Hi all, looks like there was a bit of confusion going on here but I do still visit the site occasionally so I’ll do my best to clear it up. Oh, and there’s no bad blood between us and the site or anything, we just don’t post much.
Awful Emblem is not dead. In fact, we’ve been quietly working on it almost every week since posting this demo years ago. You might think, “gee FP, shouldn’t it be done by now then?” and honestly you’d be right to think that. But when I say every week I mean that me and the other team members meet once a week for 2-3 hours and that’s it. Sometimes a little extra work is done by one of us on a random day. All of us are in our 30s now and don’t have the time to devote to these kinds of projects like we did when we were younger. Not calling anyone out for wondering, of course, just explaining how our team works.
But anyway, yeah, the project keeps on trucking along. I’d honestly put us at the 75% completion mark these days. We have seven more chapters to finish and then plenty of stuff to polish. We’ve spent the last month and a half proofreading supports, with more still to check once we’ve formatted them for insertion. Prior to that we were working on the “Act 3” of our game and all the chapters that go along with that–the second half of the game and beyond.
The tough part about FE hacking is that, compared to when I did Mario or Metroid hacking, I find it’s hard to present screenshots or other previews of the game. It is, after all, a strategy game. The most appealing things to see are map designs or cool animations, and the latter have been inserted in our game for a long time now, probably long enough to be in older demos already. I’ve posted a couple maps here and there in Discord, but largely I just never know what to post. Part of it is this possibly unfounded notion I have that people will feel like our game plays like something out of the late 2010s.
I predict Awful Emblem will not light FEU on fire with its gameplay or dazzle it with fancy ASM. At its core, it’s just a game we’ve enjoyed making in the vein of FE adventures we liked playing when we were younger. There are still cool chapters and interesting to play maps, of course, especially a few in the second half that took some real time to work out, and one more I haven’t even started on yet but conceptually should turn out pretty fun. But what we’ve really put a big focus on throughout the game is its story and character development. We’ve had a lot of years to come to the realization that just because this is a romhack doesn’t mean we can’t actually choose to write a decent story. And sure the players will be the ultimate judge of that but I genuinely love our misfit cast of characters and all the story and support moments we’ve written for them. I hope people won’t just skip over dialogue to get to the gameplay, because while we’ve written a lot of words (though nowhere near as many as Sacred Dawn DX) I think it’s worth seeing what we’ve created.
Anyway, this is a lot of words to say that we’re still around. I kinda just wrote what came to mind. I guess I’ll finish out this essay with a few random screens or maps we’ve taken in recent months since whenever we last posted here. Let’s see what I have.
We have Intermission chapters featuring supports-like conversations that aren’t actually supports. They just tie into the current events of the plot after major sections of the story.
I put a boat on a lake and gave it a “cannon”.
I don’t recall where this gentleman shows up but I guess he’s a big boy.
A near-endgame map in a marshy wasteland of sorts.
I don’t have a date for this, but keep an eye out for this hack because we do want to put out some kind of playable demo again soon. It’s been far too long since the last demo and plenty has changed and been added since last time. We do need to do a bunch of testing before we drop a demo though, so it’ll be a little bit before this happens. I’ll try to pop in every now and then with tidbits of what we’re working on.
That’s all I have for now. Far too many words and little exciting substance. Awful Emblem in a nutshell lol.