Effortposts: Design Arcs, from pre-Alpha to [COMPLETE]

[Parrhesia]

Sister Threads:
Effortposts Around Units We Like
Effortposts Around Chapters We Like

This is going to be a little different. Also a lot more flexible. While the first two threads were about, you know, other peoples’ campaigns, this one’s about your own. It doesn’t actually have to be [COMPLETE], necessarily – just a journey from original concept to final product. What changed, and how? This could be units, chapters, weapons, class systems, skills… whatever. To give an idea, I’m starting out by talking about a unit, but will probably later talk about generic lance infantry across all four of my custom campaigns. It’s pretty freeform.

This is where you get to brag, a bit, but also to help others’ thought processes, giving them a little look behind the curtain.

So we begin.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. Hesterine (Drums of War) by Parrhesia

Hesterine (Drums of War)

I started this thread before actually knowing what I was going to talk about, but a reasonable place to start seems to be: the most buffed unit (four times!) in DoW.

It’s almost never touched her growths. -10% HP growth (as part of hits to HP growth across almost the entire cast), +10% to Resistance, her one unusually good growth. The rest are about as you’d expect. Fast, high luck, decent strength and defence but nothing special.

Why does a unit need four buffs? Well, presumably, she needs to suck shit to begin with. Compare the pair:

There’s about six of these soldiers in Chapter 1, a very stat-balanced and common enemy type in DoW, and original Hesterine traded very poorly with them. Granted, this was acquired quickly using Builder cheats; she could reasonably be said to level up once or maybe twice before fighting these guys. But it still wouldn’t bridge the gap. She also struggled to one-round the weak axe foes that she should have trivially countered (and, now, does).

So why did this unit exist in the first place?

Story-wise, Roxelana’s initial force in the prologue is acquired by going around the region and finding various recruits from the villages in the area. It’s a rag-tag, motley crew, as befits an earlygame army, and which makes sense given that war’s been going on for some time, now. These are what’s been left behind. They include a couple of retired veterans, some foreigners, a 16-year old, a deserter and Hesterine. A cavalier implies wealth - they have a horse and armour, after all - and that’s what Hesterine brings to the table… but she’s young, fresh-faced, and effectively just running away from home. Most of the rest of your forces have, at least, fought before; she has not. So she was going to have to be low-level and with weak bases.

And this dovetailed well wtih the gameplay consideration. We’re seeing more of a pushback to it these days, but my understanding of the FE ‘meta’, for want of a better term, was very much rooted in those 2012 efficiency discussions. Movement was king, because even if they would lose one-on-one to the likes of Joshua or Raven, cavaliers can do basically everything that your theoretically stronger infantry units can. Now, I liked having cavalier as an on-the-face-of-it ‘fuck you’ powerful class. 8 movement, swords and lances. That sort of versatility had to be made up for by inferior combat performance, right?

And, sure, someone putting together an efficiency tier list of DoW in v. 0.3 probably wouldn’t have Hesterine on the bottom. She could rescue and canto! And I used her, sure. The issue is that she was miserable to use. She soft-countered weak axe units and mages, and didn’t hard-counter anything. She didn’t trade well with most infantry. She didn’t grow fast or consistently enough to get out of that hole. She also originally had E lances, meaning she couldn’t use javelins (which were pretty wretched in DoW anyway, particularly early builds, before their accuracy was buffed) to try and chip her way to victory. In an environment where 2RKOing was the norm, she really struggled to even get that far. And with a speed stat of just 9 – the same as the not especially fast lord (albeit from four levels below) – she wasn’t really noticeably faster than everyone else in practice, even if, sure, by 15/15 she’d have cantered to a healthy lead.

So she got nudged. And nudged again. And again. And again, until, finally, reaching the image on the right. As you can see, the sky hasn’t fallen in; she isn’t sweeping aside enemy infantry like they were nothing, but she’s contributing. She’s still faithful to the cavalier unit identity; high HP and respectable durability, good-enough strength, and now she can make full use of that toolkit, running in from eight tiles to plug up gaps wherever they arise instead of just being a warm body. And, notably, she now has actually good speed, meaning that there’s a point of use for her outside of just being in a strong class, and happening to be the first one in that class you get. So now, while she’s not the best unit in the game, she’s probably comfortably above-average.

What can we learn from this?

1. Fun is more important than balance. Sure, you probably shouldn’t have some ultra-unit who trivialises the game or makes your other units feel like support pieces. But also, it didn’t matter that you could sweat some use out of Hesterine just for being a cavalier when she wasn’t actually fun to train or use. And while cavalier is a strong class, its advantages didn’t really come into play when she was deeply mediocre on making contact with the enemy.

2. A patch buff doesn’t have to be some sweeping change. Something I like to do is basically just give a unit +1 base level, and then +1 in a few stats, as if they’d simply had another level and rolled well on it. You see how that works, you see what it helps them do, and you can adjust from there.

3. Units should be good at something. And outside of exceptional circumstances – like yeah, an Est who joins five chapters before the end of the game is probably worse at everything than your mainstays – that should be immediately apparent and immediately useful.

4. Just because You, The Designer, have trained a character and made it work doesn’t mean it’s a pleasant experience for anyone else. When enough people tell you that such and such a character feels bad to use, humour the possibility they might have a point.

[luminescentblade]

Dream of Five: Faction Visual Unification and the 1.7.0 Promotion Portraits Update

In 2013 when we’re still working on old Do5, I had the idea to make each country’s designs look coherent with one another, but I didn’t have the skills then to do that quickly, and we had to do what’s necessary first—and then, you know, stopped work in 2015, revived in 2023, completed in 2024, the whole nine miles. I did some edits, and sometimes full revamps, to old mugs, to bring the visual cohesion up, but a lot of the 2013 mugs are pretty quality and I didn’t really want to edit them too much if not necessary. I did make promoted portraits for the 3 lords pretty early on, so I knew about the tech existing, but didn’t occur to me to put in the effort to do it for the other 33 promotable units at the time.

While talking with other hack creators I learned that TMGC has promoted portraits for everyone, which I thought was cool and, at that point, I was confident in my spriting skills since my exit from retirement, I didn’t quite commit then, because that was still during pre-release and I still had to get my more necessary work done, but ultimately I’m a character design goblin and can’t control myself and sketched this:

Yeah, ok, I basically just take any excuse to draw Kolbane. I’ll talk through my process with the design in his section later. I also did a rough mockup of the sprite itself, but promised Parr I wouldn’t finish rendering the mug until after we release [complete] and get all my other things done first.

And then we released.

Which frees me up to actually render out his mug, and once I rendered out his mug I’m like, damn, I want this in the game. But Kolbane’s not a lord, he’s got a lot of story presence but it doesn’t justify him having a promo portrait change if everyone else doesn’t have it, and going back to the earlier point about visual cohesion, it was a chance to really bring the visuals together since I have the freedom to pretty much do what I want here.

So, one of the days, I go, ok

I sit my ass down, and do this.

3 weeks, 33 portraits.

1.7.0 release.

I’ll break down the groups of designs by country of origin so I can also talk through the overall visuals I chose for each country. The reasoning isn’t that deep in itself, I mostly picked stuff in 2013 off things I liked and overall stuck with them, sometimes adding some elements here or there. For this post I’ll only talk about characters who can promote, though sometimes I’ll bring in other related characters to help talk through the process. Outside of Kolbane and the lords though, I did just kinda draw stuff over the other characters, but I put thought into all of them.

Aukema

I chose Victorian visuals for Aukema (+ non-period-specific armor since I can’t exactly era-match armor with 1800s clothing), as I had an interest in Lolita/Ouji fashion which often take inspiration from Victorian era clothing–and ended up incorporating those elements in as well. Writing-wise Parr drew from Celtic and Anglo sources, so hey, it’s geographically adjacent enough! One other design element I just kinda threw in is ridges as decoration on armor, inspired by some historical pieces. It wasn’t meant to be an Aukema thing at first but once I noticed it’s on a bunch of existing Aukeman designs I just rolled with it as a full design choice.

Aukema’s celtic influences from the writing also extends to character tattoo designs, though the characters wear too much clothes to really show them. You can see some on Garath and Kolbane’s character sheets I’ve posted elsewhere, however.

Rena’s design both comes with her change in public status after the story points of end of 14-start of 15, and the Victorian elements are a lot more apparent in the unarmored fancy version as well. This design is actually what caused me to straight up incorporate elements from the JP fashion subculture in addition to more historic looks–I wanted Rena to have something elegant but she can fight in and doesn’t look weird on wyvern-back in, and what ended up in my sketches was something that looked…really similar to an ouji coat I had in my wardrobe, so I was like, full send it.

Kolbane’s a big reason I did all this, and I think listing his full set of alt portraits help illustrate the rest of my thought process more. Sometimes promo portraits are influenced by my own playthroughs, and in Kolbane’s case I have a pretty strict promotion schedule with him (hit lv20 before or during chapter 12 either route, promote, kill boss of c12 and hit level 2), which means that he promotes when your army is, narratively, not made of money, and he isn’t going to have a full custom shiny suit of armor waiting for him. I designed his new armor as piecewise replacing parts of his old armor with scavenged pieces. The paint streak is both to show him customizing his new stuff, and I think it brings a bit of edge to the new design–as do the tattered cloak and headband. Kolbane, while less experienced than Rena and Garath and often appears softer in story dialogue with them, his chapter 18 start of chapter and some of his optional dialogue–boss convos, pretty much everything he has to do with Musain chapter 8, show a side of him that’s got some fire and toughness that I want represented. His expression change was done directly to match the mood of his chapter 18 start dialogue. In the sketch I provided above, originally the paint stroke was only on the breastplate, but given how gba portraits crop I also added it to his pauldron, which both gives a nicer color distribution and keeps my favorite element of the design.

I provided his chapter 8A armorless outfit and his 23x house outfit here also—you’ll notice 8A mug has the angriest expression of all, but he originally had his default expression there. The expression used in the 8A variant was the original version of the promo mug expression that I found to be a bit too angry to be a default look, but I kept the layer in case I needed it for anything. Then while looking through one of our player’s let’s plays I noted a piece of dialogue in 8A saying “I mislike the way this one looks at me” or something to that effect, and his unpromoted portrait has a rather : ) kinda expression by default, so I thought, hey this would be a good point to bring in that angry face I already drew!

23x house portrait is provided here to really tie in the victorian visuals–his normal clothes is a button down which is present in many european-based looks, but the vest adds that much more of the victorian vibe i wanted to tie the world together, and given the circumstances in the 23x house, regardless of promotion status, he returns to using his : ) expression.

Asher’s promoted design is directly inspired by this portrait of Anthony Wilson Thorold. No relation to the actual historical figure other than I needed something that would fit the visuals and work for a promoted class.

Eilene’s fullbody sketch for unpromoted went for a puffier, frillier sweet-lolita inspired look, and I decided to full-send it for her promotion, complete with a lace headpiece. The lace headpiece also has some subtle feather based texturing on it to unify her looks with the other 2 pegs, who have feather-based headpieces.

Amelia’s clothes themselves isn’t really a big difference, she got a cape upgrade and a slightly different jacket cut and a ribbon, but I didn’t feel like she was the kind of person to get too ostentatiously blingy on a material level. Instead, I drew from her character ending–as she became someone who ended up being kind of a force of nature, I feel like having magic sparks built into her existing resting state would be a suitable look, and, if you recognize the source of my FEU portrait, a different panel of the same Thor comic was rather formative in what kind of visuals I liked.

look, he’s so cool. I’ll take any opportunity I can to make sparkly eyes.

Epicer made a PEAK meme on this design.
Mafia boss jokes aside, my idea here was actually more of a victorian business mogul. Suit, bowler cap, a sword hidden inside a cane. That being said, due to her palette being far from a traditional business suit, she ended up giving some mafia boss vibes, and I think that’s pretty funny so I ran with it.

Chester’s promo design was pretty directly inspired by Assassin’s Creed Syndicate. While we don’t have Assassins in Do5 and I don’t think Chester fits Assassin better than Rogue, nevertheless he is the fightiest thief personality-wise. As you’ll see in a number of my later designs I take a lot of inspiration from AC as a whole visually–I played so many hours of the Ezio trilogy.

Cathale actually originally had a version of her promoted design as her default–she was newly created for the revival and, we used an existing portrait that no longer had its original role for her. In her case, it was a portrait belonging to someone intended to be a lategame boss, and had a very ornate design. However, that did clash with some of her supports. So instead of a promotion, I made a simpler version of the design to use as her base portrait, edited the clothes to fit Aukema vibes better–you’ll note the green fabric is meant to be a vest, mentioned also in the Kolbane part, and the promoted design is a fancier vest layered over gambeson, which is also what I put Farrell in for his under-armor look (used in one of the CGs) as another point of country-of-origin unity.

Crowe’s writing portrays him as rather promiscuous, and a particular emote in the Do5 discord refers to a common word in his dialogue back in the 2010s. Thus, I felt it was appropriate for Crowe to give back to the community.

Sniper also gives +2 con on promotion and I figure I’d make them bulkier to reflect this.

Driscoll’s promo is a bit more low key, not because I don’t like the guy, but because I don’t think it’d fit his character to get something too drastic, so I gave him a military coat and relatively simple pauldrons because I think he’d like it that way, and his base design already achieves a good balance of low bling but high effort and detail level, so it was a suitable baseline to just do a bit more. That being said, his base design is the reason I decided to roll with gambesons as a part of the Aukeman armor selection, though a lot of that isn’t necessarily reflected on to portrait cuts and are more part of fullbody designs.

Both Cothiva’s base and promotion are based off of Victorian ball gowns, something I feel that, while generally would be impractical for battle for a melee unit, is justifiable on a socialite mage. I doubled down on the flower motif also given her herbalist background, and some of her promo ornamentation also give off a bit of 1920s flapper vibe, which isn’t quite part of the visuals I’ve set but it does fit her vibe and she’s fashion forward enough to justify it.

Gabriel’s original design was more or less a very Standard Dark Mage until someone one day pointed out his collar was shaped like the McDonalds Golden Arches. Now as they haven’t paid us for a sponsorship, I took the opportunity to add more Aukeman elements to his base design as-is. When it came time to promote him, I gave him what would really just be gentlemanwear in Victorian contexts, but also reads to a modern audience to be a stage magician, which given his character (seller of fake charms), was plenty suitable.

Marie’s promotion really should be looked at as a set with Alexis’s, since they have matching visuals with black, gold, and a ornate mask that underlines the mysterious rogue look more. Her
jacket is meant as those mutton chop sleeves that then button into those waistcoats with kind of a train after.

Conleth’s armor is kept the exact same on purpose–he’s already been given good quality armor in Farrell’s service, and his supports explicitly states that he did not change his armor, so all his design updates are with his clothes. He gets a Victorian military officer’s jacket and hat and a more voluminous cape, and the little badge he carries as a farrell scout is no longer there.

Jauger being a very heavily armored unit has less opportunities to show his clothing, and instead I gave him a very similar pose and rough armor structure as his lord and mentor Hereward.

Musain

Musain in its conception was heavily influenced by Les Miserables, as the person who originally created it submitted several characters who are direct Les Mis name references. While we decided to remove some of the more on-the-nose references, nevertheless we do keep a lot of its spirit, from the revolution plot to the french vibes. Les Mis as a story takes place in the early 1800s. 1800s western european country visuals is also used for Aukema, and while some overlap in visuals isn’t an issue especially as it does make sense with neighboring countries that would have some cultural diffusion–expanding the timeframe a bit would also give me more variety to work with, as how historical fashion worked means that there actually wouldn’t be too much real variety in cuts for a small slice of a time period until the modern ages.

I’m a fan of visual kei metal band Versailles, and their stage costumes take inspiration from the rococo era. I also decided to expand the timeframe I reference from into the 1700s, as well as take direct inspiration from Versailles costuming for some of the more glamorous looks.

Cyrille was fully designed in both versions by our assistant support writer SeraphKnight, who also created the character, and I just translated their designs to gba sprite format. The idea though is that Cyrille also wouldn’t be that fancy of a character so their promotion is reflected in the sum of smaller details–different hair, a gambeson jacket, slightly heavier armor.

Alexis generally kept his design from the 2010s, though I gave him a face update in 2023 after his character was written textually to be quite attractive but his old portraits face could not match. His original design honestly fit an Ondurite better than a Musai, but I chose to roll with it with the justification that as he’s escaping Musain to Onduris he’s looking to blend in with the locals. I figured that once joining up with Rena’s crew and that he’d likely promote closer to her return to Aukema, he wouldn’t really have any reason to keep wearing Ondurite dress. As a matching set design with Marie, I gave him a different hat and black/gold centric outfit that leans more on to his own cultural looks–alongside the mask, on oppsite side Marie’s. And when I mentioned Versailles costumes as another source of inspiration, his shirt is directly referenced from this:

I’m putting Seren and Fran’s together because I designed theirs as a set. Fran gains a feather pin on her sash of the same style but smaller as Seren’s helmet feathers, and Seren wears a sash that shares a pattern (may be hard to tell since rotated) as the sash Fran wears.

Individually I gave Seren some heavier armor and a haircut–figured that if I can make characters grow hair out, I can make characters cut off hair too. Fran gets heavier armor as a reference to her high defense stat in addition to bulkier arm muscles per previous comment with Crowe about Sniper con, as well as a 1700s tricorn hat, because I think tricorn hats are symbolic of the revolutionary spirit.

Jolyon’s portrait was one fully remade for, well, really I drew it in 2015 originally, but it has a pose that fit his character better than his original, and I especially want to channel the spirit of “Do You Hear The People Sing”. Jolyon’s got a very theatrical vibe to him in general, so with him I also took heavy inspiration from Versailles costuming, in particular this one, of Teru

I also gave him heavy glam makeup to further highlight the theatricality, and once I get to the Onduris section, the way his promo mug’s eye makeup is drawn mirrors the way Sileth’s, to also reflect their mirror roles in their respective routes.

Florent and Marin are also done as a set, and also visually ties into Jolyon’s design–both get military sashes with medals in their respective palettes, tied together with the colorful feathers. Each keeps their base armor (as armor is, still, expensive, and if you dont need an upgrade), but both also get more detailing on clothes, a switch to a cravat from a scarf and epaulettes for Florent, , and a fuller cape for Marin.

Rozelle’s point I branched out from was her Epithet of ‘Black Rose’, and from that point I added in matching visuals–heavier makeup (they didn’t let her have that in jail), a black lace shirt, and a different hairstyle. It’s a design that’s basically Roz but More but my hand died for it so hey?

Meliza’s design structure follows a lot of similar design elements I used for post c-14 Fleurre, so there’s the family connection, with a very ornate collar that, honestly, has more roots in 1500s Elizabethan styles but, it’s Musain and not Real 1700s France, so I’m free to take that liberty. Otherwise while detailed, the thought process is otherwise fairly simple.

Onduris

The original 2013 vision of Onduris just had 2 strongly defined elements–exaggerated collars and colorful flowing fabrics. Turns out that I didn’t want to draw exaggerated collars for every design as that became pretty limiting, but it is one of the [pick x] elements that i can draw from. In 2023’s revision Parr wrote in some spartan influences into the Onduris worldbuilding, and I also used that as a springboard to unify the Onduris Look. I studied Latin for many years in secondary school, and Grecoroman looks generally vibe well together, as one extends into another, so I took inspiration from Rome, as well, and finally the ‘colorful flowing fabrics aspect’ was really just me playing too many hours of Assassin’s Creed Revelation being stuck in my head–it was my first AC ever, and the visuals were beautiful especially for the time, so for that I also decided to directly draw from 1500s ottoman empire.

Onduris is probably, of the mainland countries, the set of visuals that I’m most proud of, and the mix of elements really comes into its own.

Mori’s unpromote design was mostly kept from the old days, since he’s a major character and his look was pretty defined. I ended up editing his unpromoted design for having a more fitting collar pattern and making the sleeves flow in a way that can be extended to a tunic like loose top–the full design of which is shown in one of the ending sketch CGs, though harder to tell with a portrait crop. Mori’s promoted design has also gone through a change–since his promo was designed fairly early on in the process, it was before I fully codified the full extent of onduris looks, and so I later edited it to have those roman leather flaps but on the armor itself, something I ended up repeating as an element in several other designs.

Sileth’s design IS made once I had a better idea of the full picture of Ondurite visuals and was designed with a roman tunic in mind, and the extension of that in promotion is a toga. She too have asymmetrical glam makeup, with the more heavily done eye on the opposite of jolyon’s in a similar but not same shape. Headband is inspired off a painting of an ottoman woman, and I repeated the pattern on her shoulderpiece.

Kahn got a redesign while I made the promo portraits entirely–I kept his hair, face, and cape, but while I was doing research I came across this armor—and I felt it just fits him.

it wasn’t quite fancy enough for a promo, and I didn’t really think his old design fitted all that well, so I fitted his base design to this armor, and then for his promotion I gave him a new hairstyle–symbolizing him cleaning up his act and Wren introducing him to real haircare if you actually got him to promotion, and the tiered pauldrons based off Roman designs.

Wren also got a full set of design update while I did this project as her old portrait looked too young for the age that she’s supposed to be at, so I just redid her design entirely but keeping the elements recognizable. In her case I want her to wear a Stola, and vestal priestesses was also just a vibe i kept in mind while redoing her design.

Nari’s base design came from a 2014 era sketch I had saved on my computer that I was fond of, and her promo was a Nari But More take because I think it just works with her. A bit more trim, More piercings and jewelry, and upgrading her armor to fit the multitier roman pauldron vibe.

Baldur I wanted to be a case of getting more to his person than his clothes kind of promotion. His clothes does have some subtle changes–an extra earring, a bigger and more beat up pauldron, and those off the shoulder tunics you’d see on Greek heroes—but the bigger difference with him is bulkier and more defined muscles, more scars, and slightly longer hair.

Shen’s look is in a similar vein to Meliza–though not quite for the same reason given that mir’Katal is not his family but someone he admires, but his promo was designed to take a lot of the same elements from mir’Katal’s post-14 look, though quite a bit more modestly. Still, I think a touch of the glam suits him.

These are all the Ondurites that promote, but I also did resprite most of the promoted units (as well as Nikita from Astra) to fit the aesthetic better, so as a whole it’s one of the more cohesive visuals Do5 has to offer.

Vishara

Vishara is really the start of my Assassin’s Creed influences in Do5, as I played the Ezio Trilogy sometime in '12-13 and was absolutely hooked, and came out wanting to turn all of Vishara into Renaissance Italy. Now Italy is pretty warm, and Vishara’s pretty cold, so I added furs on top of that. Parr’s writing influence for Vishara is Romania, with some Roman elements as well, so there’s also a sprinking of those influences whenever I can fit it.

Lizaveta’s baseline design is newly made by AstraLunaSol with my aesthetic guidelines, and she dresses particularly lightly compared to other Visharans since she was escaping her homeland. On her promotion, she takes a more full on Vishara Noblewoman look, furs and all, to symbolize that she’s done running away and she’s taking it up with her family.

Ioan’s design is newly made for the 2023 take after Epicer pointed out to me that his old mug was a splice, unacceptably. In this take I made him gruffier, but less generic than his previous design. As he’s fairly covered in armor, the clothing-based aesthetic notes doesn’t quite jump out as much, though the fur is fairly forefront. I did make the fabric of his shirt collar texture like something that could exist in the renaissance, the leather flap on the armor take roman inspiration shared with a few ondurite designs, and his coat under the fur collar is referenced from romanian traditional dress, just, mostly covered. For his promotion I figured an unfussy mercenary wouldn’t really do too much, so I just made him much hairier and gave him facepaint to look more menacing, as well as a few dents and scratches in his armor.

Arcus was kinda funny because we did use his portrait from the original rom which is much smaller, and I made a promoted portrait based off that. Then Astra came back and gave us his updated Arcus and, since Arcus is his direct contribution, that’s word of god. Now new Arcus base is already very ornate, so I had to go even more so for his promotion, he’s a lord after all, and also added a couple of unifying elements like a slightly ruffly shirt and the leather flaps. I included his unarmored design also to really tie in the renaissance-with-the-fur aesthetic, complete with the whole ‘have under layers show through with cuts in fabric to show you’re rich’ heavily characteristic of Renaissance clothing i forgot the term for and all.

As with other covered-in-armor characters there’s little room to show much clothes, though I did put her in a ruffle-collared shirt similar to the one arcus wears in his promo. Promoted design adds in the fur and a different hairstyle, but most notably, the eyepatch. Now, on a meta level, I gave her an eyepatch because they’re cool. Did she actually lose an eye? she could have, she’s a pretty gun-ho fighter who isn’t terribly cautious. Could she have just poked her eye with Lizaveta’s eyeliner out of curiosity and need to rest it for a month and just decided to keep it? Also possible. Did she just see Garath wear it and decided to take a hit to accuracy in order to up her intimidation? Also very possible—and we’ll leave it up to player interpretation here.

Xuanhe/Svanhild

Xuanhe is the part of Dream of Five I truly own, and as a Chinese person and a huge Wuxia fan, That’s the vibe I wanted to bring forth. While XH is heavily inspired by varying things in Chinese culture and history, and I’ve done a lot of historical research on my own for the basis of the worldbuilding, nevertheless I want to underline that XH isn’t Just Lifting China Wholesale and with that, I deliberately avoided pinpointing it to a particular dynasty for visuals and instead taking inspiration from Wuxia games, Dynasty Warriors, and various Wuxia and Xianxia CDramas I watch for the visuals. For one, it’s quite a lot less confucian than the real China is…

Out of the 3 playable, 4 on screen characters from Xuanhe in Do5, only one promotes.

Like Rozelle, they didn’t let Annelise have her makeup in jail.

Annelise’s promoted design isn’t a huge departure from her unpromoted design, mostly because Sev already did a spectacular job with the unpromoted that it’s hard to really go up much more from it. When me and Sakusa (Annelise’s creator, good friend of mine) were workshopping her character, however, we wanted her to be the most public-image-conscious (this is reflected in her volund supports) while secretly being a bit of a thug–this actually comes out quite a bit more forefront while during do5, as she’s stranded in a foreign land and mistreated on arrival, and the chip on her shoulder is full on display from that. So with her promotion I opted also for a more classically chinese-vibed makeup look and a bit of gold trim here or there, as well as adding a golden bird to her pauldron.

Now reference Thyra’s design:

In Chinese mythology there’s a set of four mythological creatures known as the Four Symbols. If you play GBF you may know them from RotB. Now the XH royal family’s symbols and, extending to Thyra as the heir and oldest, is the dragon, so by that extension, Thyra gets Qinglong. Annelise, as the flier, gets Zhuque, and thus the bird. Volund is Baihu, though that’s less reflected in his Do5 portrait crop itself (pretend it’s on his belt or something), and and Xuanwu’s a character entirely not in Do5 at all.

So yeah there’s the breakdown behind the design process for all promotion designs in Do5, hopefully it’s somewhat interesting, enjoy!

[BigMood]

@Parrhesia

This could be units, chapters, weapons, class systems, skills… whatever.

Little did Parrhesia know, he had made a big mistake.

Server 72 and the Construction of a Fictional MMO

I was once a humble man, toiling the fields of established Fire Emblem worldbuilding. Long had I plowed the grounds of lords and ladies, pegasus mercenaries, fighters with ripped sleeves, and other such staples. Wherefore did they spring forth? It was not my place to judge, for I saw what the people liked and grew it. However, one day, the eldritch tentacle of Lex Talionis touched me, and, as I became infused with its blighted energies, I began to desire to create something…worse.

Historicity, Meaning “Historical Authenticity”

I want you all to know that I googled whether or not “historicity” was a word. It is. Anyways, there is the perception that people always need to get their horseslayers in a twist about noble and commoner interactions or whatever in regards to the relatively narrow bands of European history that much fantasy fiction lifts its vibes from. The truth is, you don’t have to give a shit if you don’t want to. If you want to write Priscilla/Guy fanfic no one is stopping you. Why, then, should you give a shit? The most applicable reason for any hacker to care about historicity is if a lack thereof would make their players go “bruh why is there a gun”. There are other, nerdier reasons such as cultural erasure or the propagating of misinformation, but we’re hobbyist hackers so those fall under “you don’t have to give a shit”. However, if the player is disconcerted because your worldbuilding vibes are all fucked up, it’s over. You can get around this by leaning hard into it (yeah, uh, I have the fantasy nation of, uh, Guntopia, and they made 1911s using magic), but you can also just be accurate to real life and that more or less solves your issues without further thought.

Fortunately, most FEGBA players did not live centuries ago, so there’s less you have to be accurate about. It’s not like a hack would include a modern concept that most gamers would recognize and be familiar with on sight like-

…What’s with the blank stare? Oh, right, this is probably more your speed:

Anyway, as ironic as it seems, where you really need historicity is when you reference some shit that everyone knows because it exists in the modern day. As I embarked on the creation of Server 72, I had a thought in my mind: “Authors are shit at making fictional MMOs.” And if I was going to be shit too, I was at least going to go down fighting.

Sword Art Online Is Not Bad At This

A brief digression here before I get into MMO gameplay-specific objectionable tropes: SAO is fine. Would a normal MMO require several years to beat its base content? No. But, in SAO:

• There’s permadeath. Even without the “you die in Canada, you die in real life” part, character permadeath would definitely slow people.
• No access to the internet. Strat development is hampered immensely by a lack of omnipresent communication.
• Limited group. No fresh blood means no new talents/brains.
• People look and act like how they would in real life. This is a deterrent to completing anything.

The only ding I’d give SAO is for giving the person with the best reaction time unique access to dual wielding. That’s stupid.

Oh My God This New Guy Just Did A World First That No One Else Could Manage After X Months/Years

I started reading Shangri-La Frontier recently and it really dredged up my distaste for this trope. New strategies for various things are discovered by uninvolved parties with reasonable regularity: see the Boba skip, a Metal Gear Solid speedrun skip that was discovered by someone doing a blind, no-backseating playthrough over 20 years after the game’s initial release.

This is really not the case for base game-intended stuff. The people that intentional world-firsts are almost always the people actually online grinding it out, and for good reason: it’s something the devs intended to be done, and people are not that bad at video games. This holds true especially if the game is hugely popular, as the titular Shangri-La Frontier is. Yet despite there being 30 million active players, Joe Birdface gets on and does a whole bunch of world firsts because he’s good at shit games. Like, come on, people speedrun super mario minus levels, that’s not that unique. Stuff like this will be super apparent to any story consumer that’s played a game with progression of any sort, and is something I had in the back of my mind as I prepared to commit this exact sin.

This Guy Is Just So Much Better Than Anyone Else Holy Shit

This is real too. Like, putting aside the obvious example of real sports, we have shit like Faker in League: people with godly mechanics who, when others catch up, reveal they’re also just good at everything else about a game. However, due to the power fantasy nature prevalent in the genre, you get a lot of “guy picks up the game and turns out to be the dopest in town” (again, I’d just read Shangri-La Frontier recently). Generally speaking the freak of nature who’s better than everyone has also practiced a shitton and is better for a reason.

This extends to pretty much all gaming record subgenres but especially MMOs, where bizarre mechanics unique to certain levels more or less require people to grind hardcore to get world first clears, especially keeping in mind that MMO raids require large, coordinated groups of people who are all good at what they do. There’s not going to be some randos off the street that are just better than the top players with no practice, something I had in the back of my mind as I prepared to commit this exact sin.

Game Balance Is So Bad One Dude Solos

Shoutouts to Overgeared. If a popular MMO got to the point where one person was somehow able to be more jacked than an entire party, like, people would complain lmao. For one thing, that’s not really possible; MMOs don’t tend to have hyper-exclusive resources. Cosmetics, sure, but “only one of a thing that lets you solo bosses” would piss off the playerbase right quick, especially if it was actually used for competitive clears of content. The mystery of how such a game would maintain popularity is something I had in the back of my mind as I prepared to commit this exact sin.

Intended Content That’s Just Fucking Unplayable

Yeah OK real MMOs have done this before too. However, the devs, rightfully, get crapped on over it, and it’s not very common. And, eventually, it does get solved. Apparently the earliest successful Absolute Virtue attempt took 30 hours? Anyway, because an unbeatable MMO raid was the core conceit of Server 72, it was something I had in the back of my mind as I prepared to commit this exact sin.

Server 72 As A Believable MMO Experience: Extremely Humble Beginnings

One of the first things I did when making Server 72 (yeah, that’s right, we’re back on topic) was to make the map for the hardest level of the game. I wanted to do a variation of that “in medias res” shit that’s hip with the kids. Of course, it wasn’t actually that, it was just some party before the player party wiping out. Thus, I had to think about what would go into an endgame raid floor off the bat. This is what I came up with:

OK, yeah, that’s pretty bad, but it does fulfill the basic “MMO arena” vibe in that it’s, well, an arena. It has exactly one tile change, which is this:

This singular shitty tile change accounted for roughly 50% of the design consideration of this map. The other 50% will come later. Why did this tile change take up so much thought? Because it was crucial to implementing the sin of One Guy Doing World First. Going back to the Absolute Virtue fight in FFXI, the devs released a video of the dev team doing an “official clear” of the content at one point. Although it was later revealed that the video was complete bullshit (relying on zero-latency tricks only possible for the literal devs), it did put the idea into my head that one appropriate implementation of unbeatable MMO content would be, well, a really stupid puzzle. The exact width of these water tiles is positioned so that your melee units and tanks will get wiped out by AoEs before you’re able to reach the boss on the middle platform unless you utilize a very specific tactic.

Server 72 As A Believable MMO Experience: Intentionally Shit Balance

The sin of Game Balance So Bad One Dude Solos was not one that I particularly needed to tackle. After all, Fire Emblem is a game about many units, so there was no inherent need for an outlier power fantasy character. However, I had another problem I needed to solve: introducing a manner via which the main character’s hastily assembled party could do a world first. In short, I needed to tackle the sin of Better Than Everyone Else with no game experience.

Luckily, this one was built into the setting due to Server 72 being a sequel work. The universe of the game has magic, even in the “real world”, and that magical capability (as well as general personal capabilities) come into play in Server 72, as it’s a VRMMO. You see, SAO efficiently “made believable” the idea that your viewpoint scrub could be better than everyone else by rooting the game somewhat in the player character’s physical capabilities. Even if it’s still not perfectly reasonable, the idea that game mechanics mirror real life creates justification for one’s real life credentials transferring to a game they haven’t played. Thus, the Server 72 squad has a party consisting partly of people who are proficient at combat in real life, such as a retired assassin. Is this more realistic? Eh. But it’s more justifiable in the context of a game for newbies to be suddenly amazing.

From here, it was easy to have the game balance (in-universe) fall apart: dark magic is rare in-universe, so dark magic users benefit from a lack of kit testing. This led to “non-canon” solutions that the in-universe developers didn’t properly account for in regards to the boss fight puzzle, which is, of course, how I’ve explained away every solution I didn’t properly account for. If it’s related to a dark magic user, well, you know, there just weren’t that many. in real life, so there.

Server 72 As A Believable MMO Experience: Intended Content That’s Fucking Unplayable

Again, devs are not usually going to do this for any sort of “main story” content, at least not for any MMO that’s remotely successful. The believability of the setting would take a dip if Server 72’s raid was the main content of the MMO and no one had managed to crack it, but somehow it was still a big thing. Again, existing MMOs provided the answer: this was going to be optional content meant for tryhard goobers. As such, the raid experience of Server 72 became a small portion of the larger MMO experience that’s never actually interacted with in story, which is just a VRMMO with no stats where you play exactly as yourself. The main MMO is what remained wildly popular, while the Server 72 raid became a novelty with interest sustained largely by the rest of the content.

Now then, having justified it, there was one more step: actually making the level really hard. After all this, the MMO would still not be believable to the player if, well, the level was easy. Imagine being told it took several months for a world first clear of Sacred Stones Hard Mode. You’d laugh. You’d cry. You’d shit the pants of whatever liar told you that. I started to think about what would make a game like this feel difficult. The answer I arrived at was physical exhaustion. Although in the codifying example of SAO, VRMMO fully shuts you down, the characters still look like they’re exerting themselves. Existing VR similarly is still only at the point where you put on a headset; players still make the motions with their physical bodies. I figured that it’d be an easy sell that “the game is hard because it’s just harder to do things with your real body.”

But I could do better. What if I could physically exhaust the player?

This map took me roughly 50 turns in playtesting. I felt exhausted alright. Several players have been gatekept here, which, while I do feel bad about it, does add some narrative weight post-hoc.

Takeaways

If your medieval fantasy is anachronistic, there’s, like, passable odds that your loving playerbase won’t notice, or at least will let it slide. If your game about gamers doesn’t make gamer sense, you’re cooked, ‘cuz guess who’s playin’ that shit? Yeah, gamers.

[Ysor]

Uno, and his bullshit.

---

Hello, I’m Ysor. I have a unit in my game whose personal skill is as follows:

“Alright that’s broken” you might think, and you’re half right. He’s balanced in the sense that he’s only broken if you know what you’re doing(Who doesn’t love that). He used to actually be broken, I’ve had to change many things about both him and the game itself to achieve this “balance”. Something you’ll understand by the end of this. I hope.

Part 1: How it began

---

So, I’m gonna start somewhat from the beginning. The previous version of Uno wasn’t even really Uno. It all started when I began playing Fafnir is Smite(Stay with me). Specifically inspired from his passive.

The only important part of [Endless Greed] is that last bit about protections. Originally Uno was gonna be a tank but this was scrapped early on because The Lord was already the tank. Making the choice to make this skill offensive was maybe a bad idea but it’s too late now. With this idea in mind I started to code and with a lot of help from Sme was able to get it to work. albeit after a bit of trial and error

He only had 1000 gold

Part 2: Internal Works

---

This skill’s code is kinda nasty. I say this because it updates mid chapter.
Here is Uno and his stats with a basic inventory config

Here he is after a couple of fights with said basic inventory and…

Yeah so this is checking each item in his inventory and adding up its value PER USE so you can just lose stats if you’re not careful. The code uses the items value, not sale price. Its also +2 per 1000 so the numbers are cleaner. He can have wildly different stats depending on his inventory configuration. If you’ve played my game you know what I mean but for everyone else I’ll tell you guys a good and easy config for Uno

This in CH2 and pretty much turns Uno into Killing machine, also its important to note that the iron sword contributes nothing so he can use it freely. Inventory real estate is very fun and he can become a huge money sink if you want.

!

Of course doing this means other units lose out on good weapons but I digress.

Part 3: Uno, the actual unit

---

OK now with that context you can start to see the issues, he can kill everything super easy. But there use to be more issues. Ill go through all the big ones.

Problem	“Solution”	C
Uno used to be a myrm. His bonus speed made him so dodgy that he could never be hit.	Global avoid nerf, changes class to Merc as Myrms are exempt
After boosting weapon uses, he gained an absurd amount of bonus stats.	Price adjustments on all items in the game, keeping a close eye on custom item pricing
High value weapons,items tend to immediately go into his pocket.	Careful moderation of rewards to ensure proper tradeoff for such a choice, gems are now very rare.
Unmatched offenses, can pretty much kill anything regardless of weapon type.	Insane boost to weapon triangle(from vanilla to 2/15 to 5/20)
Legitimate competition between him and Jeigan for silver sword.	Creation of both Daggers and Jeigan PRF, both of which are unusable to Uno. Reduction of weapon EXP overall, rework to weapon exp acquisition. Complete removal of silver sword from prologue
Uno would, on occasion, level Str/Mag/Spd/Skl. Further improving his already cracked offenses	Massive Growth rate reduction to those stats. (From 30% → 15% → 5%)
Stat boosters vanilla costs made giving them out impossible	Stat boosters are worth almost nothing

Overall a lot of things have changed in this game because of him. I need to be conscious of every reward i hand out because it could end up in his hand. I need a chokehold on the economy to ensure the red menace doesn’t return. That said, I like fun. And uno is VERY fun to use. He’s also, unsurprisingly, a good unit. But like for other reasons beyond the money thing. Like his bulk being consistently on the upper-middle end of the roster, his high luck helps him avoid crits even without a PRF, fairly high con. He’s got other stuff, just nothing nearly as potent. Overall I’d say he’s one of the more wild units I have but he’s fun to use and my game has certainly grown with his inclusion. Thanks for reading, I’m gonna put out an update fairly soon so look forward to seeing him in action yourself!

[Goldblitzx]

Gasps
INTRODUCING MY MAGNUM OPUS YAPFEST – DESIGN ARC EFFORTPOST CHAPTER FIVE

Searching For Light & The Development of Narratives in Writing

Well actually before I start, here’s some music to set the mood.

Okay, Gold, what the hell is this? Asked nobody, but I’m here to explain!
I think it’s fairly obvious to say that every story told has themes to interpret and inform the narrative they are telling; but you see, my dear reader, I did not begin the development of my (as of now) work in progress hack nearly three years ago with any particular message or themes I wanted to get across to players. Take this as a warning that planning your hackroms is cool, but also that plans will change mid dev!

The Not So Great Start…

It was the Summer of 2022; that prior spring I had played at beaten Hajimari No Kiseki (Trails Into Reverie), and was massively inspired by its three-route story system, where each protagonist had their own unique “route” that all culminated in the end to tell one large story. I immediately began planning my next project.

However, what I didn’t plan was story. I rushed into planning a three-pronged story system without even knowing how to tell it! And it showed, early builds often had lightly written dialogue, units whose names and classes were references to popular media…

He was literally named after a Yakuza character without any thought to how that may shape the world.

I had decided at one point to tell a story of oppression, without understanding how to develop that idea. Most of the world-building was told entirely through text-box info dumps in chapter start events. The player never once actually sees any oppression in the story.

You get told information a la these screenshots.

The most I had in the hack to communicate the idea of oppression was a deflation in the stat sandbox – but even that didn’t come across properly; it moreso felt like deflation for the sake of having a smaller sandbox rather than showing the player that their units were struggling under the weight of a stronger force.

Al in all, it was not a great idea.

The Big Silence

By fall of that same year I had largely lost interest in developing SFL, partially due to being unsatisfied with the gameplay, but primarily due to my lack of care in storytelling. I didn’t know where to take the narrative.

During this time I largely contributed to other projects (such as doing portraits for TMGC, doing Dev-Work on Embers Entwined, etc.). But still, my media consumption did not slow down. Through the films, and novels I had absorbed during that period (largely historical in nature), I had wanted to write a story about the evolution of hatred through generations. This story already had better foundations in my planning than prior ideas. It reflected better in my world building — living in a post war setting leads to animosity and hatred from one group to others. Similar to that, I was observing hate grow in real life too; certain events that lead to a currently ongoing genocide had occurred in the middle-east, there was conflict in Europe, the American Right Wing had been slowly growing and encroaching on rights at a local and national level. Every piece of writing reflects part of the penman’s reality, as they say. (Not to compare the writing of my fangame of a 20 year old handheld tactics game to real life atrocities of course.)

Alas, this version was not meant to be. I had made the mistake of developing this version on buildfiles. I do not like developing on buildfiles, which I had quickly learned. I had been developing on FEBuilder for years at that point, and the learning curve was too much for me to want to get over. Progress floundered, not a single chapter was made.

I have no screenshots to show for this version.

Rekindled Flames

This now takes us to May-ish of last year. I had been discussing hacking with people in the Hackrom Overspill discord server, when I realized that I was getting the itch to work on Searching For Light again! I quickly appraised my plans, and got to work adjusting them to fit the new story and gameplay vision I wanted to sell.

But Madeline Goldblitzx, what changed? You might ask. Well, I’ll tell you!

In the period of time in between versions of SFL, I had gone through a very timulteous time with my family. I was (still am) incredibly upset at my father, and my mother wasn’t much better. It felt like they had both grown more hateful over time, and I couldn’t stand it.
Parallel to that, I had found new family in my friends from School Bands and other musical endeavors. My friends had pretty much become my actual family.

Incidentally, I also realized around that time that a majority of the major player in the hack’s cast are actually related through blood or other close ties. So the idea hit me: I wanted to write a story about family and bonds of love, viewed through the lens of group hatred.

And so after some further revisions; I had new fully formed plans. To start with, I added a new secondary protagonist, named Hitch. He’s a complete outsider who quickly finds himself thrust into Aizawa (renamed to Aidrian)'s close circle through events related to the hatred stoked by Aidrian’s decision to forge his family. He is a complete outsider, and through his perspective, the audience is meant to see how one who has been without love their entire life can find a place where they will feel that missing sensation; while through Aidrian’s perspective the players can find that no actions go without consequence, and navigating through that with the help of loved ones.

A chance meeting strikes the wheel of fate into motion once more…

Do not presume yourself a savior..

And currently, this version of the hack is still alive! I’m working on the sixth chapter?! Why is dev going so slowly?? But! Anyways, this new narrative is one I feel very strongly about telling, and I hope that others will enjoy it too!

As my English teachers would always say: Where’s the “So What” ?

To explain, they were referring to takeaways lol. There are a few things I wanted to communicate with this writing:

• First off: dear lord have a plan. I cannot stress how much knowing what you want to do with your hack helps to keep you motivated and on track. Please, just do it.
• Second: Writing is always going to have some level of reflection or impact from personal experiences. I’m not saying one should vent their frustrations with their writing, but generally personal passion projects have the heart of their creators on display. Don’t shrink away from this, only you can tell your stories.
• Third: Plans will change when hacking. Follow what your creativity tells you; you’re not beholden to anyone but yourself, after all.
• Lastly: Have some fun. If you want to name a unit after a food to the collective groans of about five total people, then do it! Wacky skills; go off. Once again, it’s your project!

Anyways that’s it, have a good one ya’ll!

[Rivian]

A Story of Ellerie, Skills and Powercreep in Romhack Development

Early players of Cerulean Crescent might know that almost every unit was buffed (some in absurd ways) less than a year before the first 1.0 release, totally shattering game balance and making CC a far easier game than ever before. Why should anyone care? Regardless, time to get on my soapbox.

Part 1: Man, I sure love powerful skills

Let’s set the scene a little. The nice thing about playing a lot of hacks is that you really get a feel for you like. What I liked was skills that made me feel really, really powerful.

Here is good ol’ Lex from SGW who gets galeforce at level 5, double lion at level 14 (I hope I got the numbers right) and becomes a 9 move monster. Broken? I just think’s he’s awesome.

Now let’s see the first dev build of the thing that became Cerulean Crescent. Meet our lord, Ellerie. She is a strength-focused lance user with supply and staff access. She has a skill. Pretty solid unit, I’d say.

The thing is, I wasn’t satisfied in the skill, and the lord, just being alright. I wanted the player to feel powerful. I wanted especially the lord to feel like the lynchpin of the army instead of some liability to drag around.

Part 2: Iterating on the Lord

So I changed the lord a lot. (The previous screenshot was of 2nd iteration Ellerie, I don’t have a copy of the very first.)

1. Daunt
   Giving everyone tons of low% crit made combat feel too volatile, especially if you’re trying to feed kills to someone with the jeigan.

2. Armoured Blow
   I think I just found it too boring.

3. Silent Pride and Frenzy
   I wanted the lord to have more of a support focused skill rather than improve her own combat ability, being a commander and all.

4. AoE Sleep
   See below.

5. AoE Sleep + Opportunist (for synergy, but with +10 dmg)
   AoE sleep felt way too easy to just stop any enemy without any kind of thought. (I would add way more broken stuff than this in the future)
   Also, opportunist felt too easy to apply with lances beyond just the sleep.

6. Summoner
   No idea why I didn’t go with this. Vibes maybe.

7. Lead by Example
   

   
   
   Now that’s a skill that supports allies, but also makes the lord quite centralizing. +10 dmg easily turns 2rkos into orkos and incentivizes the lord top get into the thick of it.

We did it, we have the skill.

“Ellerie kinda mid tho”
-Someone in late 2023 probably

I can see the argument for this.

• As development was up to ch20, Ellerie was still stuck as a 5 move footie for most of the game.
• The dominant units were mostly canto+ mounts (I love canto+ and I won’t let some silly thing like ‘balance’ deprive me of my only joy in life) who outpaced her.
• One round killing wasn’t uncommon past the early game.

One could argue her skill was fairly situational and perhaps not worth the hassle of setting up a lot of the time, but I think when it does matter it’s still a powerful skill to have regardless, saving turns by turning 2 round kills into 1 round kills.

I think if I had not given in to my darker desires and shipped the hack as it was, I probably would’ve been satisfied.

That did not happen. I was determined to make the lord the most centralizing thing since… I don’t know, something at the centre. But what could possibly be better than saving actions by turning 2 round kills into a one round kills?
How about just actual actions?

8. Lead by Example Part 2
   
   

This is an AoE dancer. You might be thinking, isn’t giving the first unit you have a skill that can give 1-4 additional actions per turn a really bad idea for balance when you are already 20 chapters into development?

Anyways, this is now an extremely centralizing unit. The gameplay now revolves around her. A fitting change story-wise, honestly. Ellerie is someone who makes everything revolve around her. Sounds some high school English essay bullshit? Maybe. But it was enough to keep me satisfied.

This was just the beginning of the floodgates of the absurd wave of buffs to come.

Part 3: Big Bullshit Balancing

Here’s the funny thing. I was running out of ways to buff infantry. I could slap a skill that says “does +20000 damage” and it would barely matter, because infantry killing things is a given.
What’s the next step? I look at Ellerie. More actions.

Let’s take a quick look at some units buffs after Ellerie became an AoE dancer.

• Dancer now gets an extra action after dancing (I really wanted to push the idea of the combat dancer)
• Mage prf for siege lunge now gives an extra action after lunging (3 uses per chapter)
• Archer got a prf that gives an extra action after kills (6 uses per chapter)
• Soldier got a prf that gives an extra action after attacking (4 uses per chapter)
• Cyclops got a prf that gives an extra action after attacking (3 uses per chapter)
• Halberdier got a skill that gives an extra action after rescuing/dropping
• Hero got a prf that gives an extra action after healing (5 uses per chapter)
• Both bards now get a skill that gives them an extra action after every third attack
• Dragon veins now give all give an extra action (don’t recall if this was before or after dancer Ellerie, but vaguely a similiar period)
• Lots of other unrelated buffs like armoured units getting canto+, landboat going from 3 to 8 move, but they’re not the focus

You might notice that almost no mounted unit got buffed in this list.
Canto+ would do that.

Part 4: Difficulty Dives Down

It was time to make corresponding changes to the previous chapters to account for these buffs.
Except I didn’t. Almost every chapter remained the same. Chapter 1 from the very first version of CC is almost exactly the same as chapter now.

What’s the impact?
On any turn, players now can now have an additonal 1-13 more actions (depending on Ellerie’s skill use, prf durability and if you have the extra action units fielded).
Even if you are to bench every single infantry mentioned earlier, you have at minimum Ellerie to plan around +1-4 and the dancer with +1 (you wouldn’t bench the ch1 combat dancer, would you?)

Even if the actual chapters barely changed, the gameplay flow of CC is unrecognizable from less than a year earlier.

Here is a classic CC formation, the “3 way dance plus galeforce (using a weapon)” which allows Ellerie to keep a little squad and herself going. This can happen every turn.

This massive mini-finale chapter, which was originally a brutal battle to test everything the player has learned from early game, can now be essentially cleaned up in less than 4 turns.

Hell of a new direction, isn’t it? There’s a few reasons why I’m fine with this new direction:

1. I love taking 10 billion actions in 1 turn.
2. My tastes in games in general have shifted to just wanting a chill time rather than something that takes 100% of my brain. Perhaps I’ve gotten more tired or lazier, but I just prefer games that let me have a smooth experience.
3. It plays like a FE of all time. (Thanks guys)
   
   
   
4. I’ve been informed by Fire Emblem super elitists that the “harder difficulty thrown together with tons of enemy autolevels and zero playtesting” is actually pretty legit. There’s still that if the hack is too easy I guess.

Part 5: What is the takeaway?

Option 1:
It’s okay to make stuff easy.

Option 2:
Throwing random shit at the wall sometimes works.

Option 3:
Rivian’s approach to design is the worst thing I’ve ever seen and he should be thrown into a pot of boiling oil.

Take your pick.

[PKLucky]

Cycle of Remorse’s Plot: How Creating Art is an Act of Self-Reflection

Art is a form of self-expression and with that comes vulnerability on the artist’s part to reveal an aspect of themselves that perhaps they have not shown to others before. Cycle of Remorse is the most recent example I have of this and is currently the project I hold most near and dear to my heart because of how much it shows myself as a person both in its original conception and its current state. With that said…

What do you mean it was originally gonna be a drawn-out sex joke?

I first came up with CoR back in 2018-ish. This was around the time I moved back to my hometown after dropping out of college due to mental health reasons and started streaming on YouTube again. And the game I decided to come back with? FE7. I was still very new to Fire Emblem as a whole with FE7 the only game in the series I’ve ever played at the time. I first played it in high school on an emulator on my phone during free periods but stopped my run for whatever reason. (I left off on Battle Before Dawn, but I don’t think that had any bearing on why I stopped. At least I don’t think so??) Then, I proceeded to finish the game for the first time on stream.

During that time, I came across LT-Maker (at least the version that we now know as its legacy version). ROM hacking was way too intimidating for me (and still is) so I figured that LT would be a good way to start making something FE-like. So with the help of my friends and viewers, we brainstormed a possible plot for my fangame.

Now, my sense of humor was (and still is) leaning towards sexual humor. If you’ve played through the first handful of chapters of CoR, you’ll notice that its suggestive humor is still very much present and I don’t plan on changing that anytime soon. But you know the tone of those few chapters? Imagine that lasting throughout the entire game. That was what CoR was originally gonna be like.

Like this but more.

Before its title was Cycle of Remorse, it was Ocean Crest and the Piercing Blade. The “Piercing Blade” was gonna be Krista’s late-game regalia weapon and the punchline of the sex joke. Yup, the player was going to play through possibly 20+ chapters just to get to a dick joke. And not even a good dick joke. But how exactly did we get from here to the game’s more serious story?

What a five year timeskip can do to a dude

Legacy LT-Maker was a doozy to work with so I decided to put CoR to the side until LT got more updates and possibly became more user-friendly. Cut to January 2023: I’ve been married for a little over a year and was starting to settle into being a housewife with little to no huge responsibilities other than maintaining the home. With all that free time, I downloaded LT-Maker and picked up work on CoR again.

A lot can happen in five years. Got married, moved out of my parents’ place, picked a new college major, dropped out again… There was a lot going on. Way more than what I’ve described here. I grew out of being the young sex-obsessed gremlin that I was in 2018 (for the most part). Life got serious and I mellowed out, and I think that’s reflected in the game’s plot progression if you compare the tone between pre Chapter 4 (the approximate chapter I initially ceased development) and post Chapter 5. From a silly romp to something that takes itself a bit more seriously.

Is that a Jojo reference?! (No, just me being inspired by music much like the great Hirohiko Araki also Jesus is there-)

I will say that me picking up CoR’s development again wasn’t an “Oh I have a project on the back burner” revelation. What kicked it off was me discovering the song Honey I’m Home by GHOST

Dex / Honey I'm Home [Original Song]

I love Vocaloid music a lot and it happened to pop up on my YouTube Recommended page one day. Its religious themes just clicked in my brain and inspired the major conflict in CoR, more specifically the motivations behind a certain character’s actions. (Can’t say which character because spoilers).

As someone who has fallen out of their faith a long time ago and is married to someone who is deeply devoted to theirs, the concept of religion and one’s reasons for practicing it weighed on my mind immensely, leading to these concepts intertwining with the game’s plot, raising it to something beyond just “haha sword equals dick” joke. That also led to me putting more thought into the gods and how their presence affected the culture of the game’s world.

* Listens to CoR OST * Why is Ervan’s theme THAT? (It makes sense, trust me)

The RPG Maker game OMORI is one of the biggest influences on how CoR is now. Its themes of trauma and loss resonated with me and were a huge influence on the plot especially concerning Krista’s personal conflicts in dealing with the loss of her fiance Ervan which definitely wasn’t present in the original conception of the game’s plot as you can imagine.

I will say that Krista losing Ervan was a planned plot point somewhat early on in development as a way to cope/reflect on a falling out with an old friend of mine that happened around the time of the game’s original conception. However, the exact details of that plot point were changed to what it is now (which I can’t discuss because spoilers.)

Haha and then what? a.k.a. Where do we go from here?

As of writing this, CoR has not reached that coveted [COMPLETE] status yet. I project that it will sometime in 2026, but I’m no psychic and anything can happen between then and now. Living life and experiencing more things may very well affect how CoR ends up in the future. So, what happens now? Who knows!

And the takeaways?

1. If you work on something long enough, you might find that as you’ve matured, the ideas you had mature alongside you. Don’t be afraid of changing things about your project if you feel that they aren’t reflective of what you find fun or interesting anymore.
2. Be open to finding inspiration in anything. You’ll never know what could be your next big muse.
3. Don’t take this as me saying you can’t have low-brow humor in your game. What you have in your project is ultimately what YOU want out of it. Do whatever the hell you want, I’m not your dad.

[Hatsuru]

The Happiest Sisyphus: a Story About Pure Will.

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There is an old saying that “Iron sharpens Iron” when it comes to learning from others. Unfortunately, I did not heed this call for much of Holoemblem’s development. This was especially troubling for a new romhacker, who rarely asked for help at the time.

The Search for Seiso begins
Development started during the pandemic. It was a mixture of playing Fire Emblem and watching vtubers was when I had the fantastic idea to implement them both into a game together.
Like any sane person would do, I hopped on Febuilder and started my journey.
Not knowing how to do anything, I thought the best approach would be to get some sprites going for myself.

Behold, my first two sprites. one being a Larum recolor and the other with the NPC Peg Knight.

The first Ame. Started from humble beginnings.
I eventually made enough sprites and started my first few maps.

Here is my very first map I have ever done. In the original story, Amelia would have a squad with her traveling through time and get stranded with her. The map has some obvious problems, but at the time, I was estatic at making a map.

Compared to the newer iterations, you can definitely see some similarities. Personally the evolution is always one of my favorite things to look back on. Amelia was warped in on the left map instead of walking out, but it was eventually cut in favor of the door.

Overall, the first iterations of S4S were consistent in learning the basics of febuilder. Most if not all of the eventing at the time was made from constant trial and error. In addition, community made assets made the early Ru very excited in wanting to try new things easily. However, this excitement only led to more problems in the future.

The Rock
What 2022 Ru did not see at the time was the fatal problem of FEBuilder; Each action takes up space in the rom. This meant one thing:

What I had thought was a finite (but large) amount of romspace became a smaller finite amount due to constant additions and changing of assets. This would also include the voicelines I wanted to add to 56+ members. Constantly updated the skillsystems version did not help my case either.

In short, I was running out of space, fast. And I had no other alternatives to stop the space expansion.
Until I learned of Rom Rebuilding.

Rom Rebuilding is a high risk, high reward function inside FEBuilder which as like what the name suggests, rebuilds your rom from scratch. This would alleviate the problem of the space. And I was right! Everything ran smoothly…the first few times. I had a large amount of space to work with, and I was content for the time being.

Then I ran out of space again due to the inability to choose which assets I wanted in the game.
I ran rebuild again, and lo and behold: many, and i mean, MANY, fatal errors

So, at this point I could choose to scrap Holoemblem altogether, or rebuild the rom manually from scratch again. You can probably guess what I had chosen.
Due to my poor planning, however, I still wanted to add so many things to the game. In a way, manual rebuild was probably my best move simply because I can add things/improve things as I went along! A blessing in disguise! The Search for Seiso continued!

and improvements I did:

Portraits

Arguably probably the most iconic version of Amelia from development. I had other versions at the time, but this was still easily the most Iconic version (and still remains one of my favorites to this day despite it being very crusty).

Rat, one being the unfinished (1st) attempt at a custom and her spliced version (that also appears in the final project). Can you tell that spriting is my passion?

My iterations of Rushia. Really proud of her new portrait to this day. Worked 3 days for her sprite and i’m very happy with how it turned out. She’s probably the only OG portrait that ended up in the final project.

Mumei’s custom is built like Number 1 from 9.

Fauna, who’s portrait I think wasn’t terrible, but it still needed much needed improvements.

---

These were some of the improvements I’ve done during the first rebuild.

First Rebuild. Yes, you saw that correctly. 2022 Ru was still very unsure of what to add and what else could be added to IMPROVE the experience altogether. But for the sake of finishing the story and adding more maps, I continued to experiment with FEB.

Until I had to FEB rebuild a 2nd time, in which all the patches I’ve added freaked out the rebuild again. Which then I had to manually import for the 2nd round. Around this time was when I wanted to pursue the Thracia style mechanics.

I eventually learned of custombuild and the POWER that could be added in Fire Emblem. With this in mind I wanted to learn custombuild so I can IMPLEMENT insane things like fatigue and rewarping and all of the crazy mechanics. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to learn much, and I had to use what I had. That’s okay! Limitations increase creativity! Learning how to do simple ID moving did a lot for me, and the 3rd copy will be the final one!

‘The Final One’ I said.

One Must Imagine Hatsuru Happy
As usual, my wonderful insight to attempt to add more mechanics only alluded to more romspace being taken up. In addition to more assets being imported and swapped around, I had to learn about what skills to add to INCREASE what I could do. This was the time of large map reworks and swashes of enemies being rearranged and added.

Here are some iterations of Chapter 5: Princess of Sweets

There’s many problems with these maps.

Because of reckless changing, I had to…guess? Yep, Rom rebuild again. Reimporting every little detail of the rom can do things to people. For me, it almost killed my drive to work on the project altogether. Somehow, I still pushed through and worked on it again.
One must imagine Hatsuru happy.
I eventually made it to the last copy (release rom). And I made a substantial amounts of edits and copies to a specific map(s).

Chapter 1 was originally two maps.

Changed World and The Forest. Originally I thought it would have been a neat idea to introduce Reine, then Fauna/Mumei. This was not the case simply because these maps are too linear. There is no real secondary objective and these maps can feel like a slog fest because of Faun/Moom’s hidden PRFs as well. The Forest felt more or less like a tower defense map more than anything, which really hurt the gameplay.

Other iterations tried to fix this problem, but I was still very unhappy with the progression of Chp 1 to Chp 2 with only 2 units. I then decided to just merge the two maps together.

Instead of a rout, you must escape while being able to recruit Mumei/Fauna as a side objective. It gave reason to want to travel to other parts of the map and it provided more units to work with early on. (It also gave space for a gaiden, which was added promptly after).

Now we have the release map that we know and love (or hate). As you can observe, the final map took a lot of elements from the two and merged into one. Being able to look back and make decisions like this was very helpful, especially with some maps like Chp 10 or 4, who had undergone a ton of revisions to feel playable.

Overall, S4S had a very troubled development. If you’ve TL:DR’d, then here are some things to remember:

Takeaways

• ALWAYS PLAN AHEAD
  Don’t be like me, set up spreadsheets and script for yourself. I promise it will help you in the long run

• DO NOT BE AFRAID TO ASK FOR HELP
  You will get so much more done and be able to understand more.

• IT’S OKAY TO REVISE WHEN NEEDED
  None of us are perfect, and going back to different chapters to change things up is so meaningful and leads to more cohesive progression.

• NEVER. GIVE. UP.
  I chose to still continue and push through all the headache and pain. If you can get over your self, everything else is a walk in the park

Despite all the flaws that S4S has, I’m still so unbelievably proud of the progress and evolution that this game has gone through (and my knowledge of how to make a fire emblem game). There’s a small breakdown of some of the revisions I’ve made over the years. I hope you enjoyed, and the Search for Seiso continues!

[luminescentblade]

Thyra: The Talon - Character Journey Through a Decade

I’m writing this post on Chinese New Years. Fittingly for the subject matter, but also ironically, as we’re leaving Year of the Dragon behind. Perhaps I should’ve written this yesterday as the send off to the Year of the Dragon, but it is what it is.

As my last post would indicate, I did significant work on Dream of Five’s visuals, both with taking full visual control in the Definitive Edition, and as a major contributing artist in the original 2010s version. Outside of visuals, however, I don’t have much input in how the characters are written–except four characters. Of the four, Kolbane is still mostly Parr’s, but I’ve had a number of inputs to his characterization in dev and draw him a lot, so I guess we split custody on that front. Annelise wasn’t originally mine, but was made closely with my characters as a set, and I’ve mostly taken to managing her direction these days. Volund is fully mine and I’ve done a fair bit of work on him, but he was made as Thyra’s supporting cast from the onset.

So that leaves Thyra herself.

Thyra is hard to miss if you’ve played through a good portion of Dream of Five. Notably intricate portrait, custom class, custom animation with extremely over-the-top crits, a shitload of stats, two personal weapons. And you can call that dev favoritism and you’d be damn right, because I didn’t draw 21 CGs and make 5 animation sets and I lost track of how many portraits for the character I put a decade’s worth of effort into developing to be lackluster. Especially since that would be poor character-gameplay integration, so I’m letting myself have this.

But she wasn’t always like that.

2010-2015 Era

A Brief History of Dream of Five

Dream of Five (2010-2015, FE7) has its origins as a forum community hack, in a similar vein to TLP. While many people submitted characters, eventually it came down to a small core group of people that included me, Parr, Astra, and a few others. Between us we wrangled the community submissions into something coherent, though ultimately as we graduated high school, and entered college, and grad school, it was clear that our free time was not enough for the ambition of our scope, and thus, Dream of Five (FE7) stopped development in 2015.

Thyra was my original contribution from all the way back in 2010.

A Little Background About Myself, For Context

I was born in China and grew up on stories like Journey to the West, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and Period Costume Dramas that involve martial arts. As a preteen, I got into Wuxia novels through watching the Heavenly Sword Dragon Sabre (2003) TV drama, and subsequently read the novel it’s based on, and that got me into the Wuxia genre as a whole. I was always drawn toward characters who are strong fighters. I loved swords for as long as I could remember.

But they never let the girl be the strongest.

In 2009 I got into Fire Emblem. Sometime soon after, I played FE4. Ayra’s introduction left a heavy impression on me. Many fighty female characters often had spirit, but not enough steel behind the fire. Ayra was different–her threat to Kinbois was plenty impactful as words, but she absolutely could back it up, given that she could kill most of your army one-on-one. She didn’t have a lot of dialogue–though she did have above curve for a FE4 character–but anything she did have, she made it count.

She was genuinely, insanely, cool, and to this day, she’s my favorite Fire Emblem Character. It’s been 15 years.

Dream of Once Again

So, of course, when I submitted a character to Dream of Five, I based her off Ayra.

I didn’t name her Thyra then, the character’s gone through a few renames, but those don’t matter too much. Just important to note that I named her that after a newly released FE character took the name I had given her and at that point her writing has diverged, I’m not that on the nose with my inspirations.

But, she did originally start off, as a level 4 Myrmidon.

original 2010 era design, spliced version on the left, my first full custom attempt ever on the right–Astra then made a cleaner version, and VampireElf after that. Vamp’s version was her first iteration in the rom.

I was 16 at the time when I made this. As you can tell, the outfit bears a lot of similarity to some of Ayra’s TCG looks, though I always was one for pants. There was an attempt at musculature, but this was early on in my 4-year anatomy grind, so my skill wasn’t there yet, but there was an attempt.

The early pitch of her character was also a princess in the guise of a mercenary, displaced for some reason I no longer remember. She joined where Driscoll does today, and Driscoll didn’t exist then. Her personality was very different at the time as well, as a 16 year old I had a more surface-level understanding of characters. I thought that because I wanted a strong woman she should also be hotheaded and swore a lot, even though when looking at her base inspiration, Ayra wasn’t really either of that–but maybe 16 year old me saw the Kinbois threat and just synthesized that out of many other fictional examples?

Bonus: T1-T2-T3 progression sketches, circa 2011, with a bonus halfbody sprite. This was never going into the game, I just liked designing. Some things haven’t changed.

Come 2012, through testing and user feedback, it was noted that earlygame player composition was too sword-heavy. After much discussion we decided to add Driscoll (who given the circumstances of this addition was not given a lot of thought in design, and was one of my earliest redesigns in 2023 as I was never truly happy with his 2012 portrait), and move Thyra to a later slot, changed to a prepromote.

So of course, I had to make a new portrait that fits her new role better.

At that point, I’ve started to at least move her palette away from the Ayra special, and started to add in some more explicitly Chinese elements into her design. Not quite all in yet, at this point, though. One will also note that I’ve gotten better at anatomy.

This is also when I started working on a personal animation for her–if you wonder why Thyra’s modern sword crit uses Swordmaster afterimage type stuff, it’s because the animation was from this era when she was actually a Swordmaster-type. I made a draft for her animation, Yeti took an interest in my draft and helped adjust a bunch of frames to make more sense, and that’s where her sword animation ultimately comes from.

V1 of the Thyra animation, dated to 2012 in my files.

Old Do5 Dev happened pretty slowly, and we did try to do a lot of polishing on the existing script during 2013-2014. Rewrites and the such. I took the opportunity to start revising her character at that point–At this point, I have realized that the original pitch for her was a child’s rudimentary understanding of what I truly wanted.

I decided to keep the basic background of unconventional princess posing as a mercenary, but I needed a better reason than just The Sword or whatever I had then. And, true to my sources, I also had a better understanding of Ayra’s character then, and that even subconsciously, the reason she stuck with me is, precisely, that her confidence was founded and she wasn’t really flying off the handle at the lightest offense. Despite the sword and martial prowess being a big part of her, it also wasn’t her sole driving force, and her character had facets that were impressively conveyed in about 15-20 lines of text. While I wasn’t thinking directly about Ayra at that point—I wanted Thyra to stand on her own by 2013, I still wanted to make her into the kind of character I really wanted to see–undeniably powerful and unapologetically cool, but multifaceted and her strength may draw people in but it cannot be the only thing she has. I also can’t just throw a bunch of hodge podge at the wall and just pretend it’ll work, so I got to work on putting together something that all makes sense as a package.

Of course, 2013 is about when I started to hit my stride in drawing the human figure. In part, I thank Araki for this. I’ve also decided to properly build out Thyra’s homeland to better develop her character. This is about when I started really wanting to make the do5 country visuals consistent, in general. So I got back to the drawing board with design also.

I decided to tap into what I know best–my own culture, and created a country that uses many Chinese elements. Notably I decided to capitalize on the many innovations through Chinese history, and made XH an engineering-heavy country. This also make sense to give ‘making random shit’ to her as a hobby, and with that, I came up with the idea of the 1-2 retractable chain sword of her own creation that later became Tianlong Jian. She needed a reason to be around Talis at all, so I made the whole trip intended to be a diplomatic mission gone wrong at sea. I wanted to keep her more down-to-the-ground-palling-with-commoner aspects, so I tapped into a good ol CDrama plotpoint that nevertheless, purportedly have roots in chinese history with particular emperors Kangxi and Qianlong, of the concept of 微服私訪, or incognito surveys, where emperors would dress up as commoners (in the popular cdrama huan zhu gege, qianlong and his entourage dressed up as a merchant family) and check how the people are doing without officials trying to dress it up pretty for the emperor coming. There’s some extra backstory I wrote, but those aren’t too important here—but as of 2015, after several rewrites, I finally made a character that I was happy with, both in design and characterization, just in time for Dream of Five itself to die.

the right side design ended up being pretty much the final design. As I became more confident in my art skills, I was able to properly actualize Thyra to a degree I truly wanted her. In 2015 I’ve gotten a fair bit of pushback on her design–it was a different time and not everyone was on board was having female characters be so buff. Women don’t realistically look like that! They cried. And humans also don’t realistically win fistfights with bears, but plenty of just as unrealistically buff men in fiction do that, don’t they? I don’t care for double standards.

2015-2023

I often thought about using her in something else between 2015-2023—I’ve spent this long making a character, only for it to go nowhere. I still did a bunch of refinements to her among friends, and thought of making her own comic series, possibly, but at that point, I started work, life got busy. There was a few years where I put out one full polished piece per year. The commute was pretty brutal, especially, and often drained my energy enough to do my hobbies. Despite this I did think of her from time to time and add a few pieces of characterization in my head anyway.

Then came 2020.

The pandemic messed a lot of things up, including parts of my life, but it did also bring a boon–I was fortunate enough to work for a company that realized no return to office = saving money on renting 2 floors of a manhattan building, and permanently went remote work in 2021, regardless of pandemic status. This cut out my previously long commute, and I have time to be creative again. I started drawing more and this opened me up to–

2023-2024

Dream of Definitive Edition

Long story short, Parr and I decided to revive Dream of Five in '23, and by FEE3 '23, released 0.1.0 that contained modernized content that went up to end of route split–the same as the public patch available on Serenes Forest. This means that my girl’s time was finally here, a decade later. She was slated for chapter 17 ever since the Driscoll jointime shift, and that has not changed. What has changed is that I needed to get a hell lot of graphics done again. I do at least have her portrait done, but the animation made all the way back in 2012, and her design has changed a lot since then, so while I can largely reuse the motions themselves, I’d have to remake the whole animation.

I feared I’d be rusty with my pixel art, but I got back into the groove of things fast enough. Once I made a few frames of the new version of the animation, I thought, hey, this isn’t so bad, maybe I could make her punch something too! So I pitched the idea to Parr, he agreed to it, I pitched the inf use low mt secondary prf and he came up with the lancereaver aspect. Teamwork.

The Impact of Yakuza

In 2022 I got into Yakuza, and Kiryu and Majima quickly became some of my favorite characters in all fiction. In 2023 when I was organizing a bunch of my existing character notes for Thyra for the revival, I noticed that even long prior to playing Yakuza I ended up writing a character with a number of accidental similarities. A funny coincidence–but goes to show that I have achieved ‘write exactly the character I want to see’.

While any characterizing similarities is largely accidental, I did take some graphical inspiration from Yakuza, in the end. Yakuza Gaiden came out Nov 9, 2023, and prior to that I was on a month-long grind to finish Rena’s promotion animation so I can finish before the game comes out so I don’t have to think about that animation (ptsd inducing, still) while playing the game.

The second I finished Yakuza Gaiden steam platinum, I got back to work on Thyra immediately.

Turns out Kiryu is an animation goldmine.

Originally I wasn’t intending to reference Yakuza for the fist animation. Between my own knowledge of martial arts and a wide range of martial arts media to reference on, I had a few other plans that I’ve put aside so I could work on Rena nonstop, one of which was infeasible in the gba engine anyway—I originally wanted Thyra’s fist crit for her to just pick up the enemy wholesale and jump up and then skydunk them, until I realized that would involve enemy sprite interaction and that would be, difficult, but while spamming Essence of the Dragon God in Yakuza Gaiden and having a blast, I realized that’s exactly what I wanted. Kiryu’s fighting style matched what I wanted for her well–as I intended her to combine immense raw strength and the high technical skill of an experienced martial artist, rather than a pure brute force fighter.

And then for the style points I went all out with it. Heat action flare, shirt rip, tattoo flash, the text done in the same style as Yakuza 0 Total Domination, and even the return is referenced off of Majima’s breaker style. I did end up just coming up with my own movement for the regular, as I looked through the basic combos and they’d still be too long for a regular attack’s worth of speed, but I did look at a different majima animation (from mad dog this time) for the return flip as well.

The result is this.
I finished this full set of animation in about two and a half weeks. The power of motivation.

Gameplay

Soon, we started work on chapter 17, and with that, Thyra’s gameplay needed to be real. I made her growths, Parr made her bases. We started workshopping Tianlong Jian’s stats and came up with high mt baseline with a stat decrease at range to reduce 1-2 juggernauting but still keep the chain 1-2 aspect of the design and encourage thoughtful use of the 2range, but as we don’t use skillsys, a conditional stat change isn’t exactly straightforward to do.

But hey, my day job is programming.

With contro’s help, I set up mohka’s decomp on to my computer, as lyn.event outputs are pretty builder-insertible, and got to work. This also led to me making a bunch of other custom code for Do5 down the line with the system set up–swordmaster avo, custom exp formula, 100% silence, to name a few.

The first iteration of her bases actually ended up pretty underwhelming—they looked fine on paper, but Do5 enemies actually scale up pretty quickly, and with that I pushed for some buffs–I think gameplay-character integration is important, and if her dialogue indicates her strength, but gameplay doesn’t, there’s a disconnect. As she is a monosword class and not mounted, we figured giving her just overwhelmingly high stats wouldn’t break the game–but there’s still a balance to be struck. Due to story demands there was a number of bulky strong sword users that all join in quick succession, and there needed to be care taken to give the rest of them enough differentiating niches, so there was only so much room to push stats. Thyra also still needed to have some unit drawbacks—while there is a few units in Do5 that falls under “good at every stat that matters” they’re often early joiners that are susceptible to the whims of the RNG, while you get Thyra’s stats for free. Her speed’s kept at a middling level mostly for this reason, though her other major, and quite notable weakness, is another element of gameplay-story integration.

As mentioned earlier, I made Xuanhe into an engineering/tech focused country based on China’s historical innovations. On the flipside, and mentioned in Annelise/Rozelle, grasp of magic has largely eluded them. Both Thyra and Volund don’t have much res, and Annelise’s is quite a bit lower than Eilene’s, justified by the bulk of her res coming from the pegasus. Nuking Thyra’s res completely down to 0 to justify her other stats both serves as balancing and lore-compliant, as the leading representative of her country.

I’m happy with what we finalized her at in version [complete]. Feels like a decade of work paid off for real.

Takeaway:

• When you want things done right, do it yourself
• Sometimes yourself of 5 years ago won’t do it right either. It’s ok, the you of 5 years later will do it better.
• Thus follows that even if your project takes longer than you planned to finish, this can be a good thing.

[cordatumcape]

Drawing Credits CGs for The Morrow's Golden Country

This post will be discussing assets I’ve made for Fire Emblem: The Morrow’s Golden Country. That hack was, of course, developed by Retina—I’ll just be talking about the process that went into the CGs I drew for it.

So! Back in the beginning of February 2025, I offered to do some CGs for Retina’s projects since—hey, FE:TMGC got me back into Fire Emblem, also got me back into making fanart, and is very dear to me because of that. When this took place, TMGC had the following CGs for the credits sequence: Elcorian, Blair fighting Lazarus, and Blair with Apex Valkyrie Arin. There’s also the Blair CG with falling flowers, but that one isn’t something most players will see due to its requirements.

Lots of Blair, and that makes sense; main girl and main lord.

As a result of this, though, CGs were needed for the other two lords: Zeke and Viridian.

…A fact that is perhaps immediately noticeable to anyone that’s spoken to me about FE:TMGC for longer than a minute, though: I love Viridian. Why wouldn’t I? They’re green, bow/staff, and are in-general one of my favorite character archetypes. Perfect recipe for a favorite character right there.

I love Zeke’s design a ton as well, and he was one of my favorite units to use in lategame; needless to say, I was pretty damn excited to make art of these two.

There were also a number of things to keep in mind while planning the CGs. First and foremost was that they would be compressed upon being inserted; second, of course, was that the GBA has inherent color limitations. While the gallery can use 220 colors, the actual credits that most people would see would use only 64. This meant that whatever I had planned had to have legible posing, colors, and as a personal goal, conveys the characters’ arcs and endings. These are the credit CGs, after all!

…But because of that, this entire post will have spoilers for the entirety of FE:TMGC. Appropriate spoilers are hidden, of course, but just keep that in mind.

General setup

Initially, there wasn’t a lot of cohesion between Viridian and Zeke’s CGs. At first, I was going to depict scenes from the game, kind of like the Blair vs. Lazarus CG.

Viridian’s would either be them at the campfire during CHV4x, or their final salute before the battle of CHV5. My friend Dragz pretty immediately advised against these, as these would both involve too many characters and also caused me to realize that this would eat up color space, so it was back to the drawing board for that.

Then, I remembered LuminescentBlade’s Blair CG; the very same that you see right at the download page for TMGC. I am a known nerd for botany and floriography, so I realized I could have the other two lords’ CGs incorporate foliage to give them all some cohesion.

So, some initial concept art for the composition:

Composition concept art

As a note, I have become quite the sketchbook fiend in the beginning of 2025. “It’s only March, Hiraya,” you say. Yep. Still applies. You can thank some gifts I received last holiday season for that. Anyway, because of that, a lot of the concept art you’ll see here will be traditional.

For Viridian

Viridian’s CG came pretty immediately: them asleep in a field of grass and clovers, finally at peace. I also wanted their hands to be in view, clasped over their hat atop their chest like one would see at a funeral.

Viridian CG wip

This in mind, I cracked open my plant books and searched for fitting flowers: besides clovers (good luck, industry, “think of me”), I knew that I wanted to include forget-me-nots (“forget me not”), and snowdrops (hope in adversity). Later on, I incorporated white locust flowers (affection beyond the grave, platonic love) and rosemary (remembrance).

I also wanted to include marigold flowers because of their significance to Dia de los Muertos and All Souls’ Day, but then saw that 1. marigolds mean cruelty and jealousy in flower language and 2. unfortunately, including them messed up color compression a lot. As in, the in-game result made Viridian look like they were frowning. That obviously couldn’t stand, so I nixed those last-minute.

Inspirations: Frieren: Beyond Journey's End and Octopath Traveler II

Now, in terms of just… vibes, there were two other works that came to mind for inspiration. I adore Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End for a lot of reasons, and if there was anything that would help keep the gears turning, it would be keeping in mind this series’ composition, colors, and how those are used to set the mood. I remember I had a lot of fun gathering fanart for vibes reference.

For OT2, this was mostly for… abstract reasons? Just keeping in mind how this game conveyed remembrance and grief, specifically with Castti and Malaya. I remember I looped the former’s theme a lot.

Step 2: Paint the rest of the Viridian

The actual process of painting the Viridian CG was, uh… a lot of grass. Initially I tried to put a lot of detail into it, but then I realized it wouldn’t look great compressed, so I painted over almost all of it… Looking over the speedpaint footage made me cringe only a little when it got to that part.

I also had to get my sister to take a reference photo of me lying down so I’d know how to position Viridian’s fingers. I don’t own a hat quite like theirs, but we do own a cowboy hat so that was a fine enough substitute.

Viridian was undoubtedly the easiest part of this. Not only do I draw them often as is, but this was also only a little after CYL Viridian was finished, so I was already super familiar with their design. When giving feedback on Levin’s new mug for Viridian, I remember Gold mentioned she gave Viridian eyebags in their previous look, so I made sure to include them. It also adds to the “finally resting” vibe I was going for.

Oh, and I also ended up accidentally (“accidentally”) making the flowers trans colored, so that’s a win.

The Hero Rests

Rest well, Viridian.

For Zeke

With Zeke, I wanted to focus on him abdicating the throne and his title as a prince. From the start, I wanted his CG to foil the Blair one Lumi did: rather than have his back to the audience like Blair, Zeke’s face would be visible; similarly, to contrast Viridian, Zeke would be facing the opposite direction, to the right.

Zeke concept art

Initially, he was just going to be seen taking off his crown and looking off into the distance, flower petals flying in the wind. Though, even with the flower petals this still felt too… static for me? I also didn’t like his face looking to the right, it just didn’t fit. Similarly, when he was looking to the left, I think I was worried about people misinterpreting this as Zeke focusing on his past mistakes.

So it was back to the drawing board. I also wanted this to have more motion, so maybe another prop would help.

Inspiration: Revue Starlight: Gekijouban

Hey, so Revue Starlight is a really good anime. Downright gorgeous compositions on top of an amazing story. It also had a movie a few years ago, this time focusing on the main characters graduating and moving on from the narrative.

You may be wondering why I’m talking about this. The thing is, Revue Starlight loves its symbolism, especially Gekijouban. In the ending, the characters take off their capes—symbols of their status as performers and rivals, something they have to protect in duels—as a way to represent them graduating: moving on from this stage, and into the next stage of their lives.

This was perfect for Zeke. I could use his cape from his T1 design as a prop, have him be shown having thrown it off to demonstrate him abdicating while he holds his crown in his free hand. Having Zeke be in motion, mid-step as he walks off-screen, also conveys that he is looking to the future while not forgetting his past.

Full-body designs

One thing about doing CGs, though, is that these characters are usually only shown from the bust up. Because of this, I also had to design Zeke’s full outfit; technically, I had to do this for Viridian as well, but they didn’t need much beyond what their mug shows.

Lineup (Still spoilers!)

Note: Character heights depicted here are in accordance with their respective designers/editors.

Zeke’s design was heavily inspired by FE15’s character designs; namely, Celica and Clive’s. It added perfectly to the regal look I had to go for, and I added little tassels at the end of his cape to make it look more elaborate. This design got Gold’s approval, so with that, we were good to go.

Graduation

The background for Zeke’s CG was plain white, as it was supposed to foil Lumi’s Blair CG. Because of this, everything else was smooth sailing. Just had to make sure the values conveyed distance between Zeke and his cape, along with having good rhythm and spacing for the falling flower petals.

The Prince Departs

The yellow flowers in Zeke’s ending CG are coronilla: “Success shall crown your wishes.”

For Tomorrow

This is the part of the post that looks like a confidential government document.

Right, we got a third one. This CG was going to feature a major supporting character, and while talking about this, Retina mentioned two things: First, that there was a chance there would be an Ethyl CG. Second, that among the major supporting characters listed, Retina had mentioned Kenneth and Freddric. In other words, two of my favorite characters. Ethyl being brought up also made me realize that—counting the Elcorian, Lazarus, and upcoming Girard CG—Tarquin would be the only major antagonist that didn’t have a CG.

So I wanted to kill two birds with one stone: Have one of the two fight Tarquin. They both have boss dialogue with him, so it works out perfectly. Ultimately, though, as much as I love both of them I knew that who would get the CG would boil down to what would be easiest.

But uh, I really hate drawing foot units fighting flying units. It is a certified pain in the butt to figure out positioning for that. So, I was already leaning towards Freddric with composition ideas in mind, but was still worried about committing to him since he is a Viridian Mercenary. As a result, I was concerned about canonizing one of the scout choices, even when I knew this idea I had—that is, Freddric fighting Tarquin with the Soulbow—would be amazing to try.

Luckily, Retina reassured me with how the Blair and Arin CG isn’t necessarily canon either; not everyone would have Blair romance Arin, and not everyone would get Arin’s secret promotion. …Including me, oops.

Retina also said it’d be funny since this would be the only in-game hint Freddric could use the Soulbow. So true.

Also while fretting about who to pick, this happened:

The one time rolling a d20 has treated me well

I joked to friends about this. “Viridian seeing me fret over what to draw giving me a Nat 20 like, ‘dude just commit at that point’”, lol.

Full-body designs, pt. 2

Freddric was designed by Gold, while Tarquin was a F2E mug touched up by Levin, so whatever full-body designs I cooked would be shown to them for approval. Tarquin was easy enough, mostly just needed to expand on his design while using some colors/motifs from Kenneth’s sprites.

Freddric, though.

[REDACTED] concept art and design process

Freddric took—and I kid you not—three rounds of design iterations. When I draw Freddric for fanart, I usually take from his in-combat sprite; but for his CG, I would have to (of course) keep to elements in his main design, that for his mug.

In the end, Freddric’s full-body design mostly took from Gerome (FE13) when it came to his breastplate; but for the rest of his fit, I actually took most from Conrad (FE15). Yoinked how a lot of his outfit was visibly also made to withstand the cold and added fur trim to Freddric’s blue gloves. Later on, I made the ends of his scarf visible to show a fur trim for good measure.

So, these are our designs:

Tarquin got a second design as a deadlord/simulacrum, based on some feedback from Zappy. A lot of this didn’t make it into the final CG, though—because uh, I was worried about his design still looking legible once the color compression hit and didn’t want to add more main colors than I was already using.

I did keep the zombie eyes, though, along with adding some tears to his cape. In the concept art, the idea was that a lot of his armor would be burnt to imply Kenneth had killed the original Tarquin.

Wyverns are really difficult

Oh yeah, this CG technically has four characters: Freddric, Tarquin, and their wyverns. For the sake of shorthand, Freddric’s wyvern will be referred to as Beryl (her canon name, see: Postgame Tales), and Tarquin’s will be referred to as Cypselus. Cypselus is not a canon name, I want to make that clear—I literally just needed to name his wyvern anything so I didn’t keep writing “Tarquin’s Wyvern” all over my notes.

Anyway, while preparing to draw the CG, I drew… a lot of dragons. This included just studying how Switch FE modeled them, watching HTTYD (you know, super important and vital research), and doing studies of dinosaurs and GoT/HotD dragons as well.

It… really did not make much of a difference in the end, but I did jot down ideas for how the two wyverns differed build-wise. Again, strictly non-canon, but mostly for flavor to show that these characters are both from different countries and under different affiliations. This was also back when I thought I would be drawing the CG more zoomed out.

CG 3 composition thumbnails

That’s the thing about drawing wyverns. You have to account for so many references, or at least I do: when drawing combat, I reference horseback combat videos; when drawing their bodies and heads, I reference dinosaurs or crocodiles; when drawing their wings, I look at bats; and in initial composition sketches, I looked at photos of hawks or eagles fighting each other in mid-air.

Anyway, Beryl was designed to be larger and more lithe than Cypselus. Her wings were designed to have a higher AR for longer flight duration, while Cypselus was designed to be bulkier, with wings that had a lower AR for navigating crowded spaces.

Their armor was easy to design; again, just expanding on their respective masters’ armor shapes. However, both Beryl and Cypselus also wear banners on their flanks to depict their respective affiliations: the Viridian Mercenaries and Dalst. …Cypselus’ didn’t make it in, but still.

Wyvern concept art

The little symbols on them are also seen in Freddric and Tarquin’s designs. The Viridian Mercenaries’ banner is a clover with an arrow through it, while Dalst’s was supposed to be a moon.

One more thing about the wyverns, though, is that they have different ways to be ‘steered’. For flavor. Cypselus uses reins, but Beryl doesn’t. It felt fitting, especially given Postgame Tales stuff, that Freddric just has that level of trust and understanding with his wyvern. …I almost forgot to include this in the final render, super glad I didn’t.

Weapon design

yeah this one just needs an entire spoiler section

I also did a design for the Soulbow! I’m a sucker for magical bows, and the way that FE14 animated the Fujin Yumi is still very beautiful to me. Again, this is for flavor—so, this is not canon—but I had it so that the magical drawstring on the Soulbow only manifests for those who can wield it: Zeke, Valeria, Clarque, and of course, Freddric.

Seasoning and Flavor

While the scene depicted in the final CG was more… “grounded” than Viridian and Zeke’s, I still had worked in quite a lot of symbolism, as I am often wont to do.

CG 3 wip

First of all, Freddric’s attack with the Soulbow. While his canon animation in-game is a simple flourish of the arrow, here, the arrows are manifested from the Soulbow itself—just as the drawstring is. I also wanted to make sure the CG showed Freddric winning the fight, not just attacking Tarquin.

Thus, enters one of my favorite ideas for the three CGs I did: reference Viridian’s critical hit animation. Have Freddric fire three arrows with unnatural speed and skill, and show them already having pierced Tarquin through his vitals.

I also wanted to convey a feeling of an ambush, and while looking stuff up I learned that when airplanes or animals fly through clouds, the shape of their wings combined with the speed of their flight causes wingtip vortices to form at the point of origin. That was perfect for what I was going for, so I made the clouds form a vortex around Freddric and Beryl to convey how swiftly they attacked Tarquin and Cypselus.

For the stars in the background, they are (vaguely, very vaguely) based on a star map of the Aquarius constellation because its two brightest stars, Sadalmelik and Sadalsuud, mean “the lucky stars of the king” and the “luck of lucks” in Arabic, respectively (Britannica).

You can also see some glowing wisps throughout the piece, some hidden in the clouds, but one right by Freddric’s chest. Ten of them, actually. These were to represent the ten fallen Viridian Mercenaries, as I couldn’t show who else lived or died in this scenario. Besides the light from the Soulbow, these wisps have the brightest values. I had also created a gradient map to be used on the credits version of the CG, both to consolidate colors a bit, and to ensure what I wanted to stand out, really stood out.

CG 3 (credits vers.)

Freddric’s expression in the CG is conveyed only through his eyes. This was because I knew that whatever part of his mouth I drew, it wouldn’t be legible in-game, but also because I wanted how utterly vindictive Freddric feels right now to come across. The reference that I used for his hand also had the archer’s fingers in kind of a pointing position, something that I committed to because I felt like it really added to Freddric’s energy here.

The humans in this piece were undoubtedly the most rendered. The wyverns mostly had Multiply and Overlay layers used, since most people would not see the finer details—much less any funky painting stuff I pulled—in-game.

Now, because of the deeply spoilery nature of CG 3, the full version will also be hidden under a spoiler toggle.

CG 3 (gallery vers.)

Good Riddance

The Freddric vs. Tarquin CG was undoubtedly the most complex, but I had tons of fun doing it. I’m also quite proud—and deservedly so, mind—of my composition and the sheer amount of characterization fit in.

Takeaways

• Don’t get too wrapped up in small details, that’s how you end up painting over lots of grass that’s gonna get compressed anyway.
• When you put love and effort into something, that WILL come across. I was so happy when people noticed little details and understood what I wanted to convey in my composition. I guarantee it that people will engage and notice stuff about the things you create.
• …For goodness’ sake, plan the main entities in a piece. A big reason why CG 3 went smoothly was because I had the foresight to plan everyone’s designs before jumping in, even if a lot of stuff didn’t make the final cut.

A big shoutout to Lumi for her guidance and advice on CG art, and of course, many thanks to Retina for having me! It was a joy to work on these CGs, and you should be able to see them in a future patch coming up soon. That being said, thank you for reading!

[SubwayBossEmmett]

Today I’d like to take my own crack at an effort post on design arcs.

I’m going to be talking about more or less like the mindset for how I’ve learned to hack vs what I thought I needed to do when I hacked. Originally I tried typing something out that was a lot more specific to my hack and funny takeaways I had, but I realize how many could be generalized to a much more applicable scale instead of “niche interactions I had to adapt to”

For context my hack can be reduced to a gimmicky double dancer FE6 fanfic hack (I am working with fe8 thankfully), but that’s not the focus of this design arc. These thoughts are ideals I believe can be transferred to anyone.

1. You ultimately don’t know what your project is going to end up as

Originally, my hack was supposed to be a mini hack. It was going to teach me the ropes prevent me from learning to mugging which I used to be scared for a bit longer. (Side note I still learned how to mug, it is just a very good skill to know regardless if you want to mostly use F2Us or whatever to fix frames or tweak something for an alt scene)

However, I realized I had stumbled into a unique circumstance that had capability of using such a large cast to my benefit. The ability to have an infinite move lord almost needs a large cast to justify not skipping side objectives. So I leaned into this. It took shape into something I didn’t intend, and had to sit down and plan out and restructure a lot of things.

Not to mention, I turned my jagen into someone I planned to be written out by the end of the 6th map into the deuteragonist of the plot. It took soul-searching and backtracking in my writing… it made everything else better than someone occasional chiming into the plot but isn’t allowed to advance it because they could be dead. I do not regret it for a second.

Am I perhaps less planned and more free formed than other hackers? I presume so. However, I don’t think that should take away from the idea you need to religiously stick to your guideline. Your guideline can always be revised.

Never throw out a good idea because it might be tedious. You may just regret it for ages otherwise.

2. Taking vs Adapting isn’t a 1 to 1 process

When I started Ballad of the Bard I knew my system was messed up. Not because my hack is designed around two dancers, but because I had process’d of eliminated my way into having a somewhat speedy combat jagen that dodgetanked too well by having access to two weapon types.

In my head, I went to think how Four Kings (the first hack I had beaten and used as a reference frequently) handled this for the most part by giving everyone +5 skill and strength bases to roughly every class to help check it’s rogue jagen. When I started out, I only knew how to think in black and white terms of what I did and didn’t want out of another hack. This absolutely was a good short term idea for both reliable hit rates and threatening combat to the combat footie jagen. (Almost more centralizing than the bardtrain mechanic, but that’s not the focus here.)

Only after like over a solid year into my hack did I realize that these systems have their own strengths and weaknesses specific to the context of their source material. Four Kings is a unique hack that has a very unique midgame where the progression of your player units and enemies slow down massively due to the route split having you jump back and forth between totally separate armies. This format struggles under more traditional enemy scaling.

So ultimately, I reverted and tweaked a lot of class bases to accommodate my needs instead. I buffed weapon hit rates and nerfed the avoid formula as well because I realized for this fangame. I wanted a very reliable setting to prevent my fragile lords from being punished from a miss. The point is that I could have done anything only by realizing what I want out of my hack.

I think every hack is such a specific amalgamation of context that I think saying “this will never work” or “this is always a great addition” can be a bit of a misnomer if you can make it benefit other systems in place or if it goes against a core idea of your game.

3. Do not stop taking in forms of inspiration

This is ultimately a follow-up to points 1 and 2, but I think it still needs to be said.

Play other hacks, super polished [COMPLETE] projects, someone’s first ever short demo and everything in between.

This can def extend to more than just hacks obviously, to become a fire emblem romhacker you do not need to forsake every other form of media out there. I do think however, contrasting yourself primarily to other fire emblem fangames (or mainline games you aren’t super familar with) can help you think critically about how things are done in another project and how you want to adapt or avoid that. Once you’re more familiar with hacking you can def go further at being more ambitious for stripping away or questioning what is like “Fire Emblem”. Shoutouts Sigmaraven’s S72 + Dies and KrashBoomBang’s Dream Spirit.

Not to say. “Obviously throw out everything because you saw how [insert popular hack here] handled [weapon usage] and decide your hack’s entire weapon design philosophy suddenly needs to be uprooted from scratch to accommodate this system.” I personally believe having an open mind that your structure isn’t 100% unchanging until you decide the hack is [Complete] and you might discover something that helps tie together a lot of concepts you already were working on.

4. Asking for help is a great thing

On surface this is a very obvious thing because:

“Duh yeah it helps your project get finished!”

But no, being open to receiving help and eventually paying it back is sincerely how I started some extremely close friends who have gone on to shape a lot of my hack/how I think of hacking.

If you take the time to ask for help and get those who do play your hack, help clean up a mug, or import some music for you? Show your sincere appreciation. Everyone who is helping you is another person dedicating their time towards another FE fan’s work. Please listen to their feedback closely. Observe how they did things. Don’t be scared to ask for more detail. They’re kind enough to go this far, they won’t mind talking a bit more. You don’t always have to agree with what they say, but you should try to understand their perspective on the matter.

Not to mention, the more you learn in response by trying new things even if you need help, the more you can share these skills with others and find other indebted to you.

…to which you can guilt trip/trick some poor new sap into playing your hack obviously. That’s why you should put on a kind face

If there’s anything to take away from what I’ve written is to not be scared to pop into FEU discord and politely ask for help for anything you might be struggling on.

[Rye_on_Speed]

Accomplishment.

---

I’m writing this while super sleepy so there’s probably gonna be some grammatical error here lol

During my time as a high schooler, I went through a lot of internal struggles involving purpose in my life and generally just feeling like my life was fairly empty. I was a career AP student and Asian tryhard, but the one thing missing from my life was a sense that I had accomplished anything by myself and of my own volition and desire.

And then I met some friends.

During the start of the pandemic, I started getting more into Fire Emblem. The series has been a beloved part of my childhood and getting deeper into stuff like romhacks was frankly the next natural progression.

I’ve always been someone who’s been very imaginative. As in the “so lost in his thoughts he’ll space out in the middle of a situation just because he had a great idea for something”. I’ve gone through so many hypothetical ideas for creations in my head. Until romhacking, I never really had an outlet for these ideas, so I was just content with daydreaming.

Then I met the Stoned Stoners.

It started out as a ragtag group of romhackers from a certain unnamable Discord server. We wanted to create a hack. Frankly, I barely even knew what we were doing, I was just excited to get involved into something.

After a lot of ideas being thrown around and positions shifting, eventually a main group was formed with my good friend @MemeTzar at the head of the entire operation. We were working on the start of what would eventually become…

Grug’s Primitive Disadventure

The start of Grug was rough. Tzar was basically a beginner in FEBuilder and none of us had ever tried a serious hack before. The game was suuuper rough and didn’t really play well. But, to me, who came on at first as a writer, that was everything to me. It was community. It was something to do.

Unfortunately, in these early days, Tzar got very busy and thus didn’t have enough time to really make progress. We’d go weeks on end without progress. At a certain point, it seemed that the project would fall apart like most projects usually do; fading into the background of obscurity.

It was then that I, inadvertently, taught myself my first extremely important lesson:

Lesson 1: Sometimes, you just need to step up and take the wheel.

The way I figured it, if there wasn’t any progress that was going on, I’d make my own progress. It was a weird process. I had never touched FEBuilder in my life but the logic behind how the system worked was generally pretty simple. I learned entirely by cross referencing eventing from Tzar and other hacks. By the end of the week, I was pretty proficient in the basics of FEBuilder and had gone from editing numbers to starting on working on new chapters for Grug.

A week seems like a pretty quick time, but what makes a project aren’t these small eureka moments, but the grind game that is development, and that was a lesson I hadn’t learned yet. As a teen with too much time, I was making a lot of progress super fast, and I eventually got into the expectation that romhacking was always this “easy”; that everybody else was just slow for no reason.

Of course, I’d learn a lesson about people having lives later, but that’s a story after this next segment.

After months of development, we finished Grug. It was frankly a bizarre moment. I’d never taken the initiative and lead a project to completion before. I’d never stepped up to become a leader. It was a foreign feeling, but I liked it. And for once in my life, I could tell myself that it was something I wanted to do, and not just something imposed on me by my parents.

Off that high, I wanted something more…something bigger.

Grug 1 was a rough work, but had a lot of spunk. Naturally, I thought the next conclusion was to make a Grug 2.

I had a lot of ideas for Grug 2. I had been cooking up Grug lore for a long ass time, I had a very good idea of the characters and how the world worked. Now was the time to execute.

Of course, instead of a shorter 15 chapter hack, this was planned to be double that size.

I had a lot of high concept ideas but it was up to time to see if I could execute them.

Grug 2: Grug’s Prehistoric Truancy*

was a project that leaves a lot of joy and regret in my heart today. There are many things I love about what I did and things I wish I did differently. Let’s go through the whole story first.

So after declaring I was gonna start on the project, I went in full speed ahead. A chapter a day. Two chapters a day. Fast. Fast. Fast.

By the end of 3 weeks I was done with 16 chapters.

I thought I was unstoppable, but then I hit something I hadn’t really had to worry about before as someone who’d never really committed himself to a project enough for it to matter.

Artist’s Block.

For the first time in my life, a lack of idea of what to do really hit me. Or, well, a lack of motivation. I had ideas, I just didn’t want to act on them. It was bizarre and I felt that I had no way forward. I didn’t like any of the ideas I had currently. I needed to step back.

Of course, it wasn’t easy. I didn’t want to step away. Romhacking at that point had become my life. It was one of the few things I had 100% control over and I didn’t want to give that up completely.

This was me learning my second big lesson.

Lesson 2: Sometimes, it’s better to step away and do something else.

I didn’t step away from romhacking completely. I’ll get to that later. But here’s a few things I did inbetween me stopping Grug 2’s development and when I picked up again.

I started playing more multiplayer Minecraft. I got on geopol servers and ran with a nation called Crimson Imperia. It was fun. We were absolute menaces.

I rekindled an interest in Pokemon again, I played more pokemon romhacks and fangames.

and I got outside more and talked with my irl friends that I had lost connection with over the pandemic.

and smack dab in the middle of this:

Touhou Emblem 1.

If you’ve looked on Touhou Emblem 1’s thread before, you know the life story. I played a shitty touhou FE-like fangame. I hated it. I wanted to make a better game.

This was the first time in awhile I had gotten the motivation to work on something. I was swept up in the feeling that I could do something again.

Now, the last two projects I had started were with a team, Team Stoned Stoners. I had a lot of people helping me out with that one. @LonkFC, @LunaProc, @MemeTzar are just a few examples. I cannot thank those people enough.

However, Touhou Emblem 1 was mostly a solo gig. I had another friend help me format Touhou Puppet Dance Performance sprites as portraits, but everything else from writing to game design to mapping, etc, was done completely on my own.

And managing game development as a solo creator was a new task for me. There wasn’t anybody else to really help me select music, manage graphics, all the stuff. I had to decide on these things on my own and it really opened my eyes as to how much help I had gotten from various people along the path to Grug 1. I was considering parts of design I never really had to think about.

Touhou Emblem 1 was probably the most constructive for my own development cycle as a romhacker. It gave me new independent action and a penchant for my own feel in design. Most of all, it’s trailblazed my more soloist style that I like to carry, even with team projects.

So what did this experience teach me?

Lesson 3: When you have a feeling, grasp it by the horns.

Touhou Emblem 1 was a spite project. It was that powerful emotion that got me through the whole thing and let me make something constructive out of that.

Lesson 4: You never really appreciate friends until you don’t have them.

In a certain @BigMood’s words, I’m a “notorious soloist”, but having a team is honestly a much better feeling than I appreciated before going off on this little side project.

Anyways I completed the project in 2-3 months so suck it I’m the unemployed MASTER

Back to Grug 2.

I went back to Grug 2 with new ideas, an improved skillset, and a drive to push forward. And I did. I pushed forward a lot, to create a project with lofty ideals.

I think, sometime along the way, I got lost in the sauce of all the Grug lore in my head and forgot that Grug was first and foremost a joke.

I got way too serious, I wanted this and that, but ultimately by the end of it, even with an entire training arc behind my back, I never really accomplished everything I wanted, or really anything to the fullest extent I wanted. A lot of my plans were shelved or forgotten.

I was very proud of Grug 2 when it dropped, and a lot of people say I should be. It’s a full length project with a lot of polish, but I felt like I gave up a little bit of myself and Grug (as a series)'s identity with all my high and mighty lofty ideals of what a full length Grug game should be.

I’d forgotten why I started romhacking in the first place, not to create art with a message, but to create fun games. It was a hobby, not a job, or some sort of project made to impress.

There’s a lot of more specific stuff I could say I regret about Grug 2, but I think my biggest is not putting my 100% in having fun while doing it after a certain point. Which is…

Lesson 5: Your work will never be truly great if you can’t even enjoy it yourself.

And it’s a lesson I carry with me to this day. I need to have fun doing something, or I won’t do it. I won’t drag my work or my conscience through the mud if I’m not feeling a project.

It’s driven my design a lot. I now only make design choices I want to make or am comfortable with making. No more forcing myself to try and do things that would “appeal” to a market or whatever. Not like I’m making money anyway. This isn’t about the popularity. (it’s totally about the popularity)

And I feel like that’s a lesson a lot of us could stand to live by. This is a hobby after all, and we should have fun.

Anyways that’s my hack life story I’m currently working on something too big for my scale and it’s gonna be awesome lol bye

[ArcherBias]

Mosh and Motif: Musical Iteration in Faces of a Stranger

In my current project, Faces of a Stranger, I’ve committed to minimal use of video game music for player phase map themes. More than that, however, I wanted to have more custom music than I’d ever put in a single project previously. This came with the fun challenge of having to experiment with the types of originals I created.

Scattered all over the current Faces soundtrack is a simple, two-part motif from an old original I made called Unsure Journey. It’s used for Chapter 7 of my older romhack, Doubled or Nothing. If you’re unfamiliar with it, here’s a short audio clip of the two main musical ideas in their most basic forms.

The first seven seconds (with the harpsichord) is what I’ll call section A, and the last seven seconds (with the organ and strings) is what I’ll call section B.

I used a re-arrangement of these two musical motifs in Tango on a Tightrope, the map theme for Chapter 8 of Faces. The map concept is similar to the initial context of Unsure Journey, so it was meant to be a cute musical nod. Throughout development, these motifs ended up becoming connected to the main antagonistic force in the story, turning them from a cute self-reference into the motif for major bosses and antagonists.

With this context out of the way, the remainder of this post will be dedicated to how I made the second “boss map” theme, and the various iterations it went through.

Part 1: A Waltz With Insanity

The first iteration of what eventually became the second boss map theme was called A Waltz With Insanity. I made it one day to take my mind off college classes, and the name’s just an inside joke in my friend group.

(A Waltz With Insanity.mp3. Exported April 25th)

This track served the important purpose of showing me how potent the idea of iterating on the same map theme could be. If you listen to Waltz next to Tango on a Tightrope, you’ll hear a ton of musical and structural similarities. They both start with Section B of the Unsure Journey motif, which then leads into new musical ideas. At about 0:42 in Waltz, the track segways into Section A of the Unsure Journey motif.

Note how even though Waltz quotes Unsure Journey there, the melody differs slightly (whereas the musical quote in Tango is more direct). This is just a consequence of me getting better at incorporating motifs without coming off as derivative, which is one of the biggest challenges with using them.

Now, you may ask why I didn’t use this. There’s a few reasons:

• I didn’t think this song fit the antagonist it was going to be used for. It needed to be heavier. More frantic, less deliberate.
• There’s still some very derivative sections. I made this in an afternoon, and it kind of shows.
• Despite having Waltz in the name, this song isn’t a waltz. Waltzes are in 3/4 and have specific annunciations. If I was going to claim that I was trying different styles, I should commit to actually doing that.

Part 2: Who Up Distorting They Guitar

For the next couple of days, I poked and prodded at this MIDI in the hope that it’d change into something I was happier with. Eventually, I decided to nix the Waltz naming and make the song heavier, to accurately reflect what I wanted for the character that would use this. I wanted it to sound less like a stageplay and more like a Maneskin song. In doing so, I came up with a far more rock/metal-style revision of the Section A quote, and slowly began work on altering the rest of the song to match it.

Fair warning, one of the lead instruments is quite high and screech-y for a lot of sections. It’s not ear-destruction, but it’s quite grating. Such is the nature of WIP mp3s.

([SPOILER]Map.mp3. Exported April 28th at like 2AM lol)

The first 20-odd seconds is musically identical to Waltz, just with different instruments in a higher key. The same is true of everything past 1:20 or so.

I’m of the firm belief that FE8 NIMAP’s capacity for heavy, distorted songs is grossly underestimated. There’s only one real Distortion Guitar sample, but it’s not bad, and there’s some sounds that can fill in for frantic rhythm guitar (Inst29, Harpsichord) and others that can fill in for an overdriven lead (SynthBrass1, Inst104). The section starting at 0:40 in this track was the real meat of this mp3. It was the part that I built the rest of the new version of the track around, as well as the part that I never got sick of listening to.

Part 3: MoshPit.mid

From here, I felt like I’d struck gold. From just one really cool section, the rest of the song took shape, leaving me with the best version of the track yet not even 24 hours later.

(Mosh and Murder4_28.mp3. Exported, you guessed it, April 28th.)

The new intro parts were heavily inspired by Chop Suey!, of all songs. You can hear some similarities with the initial lack of drums, before they come into the song with a tom-focused beat, lacking any cymbals/ride/hi-hat (if you’re not a music person, then that means that the initial drum part sounds poundy and not crashy).

The new organ parts were also something I was very excited about! Most of the new organ stuff is actually just cleverly re-used from other parts in this same song, but it sure doesn’t sound derivative or lazy.

It’s around this time that I came up with the new name, Mosh and Murder. It keeps the dance-style naming scheme established by Tango on a Tightrope and A Waltz With Insanity, but unlike Waltz, the name actually fits. This version of the track is still not finished. There’s a melody at 1:20 or so that ends prematurely, and the rest of the song after that is still quite derivative of Waltz, but this was definitive progress that I deserved to be proud of.

Part 4: Finishing Touches

Eventually, I did have to finish the rest of the song. But funnily enough, the back half needed less work than I thought. The difference in instrumentation already did a lot, and all I needed to do was touch it up and spin a few new ideas in. This type of thing may not sound intuitive to most people, but it’s the kind of thing you can only get a knack for through experience.

(Mosh and Murder5_3.mp3. Exported May 3rd.)

The main highlight is the new, less overwhelmingly intense section at the end of the song. It lets the track loop far more cleanly, and also sounds pretty distinct!

After this, I showed the newest version to a college friend when hanging out with him later that day. He has experience arranging video game music for orchestral use, and he’s also really neurodivergent about musical motifs, so he really enjoyed it and gave me a few ideas for polish. With his revisions, I inserted it into the ROM, and it sounded like this:

(MoshandMurder.mp3. Recorded in-game on May 4th.)

Sounds pretty cool, right? Because I record this one in-game, you can also hear how it loops!

Part ?: What have we learned archerbias

• Collaboration is cool.
• It’s okay to scrap something you worked hard on. If you have to trash it, its best to scrap it for as many parts as you can.
• Innovation is the best way to avoid coming off as derivative, even when you’re actively re-using your own work.
• You will fuck up. It’s a matter of what you make out of those fuck-ups. Like I literally named a song “Waltz” when it’s in 4/4 everyone makes mistakes you’re okay

Alright have a nice day

bonus bullshit i forgot

(mosh and murdered by the windows default soundfont amirite.mp3)
See the filename. This is the song in the Windows Default MIDI Soundfont. I made this for a joke that wasn’t even that funny, so I’m posting it here where it’s equally unfunny

(unsurewaltz.mp3. Exported May 20th.)
This is an incomplete attempt to edit A Waltz With Insanity into 3/4 about two weeks after finishing Mosh and Murder. It kinda sucks, and is a total mess after about a minute. I re-used the waltz concept for a cutscene theme eventually, but from the ground up.