Thread:Ottonumbers/@comment-131168-20140622031946/@comment-131168-20140623010844

Story #1 - Pioneer

N64 Animal Crossing never released outside of Japan, so the GCN one was the first English release. As part of their promotion for it, NOA ran an "Animal Crossing Pioneer" contest where pairs of people could enter and explain in something like 100 words or less why they wanted Animal Crossing. 250 pairs would win early copies of the game for both people. As you can probably guess by now, I and an online buddy of mine entered and were among the winners--we maximized the effect of our few words by writing haiku. :) Pioneer winners got the game about a month before wide release, so outside of journalists we were among the first to get into Animal Crossing in English.

Story #2 - Anicro Desapro

Making patterns for the game was pretty cool, but it could be kind of a hassle to try and convert some existing image to a proper Animal Crossing format. Even if it was just a simple sprite from an NES game, it might not be obvious which palette would match best. So not too long after getting the game, I decided to start work on a program that would speed up and automate a lot of the process. It would take an image, shrink it down, show how it would appear in the different palettes the game offered, and when you clicked on one it would bring up a large view to make copying into the game easier. I called it Anicro Desapro, short for "Animal Crossing Design Aid Program".

Thanks to more recent versions of the game having some quite different palettes and pattern options, plus modern Windows making the program itself look a little stranger than it did years ago, plus other similar programs with more or different features popping up, it's mostly obsolete now. But being among the first tools of its kind it made kind of a splash back in the day, especially when the ability was added to automatically submit patterns from the program to the collection at AnimalCrossingCommunity.com. Though there are bigger projects I've put more time into since (like stuff relating to this wiki), this is probably the thing I've worked on that got used by the most people, so it's something I'm pretty proud of.