Concept of somewhat different mechanic-wise hack

Projects Concepts
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First of all, hello everyone, I’m new and glad to be here. :hugs:

My goal is to remake one old trpg called Hard To Be God onto FE8 engine as a hack.

Some infodump for small context

Long ago, when I was a little, one of my first and favorite games was Hard To Be God made for cellular phones by russian game company, Akella. It was tale of baron’s son, Martese, who rises up to save his kingdom and uncover presence of beings from another world, defeating dozens of enemies in a turn-based tactical gameplay… You already know where this is going, game was released after Sacred Stones, so devs were definitly inspired by GBA titles. And so, I was in love with FE long before I meet franchise itself (here, in Russia, Nintendo’s presence is little, so my first game was Awakening, because I saw strange two-screen portable console from friend of a friend). And only after some years of playing FE games and hacks, I started wondering, if HTBG is possible to somewhat redo in FE-style.

Now, speaking of a my idea. Thinking about game mechanics, I realised, that many of them different from gba titles and FE itself, not all of them can be carried over.
For example, there wasn’t weapon triangle in HTBG, instead there was armor/weapon square (hit and damage was decided by comparison of type of your weapon and enemy’s armor), so to remake it in FE, you’d need to make units to hold simultaneously two weapons and get wexp for both of them, AFAIK, nobody did it yet.

So, there will be very different gameplay if I’d put all I could into hack from HTBG, and many players won’t like it.

Like:

  • realistic Middle Ages (for half of hack, at least), so no magic, no flying units, etc.

  • weapons up to 5 range

  • predetermined level ups (do not know if its possible to make) and half of stats based on weapon, like all swords giving 20 avoid and hit, or all maces with chance of stunning enemy upon hit, cancelling their attack

  • and more…

And I’m torn, because it would be my passion project, as first my hack, just for myself and all. But what if someone would want to play it? Should I make hack closer to FE and throw away stuff? Remake balance anew (original game kinda unbalanced and hard)? Is it worth a shot in the end?

So I wanted to make this topic and ask for your opinion, what should I do. It’s all only concept, I only began to read manuals/watch videos about hacking, so even if I’ll begin working it’s definitly won’t be in nearest future.

Once again, what do you think about it?
P.S. Sorry for typos, not native English speaker.

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If you want to make a hack with battle mechanics that are significantly different than usual, you might have to use a buildfile. Febuilder is great, but you will have a tough time changing those sorts of mechanics with it.

Gl

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Depending on what it is you want to do, it could be feasible.

The few examples you shared seem reasonable to implement. To provide some insight:

  • You could add “stone” effect to mace weapons to achieve this effect.
  • You can give a flat buff to luck and skill to all swords
  • Weapon forging exists (see Tales of Ternon buildfile for reference), but I am unsure if it is complete and I don’t know how easy it is to implement. You could probably rig something with events if the weapon levels up at specific points in time in the story vs. based on combat. However, you may be able to rig something with weapon ranks to achieve some type of general buff.
  • Extending ranges is doable.
  • The armor/weapon square thing you could probably figure out through editing the weapon triangle or making certain classes have specific effective bonus damage weakness (ie horselayer being effective against cavs in vanilla, as an example).
  • Two weapons at once is probably not feasible without some serious custom assembly coding (ASM, which is what many folks here use to build custom hacks), but it may be too fundamental a change to the game’s systems to implement without heavy reworks. This is prob the hardest to achieve of everything you’ve laid out. You could do equippable items or shields, as well as items that provide passive boosts, but not two separate combat items that get used in a single round.

You should make it if you think you will have fun building something you can enjoy making and playing.

Hope this is helpful. Good luck.

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Thanks for all input, and yeah, almost all of it is doable. I was more concerned that nobody would want to play hack with that balance, but you’re right, I will have fun making it if at least one guy from here 'll play, well, it would even cooler.
Btw, one of mechanics in HTBG was special building capture, you got extra stats while control them. Like if you have school, all your units will have better hit, or having guard tower wolud give +1 range to all your ranged weapons (really silly, it even stacked and in one map enemy throwed 4 range javelins across river because of it). I had idea to make npc who stood at map and looked like house, while giving you stats. If enemy kills it, it respawns but already red and gives stats to them, and it would work the other way. Npc would use stars mechanic, like in Thracia, it is already working in hacks.
So I wanted to know, how is this idea looking, isn’t there some other easier way to do it and if not, can you make different kind of stars and assigh other stats, to make npc armory giving extra point of str, for example.
P.S. FE Vision Quest rocks, such a blast to play)

1 Like
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I think you can make it work if you try to balance around it. Usually when mechanics or changes don’t work out well in a hack, it’s because of their implementation, less so because the idea itself wasn’t good.

As long as you’re intentional about how you design, I’m sure it’ll be good.

Thanks for the kind words!

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I think that you should mess around with fe builder for a while, maybe create single, isolated chapters to get better at game design, try out a bunch of patches in vanilla fe to get a feel for how much they change the game.

I especially recommend getting really good at map design because your idea sounds very hard to balance, for example maces could be extremely overpowered and if weapons vary too much in range than designing a good map could become more difficult because of the difference of unit and enemy ranges.

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Well, there won’t be doubling in game, so maces half good, as enemy turn will be as usual, they strike, then you. Maces could prevent counterstrike and only stun procs. What more importantly, same chance (from 0 to 20 depending on weapon) have lances, but instead of stun they have vantage (logic was, probably, because lances longer you can pierce enemy before he can strike you).
Still, thanks for the tip. Mapdesign will be especially important, because maps of original game were Gaiden-like, except way smaller. It is part I definitly will change and thinking about often.

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