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Is Lua actually good for making 3ds homebrew apps in?

I overhauled a plugin for Pokémon X/Y/OR/AS — spawn any Pokémon, shop anywhere, edit your team, know your enemy, teleport and many more!

samaBR · 2026-06-28T06:53:25+00:00

Hey everyone! 👋 I want to share something I’ve been pouring myself into: a big overhaul of the Gen 6 CTRPluginFramework — a .3gx plugin for Pokémon X, Y, Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire on the 3DS (via Luma3DS). I’ll be upfront: I’m not a programmer. I’m just a curious player who’s good at testing and thinking hard about problems. Every feature here started as a real itch I hit while playing — “there should be a way to…” — and I built it out, piece by piece, in back-and-forth with Claude. The goal wasn’t to make the most powerful cheat tool; it was to make one that anyone can actually understand. What that means in practice: Every feature is named in plain language, and every single option has an info (i) button that explains it. There’s a 23-page guide built right into the plugin, written like a guided tour, not a manual. The whole UI is available in 7 languages: 🇺🇸 English · 🇫🇷 French · 🇩🇪 German · 🇮🇹 Italian · 🇯🇵 Japanese · 🇧🇷 Portuguese (BR) · 🇪🇸 Spanish. One .3gx serves all four Gen 6 games — it auto-detects which one you’re running and loads tailored content. A quick tour of what’s inside (you open everything with SELECT): 🔍 Wild Pokémon Spawner — a live, filtered list of every species; pick one (form, level, shiny) and it appears in the grass. 🐉 Respawn Legendary — sends any legendary back to its real location. 🛒 PokéMart Anywhere — a real shop in your bag, with a FREE mode and a PAY mode (prices, cart, checkout — you can never overspend). 📦 PC Box ++ — your boxes as a visual sprite grid, with a full tabbed editor (IVs/EVs, moves, ability, item, ball…) — all picked from on-screen lists, no keyboard typing. ⚔️ In-Battle Tools — Enemy Helper coaches you on the foe (what beats it, stat-by-stat compare), Change Party Stats edits your team mid-fight, and Display Enemy Stats overlays hidden data. 🗺️ Teleportation — warp to any town/route/landmark (full Hoenn + Kalos maps), plus your own saved warp points. 🎮 Mini Game Corner — a little arcade of 7 games (loot boxes, slots, prize wheel, stat duels, a random team generator, and more). ✨ Quality of life — fast text, fast walk, walk-through-walls, instant eggs, a configurable on-screen HUD, 25 color themes, Favorites, rebindable hotkeys… 📖 Complete Professor Oak Challenge guide built in — the full Oak Challenge walkthrough (by Mewlax) lives right inside the plugin, so you can follow the entire living-dex run without ever leaving your game. Full write-up (with screenshots): 👉 https://github.com/samaBR85/Gen6CTRPFrameworkOverhauled ⬇️ Download here: https://github.com/samaBR85/Gen6CTRPFrameworkOverhauled/releases Github links are down. For now, you can download from here: GEN6CTRPFramework-v081 - Google Drive or It’s free and open-source (GPL-3.0), and it stands on a lot of community work — biometrix76, Hartie95, PKHeX (kwsch), the CTRPluginFramework/3gxtool by ThePixellizerOSS, PokéAPI, Pokémon Showdown, the ORAS Wiki, and Mewlax’s Professor Oak Challenge guides. Full credits are in the README. If you like it buy me a Coffee on Ko-Fi!

Thread starter IntOverflow
Start date Feb 3, 2025
Views 619
Replies 2

IntOverflow

New Member

Newbie

Level 1

Feb 3, 2025

I want to start making them, but dont know where to start lol

ihaveahax

Well-Known Member

Member

Level 19

Feb 3, 2025

There is LÖVE Potion [https://lovebrew.org/], a port of the LÖVE 2D game engine [https://love2d.org/] for Nintendo platforms, including 3DS. This is the only active Lua port to the platform.

Reactions: NEKOBREAD

Kwyjor

Well-Known Member

Member

Level 16

Feb 3, 2025

IntOverflow said:
but dont know where to start lol

As with all things: look around and see what other people have done. If it doesn't look like people have done very much, then that's probably because it's very difficult – or also possibly because it's a dead platform and your efforts might be better spent elsewhere. (It is what it is.)

Also, someone just posted this:
https://gbatemp.net/threads/3ds-homebrew-development-getting-started-guide.666095/