A gender-swap EarthBound for my daughter · Tommy Reddad
I had some fun over the last week preparing a gender-swapped version<br>of EarthBound for the<br>SNES. I made use of the excellent tool<br>CoilSnake, which can be used<br>to patch and rebuild an EarthBound ROM with modified assets and<br>scripts.
The full set of changes includes things like:
gender swapping all Ness sprites, replacing his baseball cap with a<br>red bow. Includes changes to Ness robot sprites, cycling sprites,<br>climbing sprites, etc. There were maybe a dozen or so sprites that<br>needed adjustment.
replacing Ness’ “Don’t Care” names with our list of preferred baby<br>girl names.
replacing “Don’t Care” list for “Favorite Thing” and “Favorite Food”<br>with things that seem appropriate for my daughter.
replacing Ness’ pronouns, references to “brother”, “guy”, “sir”, “3<br>boys and 1 girl”, “red cap”, etc.
color swapping Ness’ dog King to match the color of our family<br>dog. This required a bit more work than expected, since color<br>palettes are somewhat restrictive for these kinds of sprites, and<br>palettes are shared across multiple different sprites. Thankfully,<br>one of the game’s palettes is basically unused or duplicated from<br>another one, so it was possible to free up a palette and define my<br>own colors.
modifications to the credits font to add accented characters so I<br>could include a special message for my daughter in French.
It was a fun exercise but really surprisingly easy considering how<br>powerful the CoilSnake tool is. This would be insurmountable for me<br>without the tool.
I originally considered just getting a ready-made gender swap ROMhack,<br>maybe from https://www.romhacking.net/. There are actually a few<br>different ones floating around, with some having a trans Ness. One of<br>the gender swap hacks apparently injects a bunch of other “red pill”<br>content into the game’s text, which I didn’t want to have to deal with<br>myself. Ultimately I decided it would be best, easy, and safest, to<br>write one myself.
Now I just need to get my daughter to play the game eventually 5 to 10<br>years from now!