I advise running Hope’s Trail on VBA-M, as this is the emulator that was used throughout development and testing. Some bugs have been reported on other emulators, particularly when combining Chaos and Plus mode. (As of 1.29, I believe the most severe non-VBAM crash has been fixed, but please let me know if I’m mistaken!)
Hi friends,
Hope everyone is staying sane waiting for mainline FE news. I had a fever dream while I was stuck at home with COVID and this was the result. Please see the Hope’s Trail Documentation to get a more thorough idea than what I can list in this post.
This is a complete, 10-chapter fan game made mostly with FEBuilder. The central gimmick is that there is a pool of ~60 player characters, but only a fraction of them will be “encountered” in each run - similar to the one catch per route rule used in nuzlockes. After choosing 1 of 3 starter units, at every ‘encounter point,’ 1 of 3 characters will randomly join your party. This is intended to provide a highly replayable experience similar to a randomizer, but without the immersion-breaking and unbalanced jank that randomizers often entail.
The skill system is used to differentiate units, but sparingly. Player units and bosses have a single personal skill, and promoting grants a single skill.
In my previous project, Heaven’s Bloom, I tried doing all the art assets myself and it led to some very ugly results. This time I leaned heavily on the free to use FEUniverse art and music repositories - so I’d like to thank everyone who contributed resources to those. Specific credits are in the documentation linked above. If you see an asset in my game which wasn’t properly credited, please let me know and I will remedy that as soon as possible.
As you might expect from something based on Nuzlocking, I recommend playing this game as an ironman. There is no lord unit, so the run only wipes when all allies have fallen, and the game is short and varied enough that restarting after a gameover shouldn’t be too boring. But ultimately, play how you want, I’m happy to have people experience my work regardless!
Feedback on any aspect of the game is welcome. I fully expect some very imbalanced stuff to be found as I haven’t been able to test every permutation of encounters.
note: As of patch 1.22, if you play with battle animations I recommend keeping battle backgrounds OFF (animation setting 1). Battle backgrounds on can sometimes cause visual bugs on unit death. This is being looked into.
Hope’s Trail UPS - latest version 1.32