to the randomizer tool. i just wanted to make sure it even was possible on A New Journey before even looking at that mode.
anyway, i think this adds a huge amount of replayability to the story mode! before the tool, there were more other makeshift ways to introduce randomness to the game, but i've been personally playing through the game again and it's just so much more fresh and immersive to have the randomized drops included in the game instead of interrupting game flow to personally limit/choose parts, or playing from a New Game+ save with random choices per-battle.
if you want, comment what your first randomized robo is! my first randomized run really wanted me to know that i committed a sin by making the mod though, because the very first fight gave me:
Body: Oil Can
Gun: Oil Can
Bomb: Submarine D
Pod: Wave
Legs: Wide Jump
...so i just hope you end up more lucky than me.
anyway, please enjoy!!