I’ve got 5 chapters done so far. It’s very much in early development, but I would like to know what people think if they have the time to review it.
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Congrats on release! Recommend you share some screenshots and basic info about the game so people know what to patch and what you’ve made.
Good luck!
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For now, I’m calling it Fire Emblem: Revolution.
On the continent of Pescar, the tyrant Ambrose has begun a violent conquest of the world, Lucius, a young farmers son, speaks out and is condemned to die. Escaping by the skin of his teeth, he rushes to safety, recruiting unlikely allies along the way hoping to one day restore his countries honor and undo the wrongs that have been committed.
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The story seems interesting. After killing Zorna, it hangs.
Thanks, I’ll look into it
Yeah, please do, will give you feedback after playing the entire 5 chapters.
I’ve updated it and fixed the issue. If anything else comes up, let me know.
Here’s a write-up of my thoughts during a run through the patch.
It’s not bad as early development goes, but you should absolutely put up some screenshots in the op so people can see what they’re getting into. I made an exception this time on a whim, but normally i wouldn’t even bother to download a patch that doesn’t have some screens showing it off. Basically, the more info you give people, the better, and the easier it is to attract those who would actually like to play your game!
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I just played this too, I wasn’t particularly enthralled by the sales pitch but a cursory glance in builder showed that it didn’t have oversized maps or dumb enemy density out of the gate so that’s already a step ahead of a lot of other hacks, so I figured I might as well give it a shot. vilk has covered most of what I was going to say (for the first couple chapters at least) but I’ll leave some more.
Writeup
I’ll start with my big peeve first, the gameplay. Enemies for the most part only seem to move when you enter their range, and there’s no anti-turtling incentives in any of the chapters I got to play. This creates what we call “bait and switch” gameplay (at least, once you reach the point where you have more than one combat unit and thus can actually do the switch part). Where you just slowly creep forward, pull one enemy at a time with whatever unit is most suited for countering them, mob them, rinse and repeat, no need to take any risks whatsoever. Which makes the gameplay not particularly engaging. It really doesn’t help that you only have one combat unit in the prologue, and only two in the second chapter and half of the third chapter. Unfortunately the narratives for these chapters makes it hard to include anti-turtle incentives. Perhaps in chapter 1, the door key house could give a chest key too, a chest in the crypt holding some sort of statbooster (something more substantial than the secret book that one of the guys drops) and a staircase that eventually spawns a thief who takes the chest and retreats down the stairs if you take too long, so you have an excuse to actually move forward quickly. And perhaps in chapter 2, you could take the droppable red gem and move it to a non-charging skeleton who appears on the south edge of the map in the “second half” so that you have an excuse to actually be aggressive instead of just huddling up around chokepoints until the map ends.
Now for other stuff in mostly chronological order.
I appreciate that the world map opening only references the countries that are relevant to what’s about to happen, and not “here’s the backstory of the entire continent, keep that in the back of your mind for the next 20 chapters in which most of them don’t matter”.
10000G seems like Kelvis might be undervaluing the life of his brother (also a prince) a bit…
Lucius is not particularly enthralling as a unit since not only is he a sword lord but he has the same awful growth distribution as Roy and Eliwood (all the skill/luck, nothing of anything else). Only difference is his personal unbreakable brave weapon which seems like it has the potential to completely spiral out of control if he actually hits his shaky strength/speed growths.
The prologue brigands can roll with enough speed to double Lucius on hard mode (7 versus his 3), meaning he risks a chance of death every fight with them. If hard mode isn’t intended you should probably say so.
Diane can be skipped entirely if you move from here to here, and the TWO droppable vulneraries combined with forest dodge rates mean it is entirely possible to win against the boss if you do this. When you reach chapter 1, Diane vanishes as soon as the map starts… only to then come back if you manage to make it to chapter 2 without her aid. On that note, Wayne can ALSO be sort-of skipped; you can just never talk to him, and then when you reach chapter 2, he joins with no fanfare and suddenly has an iron lance instead of a javelin (and is also a level higher with nothing to show for it).
Diane’s “random movement” gimmick can make or break this chapter. Fortunately for me she decided to move into exactly the right position for me to recruit her and heal while also keeping her out of the enemy’s range. Maybe she should just… not have random movement.
I don’t get the point of this, it’s just a waste of time. Batta could just be sitting on the gate of a 3x3 village instead of in the middle a cross shape of 5 houses, and that’d still communicate that there’s a town there, without teasing players with visitable houses that contain absolutely nothing.
Speech bubbles that are coming from the empty air behind the character because you moved the character. This means the characters don’t move their mouths.
Sain seems awfully quick to trust the word of a companion of a murderer, but hey, I suppose he is Sain and this is a woman. For what it’s worth I did like this little interaction, with how he temporarily becomes a red unit.
Thanks to the player having altogether way too many leadership stars (5 between the first 3 characters you get) as well as charisma, and weapon triangle having vanilla +/- 1 might, weapon triangle basically does not matter when it comes to offense, only for dodgetanking. This is almost the worst matchup I could have (only thing worse being if the brigand was on defensive terrain or had a lancereaver). I can appreciate reliable hit rates, but you might want to either buff the might component of weapon triangle or just remove weapon triangle entirely if you’re going that route.
Speaking of dodgetanking. Diane never had to heal anyone this chapter because the player has so many dodge boosters at their disposal. (that’s 4.06% in true hit) And suddenly the generic brigands here only have 2 speed whereas the ones in the prologue had 7??
vilk already brought this up but I feel the need to reiterate how terribly designed this boss is. Lucius needs 2 speed levels just to not face a chance of death from him, and him getting 2 levels period is an iffy proposition since experience gains seem to be heavily nerfed, never mind 2 speed levels when he has the almighty shaky 45% growth. So ultimately you are left with plinking him at range with javelins as your only option, which is safe and reliable, but now the problem is the boss isn’t fighting back at all so it’s just a waste of time. And if he had a hand axe he would double and most likely one-round Wayne too, so letting him fight back doesn’t fix him either. This guy needs a serious overhaul.
And this is made even more egregious by his second appearance, where he is now on a throne, which means that you can’t just cheese him with javelins, which would be fine if Lucius didn’t face a high chance of death every time he fights since he still gets doubled and one-rounded.
Armsthrift. On a bow unit, who is not going to be hurting for weapon uses, and who has no luck to trigger it with. What’s the deal here? If it tied into his character or something (like Mundo from FERDOP) I could see it but Morgan is apparently just a wandering soldier who doesn’t stand out.
Pretty sure that Lucius has been denying that he’s a criminal all this time but ok
In 2x we fight Lyn’s worst nightmare
And the game hangs when anyone moves; they just get stuck moving in place while the FE8 victory cutscene music plays. So I can’t progress past this point and tbh I really don’t feel like replaying the first three chapters in this state (judging from chapter 2 Wayne’s battle quote with Zorna, I’m guessing I get to skip this freezing gaiden if Wayne never fights him).
There’s definitely a lot to iron out but since this is so early in development it won’t be a big deal to fix at least, good luck!
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Thanks so much for taking the time to play and critique it. I will do my best to fix everything that you mentioned.
Thank you so much for playing! I’m grateful for the advice and suggestions and will do my best to change and add them.
No problem, and good luck with the hack! You’ve already made more progress than most people who try and make a video game.
The game hangs again when Lucius arrives & escapes after chapter 3 & the game begins from prologue again
I tried hard mode and somehow got an enemy on the first map stuck on heal mode for 3 turns, with no way of killing him fast.
Thanks, I am looking into it.
I haven’t taken hard mode into consideration so far, so I would recommend easy mode to start with. I’ll look at hard mode once I’ve finished debugging.
There’s a patch to disable certain difficulty modes in febuilder. Might make sense to do if you aren’t balancing other modes yet.
I tried making a more gbafe-esque palette for Lucius based on his portrait colours.
It uses the black from Marisa for the hair and inside of the cape and green from Joshua for the clothes. Feel free to use it if you want, or just modify or build on it if you like.
The palette is
5553FF7F9E631F4B392A2631304E831C9877D26ACB49B0560B42662DC3180000
and you can just paste it into febuilder to apply it.
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Thank you so much for this, but the Eliwood was pretty much a placeholder for what I was making.
This is the portrait I plan on using for him.
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I figured you might want to replace Eliwood at some point, but i felt inspired :V
New portrait’s pretty good, he does look a lot more like a farmer’s son now!