So I thought I would make a document of the sort of stuff I do when making a theme. First things first though, I'm not a 3ds theme aficionado, or anything of the sort, but I'm a really biased person when it comes to the eyecandy I want to see.
Pretty much, earlier today I felt that I should make a 3rd theme because the world really needs more waifu 3ds themes that I feel are more "complete". Complete of course being somewhat subjective to my own personal preferences and motivations. Normally that means making a top screen, bottom screen, folder icons icon borders, grabbing some music, sound effects, and picking colors for the buttons, etc.
The first thing I usually do is collect some resources/assets to use from various sources, whether they are renders, backgrounds, possible layout ideas, or music from the OST/singles, and when it's available, various games of the series. Since this time, I decided to make a Suzumiya theme (and quite possibly one for each of the major characters), I kind of wanted to make sure that I had a large pool of assets to pick and choose from. With that in mind, I spent some time hunting for 7 out of the 8 official games (the skipped game being The Day of Sagittarius III for iOS) and looked for tools to tear apart the roms.
NDS rom hacking never made much sense to me, but since it was the smallest, I began with that one. I extracted it with DSBuff and shuffled through the files...but most of them were just .bin files...which actually told me absolutely nothing about the format that was used. I did look at it in a hex editor for a little bit, but I might as well have been looking at a rock. The best I gleaned from that was it was a Cri format.
So I decided to put the NDS stuff aside to look at the PSP roms because for whatever reason, the PSP seems to have an abundance of tools and not quite as obscure file extensions. I eventually ended up finding out that some of the games were using .adx, and some were using .hca inside of a .awb archive (thanks to some forum somewhere that told me everything I wanted to know about .awb extracting). I also ended up looking at one of the .adx files only to realize it looked really familiar (it was the same format as the nds rom).
So after finding a hoard of sound effects and background music, I also went looking around for any image assets that I could possibly get, though with such a great haul of audio, I didn't spend too much effort on extracting the images from each game.
In the end, I sorted out all of the assets and tallied up 3881 voice files, 874 sfx files, 102 bgm files (not counting any OST or cd releases) for a grand total of 3.31GBs worth of assets. Of course, most of the files are next to worthless since really I only need at best, 6 sound effects and one song per theme, but at least I know I have some options. They are all in separate playlists in my media player (foobar2000) and because I want to get a feel for what music I might potentially use, I've been playing the bgm playlist on a loop.
With the audio tentatively done for the time being, I've moved on to hunting for some character renders primarily of Haruhi since I might as well start there. Unfortunately, a problem with choosing an older anime is that while fanart is abundant, some of the ones I want to get might have broken links here and there, or the renders are from the anime which honestly feels like a major quality drop. So, I prioritized light novel renders which have far cuter poses IMO and consistent crisp artwork. The largest problem by far is the fact that I actually have seen a variety of the wallpapers around (and like them) and I would really like to plaster a bunch of different wallpapers onto the themes. At the same time, using wallpapers just because I fancy them and not to match the kind of theming I want to have would really defeat the purpose of making a theme myself.
Currently, that is about as far as I have gotten so unfortunately there really isn't much to show as a preview yet.
Total time spent so far: ~7 hours
Total time listening to Suzumiya music: ~5 hours
Pretty much, earlier today I felt that I should make a 3rd theme because the world really needs more waifu 3ds themes that I feel are more "complete". Complete of course being somewhat subjective to my own personal preferences and motivations. Normally that means making a top screen, bottom screen, folder icons icon borders, grabbing some music, sound effects, and picking colors for the buttons, etc.
The first thing I usually do is collect some resources/assets to use from various sources, whether they are renders, backgrounds, possible layout ideas, or music from the OST/singles, and when it's available, various games of the series. Since this time, I decided to make a Suzumiya theme (and quite possibly one for each of the major characters), I kind of wanted to make sure that I had a large pool of assets to pick and choose from. With that in mind, I spent some time hunting for 7 out of the 8 official games (the skipped game being The Day of Sagittarius III for iOS) and looked for tools to tear apart the roms.
NDS rom hacking never made much sense to me, but since it was the smallest, I began with that one. I extracted it with DSBuff and shuffled through the files...but most of them were just .bin files...which actually told me absolutely nothing about the format that was used. I did look at it in a hex editor for a little bit, but I might as well have been looking at a rock. The best I gleaned from that was it was a Cri format.
So I decided to put the NDS stuff aside to look at the PSP roms because for whatever reason, the PSP seems to have an abundance of tools and not quite as obscure file extensions. I eventually ended up finding out that some of the games were using .adx, and some were using .hca inside of a .awb archive (thanks to some forum somewhere that told me everything I wanted to know about .awb extracting). I also ended up looking at one of the .adx files only to realize it looked really familiar (it was the same format as the nds rom).
So after finding a hoard of sound effects and background music, I also went looking around for any image assets that I could possibly get, though with such a great haul of audio, I didn't spend too much effort on extracting the images from each game.
In the end, I sorted out all of the assets and tallied up 3881 voice files, 874 sfx files, 102 bgm files (not counting any OST or cd releases) for a grand total of 3.31GBs worth of assets. Of course, most of the files are next to worthless since really I only need at best, 6 sound effects and one song per theme, but at least I know I have some options. They are all in separate playlists in my media player (foobar2000) and because I want to get a feel for what music I might potentially use, I've been playing the bgm playlist on a loop.
With the audio tentatively done for the time being, I've moved on to hunting for some character renders primarily of Haruhi since I might as well start there. Unfortunately, a problem with choosing an older anime is that while fanart is abundant, some of the ones I want to get might have broken links here and there, or the renders are from the anime which honestly feels like a major quality drop. So, I prioritized light novel renders which have far cuter poses IMO and consistent crisp artwork. The largest problem by far is the fact that I actually have seen a variety of the wallpapers around (and like them) and I would really like to plaster a bunch of different wallpapers onto the themes. At the same time, using wallpapers just because I fancy them and not to match the kind of theming I want to have would really defeat the purpose of making a theme myself.
Currently, that is about as far as I have gotten so unfortunately there really isn't much to show as a preview yet.
Total time spent so far: ~7 hours
Total time listening to Suzumiya music: ~5 hours
