B3L-H411-A: Bar-tending in Fire Emblem [COMPLETE] [FE8U]

[JacobTJP]

Here is my entry to Ghast’s Make a Fun Chapter IV: B3L-H411-A!

Back when the contest got announced, the idea was pitched in a particular FE discord to have a bar-tending Fire Emblem hack, and me being the masochistic idiot I am thought: “that sounds like a great idea!”. After months of procrastination and crunch time and submitting the hack into the contest late I finally got the hack finished!

It contains a cast of over 30 characters, a new gameplay mechanic: a crafting system, and of course le funny memes! (Disclaimer: memes may not actually be funny)

Initially, I wasn’t going to release the hack until knowing if Ghast was going to still play it on his channel or not, since it was late, but after everything that’s happened, I decided that it would be best to release it now instead.

More on that here (FE Community sadness warning)

Given the current state of the community, I don’t know how long it’s going to be until MAFC 4 continues, and Ghast needs to take all the time he needs to heal and figure out how to move forward after this. I doubt you’re reading this, but if you are, I wish you all the best and thank you for doing what you’re doing.

I also felt that we could all use a good laugh, and while not everyone is going to find the “humour” in this hack funny, I hope something in here makes people laugh, especially after everything that has gone on. So yeah.

Credits:
JacobTJP (Eventing, Hack-Specific ASM, Writing)
Sam/Lynx (Concept)
Vandal Swiftblade (Writing)
Sildra (Chapter design, CGs)
Melliel (Custom Tileset, Map)
Obsidian Daddy (Item Icons)
Sapphire (Playtesting)
Sonu (Playtesting like hell)
Mega (Naming the hack)

Special thanks:
@Leonarth
@Sme

You two helped me out whenever I had a problem and came to FEU for that, and without either of you this hack wouldn’t have been finished, and for that I thank you.

@Vesly Also a massive thank you for helping me get the auto-refreshing units working.

Also thank you to Ghast for holding MAFC which got me to make this hack in the first place.

Further credits are included in the doc, if I have failed to credit you in some way, please message me on here so I can make alterations.

If you find any bugs, before reporting them please check the README to see if they’ve been addressed.

Enjoy!

DOWNLOAD THE HACK HERE

[Mega]

Yay, I’m in the credits. Look ma, I’m on TV!

[anon30371999]

congrats on the release boss, good to see it finally finished

[JacobTJP]

You know it’s a strange year when I actually finish a hack

[BuskHusker]

VA11 HALL-A is one of my favorite games, so I’ll definitely have to give this a go.

[vilk]

Interesting concept, but i can’t get it to work. I managed to get the drink and food, but there’s no option to interact with the customer either next to them or across the counter. Am i misinterpreting something?

Tried this on vba and vba-m, same result.

[Ribombee]

When I patched it it showed ups error
But it isnt same type of error of wrong rom

[Levin64]

vilk, it was being shown that in this specific part Sam has to give it to Jacob across the counter, after that Vandal and Rosetta will be the one accepting and delivering orders

[vilk]

I could swear i tried that too. Let me check again

e: Okay, he doesn’t have a prompt for it, but waiting works! Of course that was probably the only thing i didn’t try, i was trading back and forth between all the characters and trying to get one of them to trigger a prompt somewhere but didn’t wait in the right place. Doh.

[JacobTJP]

When patching a UPS file in NUPS, select the “ignore” option to get rid of that error.

[Vesly]

Recorded myself [trying this out] failing at this for 23 minutes. I had a lot of trouble with this, which may be an indication that some others might as well. Hope you find this playtest & feedback as useful. Definitely a neat concept, and I’d be interested to see how you expand on this.

Failing as a Bartender - Hack playtesting

[JacobTJP]

Thank you very much for playing the hack and making a video so I can see how someone blindly playing it approaches it, I’d like to address some of your points of criticism.

The tutorial obviously isn’t great, I should have made it so the player is given more guidance as opposed to a giant wall of text you get to view once since it’s a completely new system, you aren’t the first to have trouble with it and unfortunately probably not the last.

Originally I did try implementing the auto-refresh after every action, but I was unable to figure it out with the UNCR code, nothing seemed to work during development so I gave up on the idea. If you’re willing to share with me what you did to fix that, I’d really appreciate it, because it’s a quality of life feature I really want to implement for this.

Some of the clues can be very cryptic, like Aalware’s one could mean a range of things, which is entirely a fault on my end since it doesn’t point to anything specific. Arty’s and b0b’s are supposed to be more straightforward as they actually do this. Also Soh is just there to be stupid hard to understand and the clue is horrible, sorry about that.

The terrain idea you suggested for essentially locking certain units to certain areas is actually really interesting, and if I was to make major changes to how this hack works, this is something I’d definitely try to implement.

If you’re willing to play the game further, that’d be great! I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on… what comes next.

[Mycahel]

“Welcome to Belhalla. Time to burn lords and change lives.”

[Vesly]

Here’s a quick UPS with a couple of changes put in

• Range event to auto refresh the unit that just acted

• Kitchen tile (renamed forests) that only Mega can walk through quickly

• Plain tile that I forgot to rename for the bar area basically restricted to one of them

• Floor tiles for the rest of the area cost more for the two that are supposed to stay by the counters

It’s probably a half hour tedious task to do the same thing without ruining your kitchen / bar area as I did, but you just copy the tiles in the tileset and assign them different terrain, then set the terrain cost for your units accordingly. I think it would be a nice improvement to do that, though you’ll want to set their starting positions differently I guess. You can name them all Floor if you want. I’d also put some sort of obvious marker on top of the mixers (eg. thief escape tile that can display when flag x is on, which only occurs from an always event that turns this flag on when the mixer unit has an item in slot 1 and back off when it has no items) and work on breaking up the wall of text at the start. If you say a couple sentences, then have the player try that step, it will be a lot easier for them to follow.

I can’t comment too much on the clues beyond the fact that I did not seem to understand any of them. This was frustrating and maybe I’m not the best at trivia or riddles, but it didn’t really encourage me to play more of it. As I seem to have failed at his quest of continued alcoholism, I’ll be leaving this hack be for now. Best of luck with whatever you do next, though.

for Jacob

https://drive.google.com/file/d/14gMlfH76vIPRIjwkK1Yfndyx75gDej-2/view?usp=drivesdk

[Mycahel]

I’ve been playing and everything seems good until I try giving food to Cedric. Then the game crashes. Any help? :v
(Note: I used Vesly’s patch).
Aside from that, the game is pretty fun, but it does take a bit of getting used to, after the wall of text at the beginning.
The riddles aren’t that hard if you know FE. The easiest guy to me was bOb, so I guess you could call that an interesting maneuver.
I’d like to see what you do next.

[JacobTJP]

Please do not use Vesly’s patch as he hasn’t seen everything included in the game and therefore doesn’t know how it works, which is why the game likely crashed because my patch had worked for everyone else.
There will be an update shortly with the auto-refresh units quality of life feature.

EDIT: Just in case, I tested Cedric’s food events again, and as it turns out if you get his order wrong, the game did crash, I found the cause and fixed it, sorry for my outburst and thank you for bringing the bug to my attention.

[Vesly]

Yeah, sorry, that patch was just intended as a quick showcase of what I was talking about for things that could improve the first section of the demo. It is completely untested and was meant only for @JacobTJP. I shall hide it in my previous post.

[JacobTJP]

The update with auto-refreshing units is now live!

[Zeldacrafter64]

I’m a simple man, I see the title references an excellent game, I like and download.

[Mycahel]

A co-worker got killed and the police is knocking at my door.
They think I did it.
Send help.