I recently tried my hand at a little bit of Mario 64 hacking using the decomp and it was interesting. I'm too lazy to boot anything to show the test map I made but it was definitely fun to learn.
The process is a bit strange - a Blender plugin called Fast64 lets you set up the level in Blender and then export everything to C to build it into the decomp which is certainly a workflow.
But seeing Mario running around in my little test level made me sort of... melancholic. It's strange but it's kind of been a dream ever since I committed to the modding aspect of my Psychonauts projects just to be able to see Raz running around in a similar test map. Just being able to see a fully custom map working in game would be such a special moment. And yet, despite all the progress that's been made, despite so many of the pieces being in place, it still feels so far.
So trying my hand at this stuff with Mario 64 really got me thinking.