So, this is something long coming, I kick myself for not doing it sooner.

I'm gonna take you guys down the two-year journey from inception to Version 2.0, and all the fun and struggles and education I got doing it.

These are the design notes of Filly Fantasy VI.

It Begins With An Idea

I do a lot of "fantasy casting" things. I've recast Gurren Lagann with Pokemon. I've recast Buffy with ponies. I've played FF6 naming everyone after a Yugioh character. And yes, I did a pony cast for FF6.

When I heard of PF6, I played it only sparingly but mostly know about it through playthrough vids. And the reason is I couldn't get into it. I feel awful saying this, since this project wouldn't exist if not for Pony Fantasy VI, but if I'm being honest, I find Pony Fantasy VI... lame. I recognize its working on early Season 2 canon, but even still, that hack did not age well with all its memes and jokes. Some of the casting choices still baffle me, particularly Gilda. The numerous and random pop culture references are also groan-inducing. I feel like this was meant to be a pony-themed parody of FF6. I don't know if that was the intent, but even as a parody I didn't find it very funny or engaging.

I told my friend around the Season 5 time "if I did Pony Fantasy VI, this is how I would do it" and laid out my casting choices, including G1 ponies as Espers - I wish I could recall what inspired that choice, I think it's one of the coolest parts of the story I came up with. I still have the Notepad file of the cast, which was not identical to the final product. Banon was to be Star Swirl, and Scorpan would play the part of Ramuh. Doomgaze would be played by a Windigo. Most importantly, the part of Gogo would be played by Mare-Do-Well, as they fit as a character who could embody all the powers of the cast.

On a lark I downloaded FF3usME, a Final Fantasy VI rom editor, just to see how it worked. It was very user friendly, everything laid out in tabs and dropdown menus and lists. I knew nothing of rom editing or anything of the sort, but this program seemed to make it all so easy and straightforward.

At this time, late 2015-early 2016, I was hyper into the Final Fantasy fandom, unemployed, and bored with myself sitting at home job hunting.

I had a lot of spare time, I had a passion for Final Fantasy and pony, I had an idea, and I had a program that was very user-friendly and inviting.

Let's do this.

The Early Days

The first thing I did was the script. Over the course of a weekend I exported the entire script in a text document, and rewrote it. My focus was story for this hack and I wanted this story to - if not objectively good - be good in the sense of what the project was. I had to expand the rom for dialogue, as it turns out this game is more dialogue heavy than the vanilla game. Loading the rom now and looking at the dialogue editor, it tells me I only have room in the rom for 213 more characters - keep in mind I'd already blanked out numerous unused dialogue pieces.

I reused a lot of sprites from Pony Fantasy VI, modifying them as I could - Flash for instance is a heavily modified Scootaloo sprite. Pixilated vectors and fanart made up the early enemy sprites I needed, and I began reaching out to fan artists seeking someone who would be willing to make sprites for me. No leads panned out yet.

I moved on to rebalancing equipment and spells then. I'm fortunate to have replayed FF6 numerous times over my life, I knew the game inside and out. So I was pretty confident in my ability to rebalance the game, I knew who was too strong and who was too weak. I feel that FF6's primary difficulty is that enemies are just too weak against the party's high-powered abilities, so I gave enemies higher stats and lowered the party's stats.

It was at this point that I got rid of Mare-Do-Well. Intent was to have hints that it was Starlight Glimmer beneath the cowl. Starlight would appear in the World of Balance as a citizen of Starlight Village, and NPC dialogue in the World of Ruin would mention her by appearance, leading the player on a trail of breadcrumbs to Triangle Island where they would find Mare-Do-Well. Her ultimate weapon was the "Equal Staff", which cast Dispel on the target. Prior to the first public beta, I tried to modify Trixie's PF6 sprite into Mare-Do-Well. On a lark, though, I considered my decision - who would I rather have playable, MDW/Starlight, or Trixie? I inserted Trixie's sprite into the rom and renamed the Equal Staff "Magic Wand" but didn't change the Dispel effect until a much later release.

I was getting to the limits of what FF3usME could do and would need to venture into hex editing. I did so with the grace and subtlety of a bull in a china shop. I applied fan patches for obvious glitches like Rippler and Psycho Cyan, had to troubleshoot glitches of my own. I quickly learned the importance of beta back-ups and began to keep them after having to start from scratch a few times. My thread on FF6hacking.net is full of pages of me whining "I tried this and it doesn't work!" The users were low on patience sometimes and rightfully so.

After I had played to the World of Ruin and found all was well, I released the first public beta and kept playing, updating the download as I went and mostly hoping no one played fast enough to catch up to me. It was at this time that RydelFox came on as a sprite designer, and later basically became a main programmer for how much more he did than just sprite work, like reworking programming limitations to allow some of these sprites to be used in the first place. Rydel's sprites were added to the game over time with the rest of the rolling updates. I finished my first playthrough of the game and prepared myself to dive fully into hex editing to pull off the more difficult coding tricks I wanted.

The Three Banes

In my work, I had to deal with what we shall call The Three Banes, three recurring and persistent problems that made me want to tear my hair out. The first of them was palettes. 16 colors across 6 palettes sounds like plenty of colors to work with, except only 12 of those colors are usable in-battle, and two more have to be black and white, and palette 6 doesn't always work anyway. So it's more like 5 palettes of 10 colors, to fit a cast of 16 colorful ponies (and Discord) on. This is why a lot of the cast's colorations are slightly off - I don't have the room to make the colors 100% faithful and I had to compromise.

The most recurring problem was the disguises in Ponyville during Flash's scenario, which glitched constantly. And really, as more sprites came out and I modifed existing ones to be better, I kept having to recolor sprites, relocate the colors on the palettes to new slots, change which sprites use which palette, and so forth.

The second and third Banes happened at this period. The second Bane was - Maud. Umaro and the FF6 rom do not get along. At all. Umaro is, in a data sense, the last playable character. This was a developer shortcut, because a lot of the game where it scans the playable cast, it just scans one slot lower to exclude Umaro. The unequip guy on the Airship. Auto-equip from the Gauntlet and Genji Glove. Numerous status ailments. All had to be found and modified to include Umaro.

Then I had to give him Magic. That was a whole other ball park because no one had done that yet for Umaro. Another frustration is that I was under the presumption that, with how the game handles its data - if Umaro's magic wasn't fully functional when I began the game, it wouldn't take when I fixed it later. I don't recall if that's accurate but it's what I feared. I was able to track down a guy who did a patch to allow Gogo to learn magic from Espers, and he was able to modify the patch to work for Umaro instead. It isn't seamless - ever get a notice about Trixie learning magic when it was actually Maud? That'd be why. But it works well enough. Increasingly with this hack I got to the point where I had to accept some stuff just isn't worth the stress fretting over.

I would repeatedly have to dive back into the coding to fix an oversight with making Umaro fully functional, but at last it happened, and Maud became a fully functioning character.

And then, the third Bane was Flash Sentry - specifically, the Rachel flashback. People pointed out it was odd for Sunset to push flash away from the collapsing bridge, he's a pegasus, he could fly. So okay, let's put some rocks there for a rockslide. I put in a coding jump at part of the scene, put in the code to make the rocks move, and tell the code to jump back.

EASIER SAID THAN DONE.

I spent days getting those three rocks to move properly. I had a version where Sunset pushed Flash all the way to the right and he fell off the other side of the cliff. I had a version where the party couldn't exit the door when the scene ended. I had a version where when they exited the town was still in sepia. I had numerous versions where the scene hung at various points. At the end of one playthrough a scene in Discord's Tower went chaotic because I had accidentally stored the data for the rockslide event in a scene that the Discord scene used, so I had to relocate the data somewhere safer. Every time someone posted here to notify me the Sunset flashback wasn't working in some manner, I groaned and facepalmed.

Really though, the third Bane was event editing in general. The event editor for the game is barely functional. The rom has only so much room in it and it's all together, so when you want to modify an event with a bigger event, you have to move it. This is why I did the rockslide in a separate part of the rom. For example, say the scene of Sunset pushing Flash takes up ten bytes of coding, from Value 1022 to 1032. Well guess what, if I just shove data for the rockslide in there, all the stuff from 1033 on is moved down the line to make room, but it won't fix itself. When the game looks for the event set to be loaded from Value 1033, it still looks to 1033. So I had to have a second rom to mangle like a chew toy - do my event editing in it, and once the event coding worked properly, copy the hex editing for it into an empty spot on my real rom and modify the original event to jump there and then back.

Tripping at the finish line

The worst was behind me though. We were into May, the second beta. I had learned much and was able to do some stuff on my own. My FF6 hacking thread was over 60 pages long with my pleas for help - seriously, how the staff didn't just get fed up with me and lock the thread, I will never know. I knew enough about event editing to do some fluff events. I added Trixie and Maud to the party's dialogue in the final showdown with Discord. I changed the Ancient Castle flashback. I changed the Esper World flashback so Night Light flees rather than Sombra striking him down. Fluttershy would not randomly flee the party after battles. And all the while, RydelFox rolled out new graphics, I made more balance changes, and fixed glitches as they were found.

I was optimistic to release a final release of the game in the coming months.

And then in June I lost my desktop.

I was able to grab my rom onto a USB, thank god. But my only regular computer was my Macbook, which isn't compatible with the dozen or so programs I was now using to edit the hack. So I spent a couple months watching LPs, making notes, and discussing things with playtesters. August saw me return full force - and now I had a job. Time was limited but fortunately so was the scope of the work left to do. I didn't have the time to play my project through fully again - I'd already done so two times, and played parts here and there - but it was almost done.

At last, on October 14th, ten months after I downloaded FF3usME, I released Version 1.0.

Conclusion

Thank you for making this far, your 60 dollars and your bindle will be waiting with Caroline on your way out the door. Everything from this point on has been discussed and documented out in the open, if you want to go have a look at the old threads.

Me, I just thought this would be cool to do. Thanks for reading.

That editor reminds me a lot of RPG Maker. Simple to use but capable of doing more difficult stuff if you know how.
And Flash Sentry fell off the other side of the cliff. That is some gold slapstick.

Yikes. Kinda glad I'm sticking to the 500K+ word story.

Sounds like a lot of passion went into this. You need that for a project this indeph. Nice work!

Interesting indeed

but now that the tv series have ended you think you could have gone into a different character roster or story change or other differences if you started now?

7142057
The only thing I might change is making the Legacy Magicite into the Pillars of Equestria, and replacing Star Swirl with another character. But I'm not sure. Otherwise, maybe making some other Espers into the Pillars - off the top of my head, Odin as Rockhoof and Lakshmi as Mistmane. But they would stick out among the G1 cast otherwise.

I could see Thorax fitting Gogo, but I wouldn't replace Trixie for him, and the show's Grogar was such a letdown that I'd keep the G1 Grogar in his role. Not really sure there's a good role for Cozy Glow to fill.