Aggression Project [8/~30]

[kdports]

The Aggression Project (Working Title) is a unique tactical RPG focused on creating a fast-moving gameplay experience that refuses to waste your time.

Captured during a skirmish between two nations, Ameli and Dan are forced to embark on a suicide mission on their captor’s behalf. Tattooed with a magical poison, they’ll die if they cannot steal a powerful artifact from a neighboring state before their time runs out.

Check out the FEE3 Story Trailer below:

Healing is gone, replaced by Soul Voices, with kills healing adjacent units for a portion of their hit points. Dual Strike, but no Dual Guard, lets players chain together kills to tear through their enemies. You can also shove your enemies into pits, providing a quick way to handle annoying foes.

Units possess powerful yet intuitive unique abilities. Turn back time, summon a portal to the void beneath your enemies’ feat, or mark an opponent for death. Do whatever it takes to make it out.

This dynamic gameplay is accompanied by a diverse set of difficulty modes, accessible at camps during a playthrough, to tune your experience as you play.

Speaking of camps, the party will convene after each mission to chat, bond, and plan.

You can access a variety of unique facilities from the camp to help you survive the heist.

Chapters 1-8 of The Aggression Project are available now. The game can be played in browser on mobile or computer, or as a windows executable.

This game was created by myself and SP. A full list of credits can be found in the game’s files or the ending slides. Please inform me if I have miscredited or accidentally left uncredited anyone whose assets were used in this game.

Unlike our previously released games, The Aggression Project is nowhere close to the finish line. Thoughts, feedback, and especially bug reports, are more than welcome in the comments below.

Lex Talionis

Lex Talionis is an engine created by rainlash and developed by them, mag, myself, and various other contributors. It is open-sourced and easy to learn. If you’re interested in making your own Fire Emblem game, you can check out the Lex Talionis discord [here]( Discord ).

Known Bugs

• Playing on mobile often fails to play any sound from the game. If you are able to hear sound while playing, please drop a comment with your iOS version and phone version.
• If a Vanguard warps and then the player turnwheels, the Vanguard will walk instead of warping.

[Dungeon_Noodle]

The topic is created right as the FEE3 video is uploaded, that’s funny lol.

Amazingly cinematic trailer, great usage of FF6 tilesets, and you even made this playable in browser, just like TUT!!

[andrazorwire]

Was just reminded about this game as I was just recommending The Unbroken Thread on Reddit. Hope development is going well!

[kdports]

Thanks! It’s going great!

We’ve finished chapters 8, 9, and 10 and are pretty close on 11. I just foolishly took a vacation and haven’t been able to work on it. Those chapters will end Act 1 and be a bit less than the first half of the game completed!

[kdports]

New update! This contains chapters 9-11 of the game, finishing the first act of the story. You can download it from the same link as above.

Dan and Ameli finally reach the shield, and meet a strange new ally along the way…

As always, please leave feedback or comments here. Thanks so much for playing!

[kdports]

New patch! Fixes a crash at the start of chapter 9 and an incorrect Talk bubble in the pre-Chapter 8 camp. Thank you for playing!

[Luba]

this has been such a fun game so far, i don’t yet have in depth thoughts about it since im only 2/3 through the current content, but the way healing works is so fun, and it uses the fatigue system probably the best i’ve seen on such projects so far

The fact that ring outs and similar effects actually give proper exp to the unit that does them is such a breath of fresh air compared to similar systems in other games ive come accross before

[Alexmanpersonguy]

So, I blasted through Unbroken thread in about a week and had the time of my life. Still craving some more so I figured i’d check this out too. I wasn’t dissapointed at all, Aggression Project knows what it is and wants to do and executes on that perfectly.

Straightforward yet powerful mechanics, maps that tend towards small but don’t waste a single tile of space, brief but impactful story beats and incredibly clean cutscene eventing. I am HUNGRY for more, really just a gem of a time and one of my favorite projects Ive played to date.

Glazing aside I have some thoughts on later maps, unit power, and some random bugs I noticed that should probably be reported.

Ch10 and 11 were a nice difficulty spike that fits narratively as well, though I believe 10 is a bit overtuned at the moment. Namely, the Stalkers are a bit too offensively potent in my opinion. 20 attack, 14 AS one rounds ALOT of units, leading to my team for the map really just asking “will you survive a guy coming from fog with a steel chair” . Personally I would suggest lowering the AS threshold a little first because that will lead to more people living then lowering the Atk a little. This map took me more tries then the rest of the hack. It was fun, at times but others it felt a little bullshit lol. Theo ended up getting sacced for my sanitys sake. if this is the intended experience, well that’s fair but I think its just a little too much.

Ch11, well that map wasnt so bad once I “got it” (which for me looked like, letting enemies come to me, killing them then just kept running up for my life top left ) it still felt a little too frantic. I would personally like one more slot just for breathing room and feeling less bad of thinking about bringing a utility mage at all though I also understand leaving it as is just my two cents.

Sides these two no notes chefs kiss its so fun.

In terms of “ unit Balance” really I just wanna suggest some light buffs to some people I felt lacked oomph.

Ida has some pretty tragic bases, perhaps she gets rolling but her 3 speed and lackluster bulk made her quickly be benched and never seen again. Im assuming she wants to lean into the big treant angle maybe a teensy more base bulk, unsure because like I said i didnt really give her much deployment.

Cartha, Cartha is a weird case because I know i did not give her many of the promoted XP bags in the forms of generals that are common throughout the first act (though I think largely it can be hard to feed her these naturally). Perhaps she can pop off with that, but seeing her get one rounded by centaurs in ch11 at base speed made me hella sad I wont lie. My wishlist for her is a little more base strength, and speed or bulk. But shes largely pretty solid, though I think axes in general have the least interesting options as of the 11 chapter demo. Courage axe is very much a utility option and hammer is nice, but many hammer targets are also better off killed in less pedestrian ways (such as being thrown down a stairwell). Besides that she struggles to hit ohko thresholds on non mage targets without really solid attack stance backup and then is liable to take a lot of damage on the counter.

Jenny, is a unit I really want to like and I think I do? But her base bulk is superrrr bad and perhaps thats the point of the super speedy myrm with killing edge. Once Dan hits C rank though its a little over for her. While I did deploy her in 11 and sporadically before that I think a little bulk to keep her from getting Ohkoed by stuff like stalkers and sword centaurs would be pleasant. But maybe unneeded, also important to note I gave her the speed +2 buff because tbh her base speed is pretty shaky much less activating her skill.

There are probably other units I could mention? Overall Id say the cast is well defined, and have their uses though it’s the product of any game with such Constrained deployment that the bar to entry is a bit higher, there isnt any misc slots to deploy people who are borderline okay or “lets see how they turn out” but this is also my personal philosophy speaking a bit. Eitherway I had a lot of fun with them, Shoutout Thom and Rasmus. THE GOATS of having impactful but simple mechanics wise skills.

Econ wise I ended up buying a steel lance and a horseslayer, both flex options for Ameli and Zan though largely used by the former. Only ended up making the Salvage shop thingie and the armory.

Lastly bugs I only noticed two minor ones. In the camp talk between Ameli and Cassandra ( Sorry i forgot the chapter) there is a WAIT 500 command visible to the player half wayish through the convo.

In chapter 8 camp Bourgne cannot be spoken too though he has a talk bubble above him.

So TLDR great stuff looking forward to more!

[kdports]

Thanks for playing! Really glad you enjoyed.

I agree that Cartha and Jenny are some of the weaker units right now. I think I’m happy with where both of them are at but could see us changing them if they feel unusable.

Your Ida feedback is really interesting to me. She was absolutely broken in earlier versions of the game, so I wonder if I overnerfed her. I didn’t think she felt too terrible last time I played, but I’ll check with SP and see how other players feel about her.

Really appreciate the chapter feedback. 10 is supposed to feel brutal, but SP has said he’s open to changing it if people are really against it. It’s hard to communicate to a player that losing less than two/three units that chapter is supposed to be a major win.

I’ll have to think more about your 11 feedback. I’m really curious how you played it. My fear when making that chapter was that it would suck if people didn’t match my play pattern. I tried to control for that but maybe I failed. Curious to see what others think too.

[Alexmanpersonguy]

Awesome! Yeah with Ida i def didnt use her enough to give a full take. But the immediate deploy choice between her and Alek doomed her for me after that once I tried deploying her again in ch7 and she exploded to a soldier.

ch11 I found after multiple attempts was that the more i tried to enemy phase the worst things got. So what I did was, Dan goes left asap, lights the torches, kills the banshee, gets the monster bane etc then straight up to the top light. Meanwhile my other units in groups of two/three broke off towards enemy packs and picked off the ones that got closer to me with player phase combat. Everyone during this continues to move left and up as much as possible, while keeping enemies from piling up. Inverted Rasmus and Thea do some light enemy phasing here and there but I find this is a map that is especially hard to group chain big heals because there is the ticking time bomb in the form of large stats enemies keeping you from taking a breather turn with little movement towards the last light source.

I def felt like once i got this approach down the map was infinitely easier, my other attempts were pretty fruitless. I think the 22 attack sword centaurs and 10 as Axe centaurs were particular menaces with the sword one Ohkoing jenny and the axe one one rounding Cartha. But Yeah i think the map is in a pretty good place, but it may skew toward a particular strat at the moment.

Yeah that makes sense with regards to 10. drawing a comparison to some other hacks (some light spoilers here ill try to keep it vague) Such as homecoming and TMGC, where you get maps like 10 ala “were not all gonna make it out alive” they tend to proactively “get ahead” so to speak of the player defaulting to resetting on unit deaths by highlighting a bit narratively in story that "were not all gonna make it”. I think you could definitely slip a line in that vein into 10, failing a subtle approach some [ToggleRed] always gets the point across.

oh yeah shoutout ch9 lol that map was sick! Probably my favorite in the game next to 6

[kdports]

Thanks for the play-by-play! That helps a lot from my perspective. I like the idea of explicitly calling out Ch10 deaths in dialogue. I’ll need to do some iterations to make it try and feel natural. I’m not the biggest fan of red text but it’s become standard enough in this community that it’s probably the play.

I need to try inverting Rasmus in one of my playthroughs. I think SP’s done it but I always use him as an offensive nuke with inversion as an anti-mage tool. SP was really cooking when he made that character lol.