The Happiest Sisyphus: a Story About Pure Will.
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!