(11-17-2012, 03:06 PM)Aero88 Wrote: Personally I agree that Rom hacks are on a different playing field than from the ground up Fan Games as designing the engine is a HUGE portion of making a fan game

One thing you have to remember is that many ROM hacks will modify the engine extensively, in some cases to the point where it's barely recognizable. If you're familiar with many Sonic ROM hacks, you may know what I mean; adding characters with completely different gameplay mechanics, adding different game modes, giving characters new abilities, and changing the level structure from being linear to something different (Which Elibian Nights does), and sometimes even fixing the bugs inherent in the older game engine, all require reverse engineering skills and heavy code modification which, most of the time, is done in raw assembly code so as for the code to run quickly and smoothly. Furthermore, many ROM hacks (including the ones featured this year) change both the graphics and the music (the music, itself, requiring being re-coded in the game's music engine simply to be played, then tweaked to be pleasant to listen to, when most fangames simply use MIDIs or MP3s.). All this, and they still need to factor in the limitations of the hardware they're working with, so as the game doesn't break when playing on the actual hardware or on accurate emulators. (And, of course, in the case of Sonic 1 Megamix, they literally ported the game from the Genesis to the Sega CD, which required changing the hardware the game ran on.... yeah, this is all a bit out there.)

Both Elibian Nights and Dream of Five were more elaborate than the typical, dime-a-dozen SMB Level Hacks you may otherwise be familiar with.