Awful Emblem - Version 1.1 RELEASE!

[DelphiSage]

Glitch report: This scene in the start of Chapter 6 plays music even if music is disabled:

Chapter 6 Image

I checked FEBuilder, and apparently it’s because Tension was programmed to play as an SFX rather than as a BGM. Is this fixable without wrecking the intention of the scene to be three things happening at once? In-game, there’s no issue - all it takes is to go into the Options setting and turn Music on and off again for it to stop playing nonstop. The track won’t play at all if you use the B button to skip scenes rather than progress with the A button.

EDIT: Also, how come I can’t see Melanie’s bonus conversation for the village in FEBuilder?

FEBuilder screenshot

EDIT 2: Oh, and the eastern ballista on that map has two ballista stacked on top of each other. I have no idea why.

[Artix]

You mean Chapter 29, right? Unless something has been drastically fucked up, that chapter does not have infinite reinforcements. The initial design had three turns of reinforcements that were triggered when you entered each of the danger zones but (among other things) we cut that down to two turns on the latest patch.

Final does have infinite reinforcements, but only in the throne room.

[KainLegacy]

Maybe there where 3 turns? I could have spread too much my forces and activate too much danger zones and all the reinforcements, still the final was a walk in the park in comparation.

[RNGSOMEONE]

Alright, I’ve caught a serious bug.

The script used to hand out Nyria’s Wings after Ch24 is fundamentally flawed, due to using “Give item to current/active unit”. This script works perfectly fine if the last turn was a Player Phase, but it does not work if the chapter ends on Enemy Phase (as a result of the boss dying to a counterattack).

If the chapter ends during Player Phase as a result of a player unit initiating combat against, and defeating, the boss, the script works perfectly fine. This is because “current/active unit” is the player unit that defeated the boss.

If the chapter ends during Enemy Phase as a result of the boss dying to a counterattack, the script stops working as intended. “Current/active unit” happens to be the boss, who is now dead, and as a result, the script sends Nyria’s Wings to the boss’ inventory, resulting in the message “Nyria’s Wings was pilfered”. The player doesn’t get the item in this instance.

[RNGSOMEONE]

Other feedback:

• Ch24x’s boss Wotan is bugged in that when hit with a status staff, the duration of the status effect on him never ticks down from 5 for some reason. As such, applying Sleep to him renders him incapacitated, permanently (unless you wake him up with a Poison weapon). Other maps don’t seem to have this issue.
• Ch25 is softlockable if you don’t have a flier/Sniper or siege tomes. The map’s objective is Rout, but a Sniper and Swordmaster on the southwestern ship and a Sage on the northeastern ship all start in locations completely inaccessible to ground units, meaning the only way to kill them is with fliers or siege weapons. If the player reaches this chapter with neither (including units to man the Ballistae), they are softlocked because they cannot rout the map.
• Ch25 also has two Ballistae stacked on top of each other beneath the pillar. A unit can get in and ride one, and once they move off of that tile, a second ballista will still be there for some reason.
• Ch25’s boss, who never moves off the throne, is erroneously set to show his movement as if he will move off the throne.

Also, I found the Secret Shop in Ch24. With 90k in the bank from selling promotion items. Infinitely purchasable Sleep Staves and Goddess Icons are fair and balanced.

[DelphiSage]

In Chapter 7. The same issue of overlapping ballistas from last chapter is in this chapter, too.

Chapter 7 screenshot

[FPzero]

I really don’t know what would be causing the double Ballistae on every map with them. They’re called to coordinates by TrapData and every instance of them only has one Ballista coded to show up at that location. For example, Chapter 7’s TrapData:

TrapData:
BLST [7,6] Ballista
ENDTRAP

Regarding other feedback/bugs, I am not sure what would single out Wotan in 24x as being unable to tick down status timers. While we did add a couple status-dealing weapons, I don’t see why it would only affect him. Did you notice this happen to anyone else?

We’ll switch Ch25 to a Defeat Boss. I believe that was an intention of this newer patch but it could’ve gotten overlooked. I’ve also updated his AI to the proper one that doesn’t show movement.

I’ve fixed the Ch24 issue with Nyria’s Wings. The use of Active Character in the cutscene was not intentional and was missed in testing, likely because everyone was killing Grigori on player phase.

Chapter 6’s music is caused by the use of a SUDDENMUS command that has no description in my event assembler language document. Since I never play with music off, I would never have realized it counts as a sound effect call. I’ll switch it back to a standard MUSC command. As for the lack of bonus conversation, I don’t understand what’s happening there either. The check for Melanie being the active character is shaped exactly the same as the bonus conversation in Chapter 4 with Angus, and that one works perfectly fine.

Chapter 4:

AxeVillage:
SVAL 0x9 0x7
CHECK_ACTIVE
BEQ 0x0 0xC 0x9
VillageEventItem(C4VillageGeneric,Village,SteelAxe)
LABEL 0x0
VillageEventItem(C4VillageAngus,Village,SteelAxe)
ALIGN 4

Chapter 6

DefVillage:
SVAL r9 0x22
CHECK_ACTIVE
BEQ 0x0 rC r9
VillageEventItem(C6VillageGeneric,Village,Dracoshield)
LABEL 0x0
VillageEventItem(C6VillageMelanie,Village,Dracoshield)
ALIGN 4

I can’t imagine the use of r9 instead of 0x9 is going to affect it.

[RNGSOMEONE]

Ch24 isn’t the only map with a “Give Item to Current/Active Unit” line that can go wrong. You can lose the Ch24 Myrina’s Halo the same way, which I found out a lot later. Just make sure to do it for all maps, not just Ch24.

As for the status effects, not that I know of. I haven’t been using my Blizzard/Taeco tomes, so all the status effects I’ve inflicted so far are with Sleep staves. Sleep staves worked normally in other maps against generic enemies, and their status counters ticked down properly.

Also, I find it funny that all of your playtesters killed a 28 SPD boss, on a throne, with HM Kel-levels of evasion and high damage, on player phase. Did none of them play on HM or what?

[FPzero]

I went and checked all GIVEITEMTO commands and fixed the Myrina’s Halo one. It seems to be the only one left that had the active character so hopefully this fixes the issue for good.

We did not prioritize Hard Mode testing (or even Hard Mode in general) as it was never intended to be more than a numbers inflation. Therefore, we didn’t make our playtesters go through it. It’s only in this most recent patch that we tried to address it even slightly. That said, one of our team members did play the whole game on Hard Mode, in pre-release with the extra hard settings we toned down in post-release patches, and did not call out any significant stumbling blocks that he encountered. Since I am not skilled enough to play Hard Mode, I took him at his word that Hard was challenging but fine. He didn’t report anything about not getting Nyria’s Wings so I assume he must have beaten the boss on player phase. Don’t know what to say otherwise.

I do see that he did come across the Myrina’s Halo one about a month before our 1.0 release but his best guess as to why it happened was that the character’s inventory was full. I wasn’t sure why that would be the case and couldn’t pin down the reasoning, plus none of our other testers had reported it, so the bug stayed in the game until now.

[RNGSOMEONE]

Speaking of full inventories, you can technically softlock any FE8 game/hack if you have a full convoy, a full inventory of non-discardable items (which have the no-selling tag on) and then attempt to receive an item that can’t be sold. The game will make you discard an item if you try to receive one with a full convoy, but if none of the six items can be discarded, you’re just stuck on that screen.

There’s nothing that can be done about this extremely fringe softlock. Unless you have a bunch of non-sellable items that provide inventory boosts (think Myrina’s Halo, but multiple per run) in your game (where it can become a legitimate problem if player stack multiple in the Lord’s inventory and also have them equip a non-sellable weapon like their PRF), the player would have to be actively trying for this softlock for it to happen.

[sekihoe]

I’m now at chapter 16 and I’m having a lot of fun with the game. Playing on hard and I think the difficulty is good, you have to play well and you cant just breeze through chapters, specially the survival ones that can be quite challenging (being surrounded by siege tomes and prepromoted falcon knights in the middle of a limited mobility desert is a bit cruel imho). I’m a little puzzled by the caps and promo gains of certain units. Selia and Ferris gain different gains while promoting to general, I havent checked all classes but I think that might be true for other classes as well. Also, the Hero stat caps are considerably lower than the warrior’s, which might skew the player in a certain direction depending on the situation. I using Angus and Frank, and I’ll make Frank a Hero even though his promo gains and caps would be better as a warrior, but I’m already making Angus a Warrior and i’m a sucker for team variety so… are those in proportion with sacred stones og data? Anyway, fun game so far.

[sekihoe]

Is there a link for the updated version? the google drive doesn’t seem to be modified

[FPzero]

@sekihoe

Is there a link for the updated version? the google drive doesn’t seem to be modified

Ah sorry, I probably should’ve been more clear. I haven’t updated the patch or version yet because I’m still receiving various bug notifications from places and would rather that I fix as many as I can before putting out an update. When I do update, I’ll make a new post with a new download, then update the links in older posts.

[FPzero]

We changed a lot of class stats and caps from vanilla, often to better differentiate similar units. For example, in vanilla GBA FE, Mercenaries are often ludicrously good, being fast and strong. They directly compete with Swordmasters being fast, but not strong. We decided to make mercs and heroes a bit more on the strong but slow side for a sword unit, an archetype that isn’t generally represented in vanilla. With Warriors, the goal was to make them stand out a little compared to Berserkers, and one way we worked on that was with some very heavy but powerful D-rank bows available to Warriors as soon as they promote. Technically other bow units can use them, but none of them will really appreciate the AS penalty they’re taking from the 16-weight Gatling Bow (brave bow but available at D rank instead of A rank for heavy weight penalty).

It wasn’t just classes that we changed around significantly. Many vanilla weapons saw stat adjustments of some kind. It’s always worth checking the stats of new weapons when they pop up. Case in point, the Battle Axe is now quite good, going up to 80 hit, only held back from dominance by its availability.

[Marik]

Im on 15x, was iffy about it before part 2. but the writing picks up and I love the tone. This is such a funny hack.

[DelphiSage]

I’m on Chapter 9. I don’t really like how the game seems to railroad towards using Cassandra and Selia when I already have Clover and Ferris.

[sekihoe]

I think the only chapter Selia is mandatory is her debut chapter so is not like she’s really being pushed she’s just being introduced. as for Cassandra, I think she’s mandatory in 2 chapters and there’s another one (the night in the city one) where she’s optional but if you deploy her you can hire the barkeeper mercenary/pegasus knight for half price by talking to them. I don’t think that’s enough to argue that they’re being “railroad” onto the player. Also they’re all quite different functional units. Cassandra is a more of a bulky sword user while Clover is the quick and dodgy one, and Selia is a mage killer while Ferris is more of a traditional physical tank. I dont use Cassandra although I did deployed her in the aforementioned chapters, and got 2 levels on her to help her survive the more difficult desert survival one, and story wise it makes sense when she’s forced. Selia is pretty fun to use specially cause mages do a lot of damage on hard and having an unit that can absorb those is quite useful… and also Ferris is a bit of a pos despite having the most gorgeous palette, I rather not use him, but I imagine he’s a pretty competent tank.

[RNGSOMEONE]

Cassandra is pretty good IMO. She has speed issues and tends to frequently get doubled, but her main draw is that she is an Ice affinity support partner for Judith… who is also Ice. Double Ice affinity is +3 Defense, +15 Hit/Avo/CrtAvo at an A-support, making the pair almost unkillable even on Hard. Cassandra is the inferior unit between her and Judith (as Judith has the speed to double enemies, which Cassandra lacks), but even just trailing Judith by 3 tiles is more than enough of a contribution as Judith kills everything with Hand Axes.

[ShinryuShadow21]

Hi, this is complete right? Are there supports? How many chapters?

[Artix]

Yes, it is complete. There might be one more bug patch in the near future but by and large we’re pretty happy with where it is now. Yes, there is a full slate of supports - nearly as many as the script for the actual plot. I forget the actual number off the top of my head but both were over 400 pages in Drive. There’s 30 main chapters, plus like, 6 gaidens I think? Maybe 7? All the details are on the 1.0 release post linked in the OP.