Credits

PK Scramble was made by jtolmar. You can find me, and other people who play this randomizer, at the Earthbound Speedruns Discord, in the "scramble" channel. You can find some other projects of mine at Noisy Owl.

PK Scramble would not be possible without the amazing tools and documentation created by the Earthbound community. Shout outs to everyone who contributed to:

• Coil Snake
• Data Crystal's Earthbound Section
• Earthbound ROM Explorer
• ebsrc

And individual credits to Aurilliux, Catador, Chaz, Messianic, and Phoenixbound for directly providing information that contributed to this project.

Assembly patches borrowed from:

• H.S.
• D-Man
• Catador
• The Kirby
• ShadowOne333 and Conn (MSU-1 patch)
• cooprocks123e

Custom title cards courtesy of BigSharkZ.

Custom window graphics courtesy of BigSharkZ and JTolmar.

Custom sprites courtesy of Messianic and JTolmar.

Custom fonts by Gabbi, 0xCrafty and Phoenixbound.

Website font: Motherish by Omni Jacala.

Penultimately, a shoutout to the very early playtesters Papungha, d0sboots, and Aurilliux.

Finally, we run a yearly tournament (check the discord at the start of a year). Shoutouts to the winners so far, ChargingCharles, mcmcgurk, and Serra!

Design Philosophy

I tried to do the following:

• Make the game work the way it pretends it does. For example, in PK Scramble, the boat captain in Summers is willing to give you a ride once his wife starts selling magic cakes again. In Earthbound, he actually checks whether Poo has given his joining speech.
• Remove places where silent plot flag causes a change somewhere else. For example, talking to the Topolla theater manager in Earthbound opens up the mines. In PK Scramble the mines start open.
• Replace long-distance plot flags with key items. In Earthbound, Paula receives a psychic vision telling you to go back to Threed, then the Sky Runner is fixed. This is a key item shuffler, not a Paula's psychic visions shuffler, so the Sky Runner is instead missing its engine.
• Make a good casual experience.
• Make a good racing experience.
• Paste over logical inconsistencies I've introduced with humor and Earthbound-esque writing.

Even following the same goals, you may have decided to do things differently. I may have decided to do things differently if I made that particular decision on a different day.

Contributing

I will open source this eventually. Currently the whole thing builds off my Coil Snake directory, which contains a complete decompilation of all of Earthbound's script, so it really shouldn't be published online.

It's been long enough that I really should get around to it though, so feel free to pester me about it occasionally.

In the meantime, the best way to contribute to PK Scramble is to contribute to the Coil Snake ecosystem. If you make general use patches, they can end up both in PK Scramble and in the EB hacking community at large.

It'd also be extremely cool of you to organize races. Getting a bunch of speedrunners trying to break this thing will probably find more interesting stuff than us technical types can.

Finally, if you'd like to support continued development of PK Scramble, you can support me on Patreon.