[FE8] [Complete] Fire Emblem: Vision Quest (v3 by Pushwall - 1-Oct-22)

[Pandan]

Hey All,

Hope everyone enjoyed the holiday season and had a restful New Year’s celebration.

December was a slow month for development overall, but I have a few updates to share. I know the art quality in this hack is currently sub-par (and frames are missing, etc.), but thanks to Zaim/Zmr with help from Card, we have two new updates for characters that needed it badly.

Marlen (by Zaim)

Storch (by Zaim & Card)

Additionally, a few other changes:

Team SALVAGED cavaliers are now inserted! Here’s how Marlen looks.

… And the new female edit available in the Repo! Thanks to flasuban for the edit to the original. This is Stina, an axe cavalier you will meet in Part III. Big thanks to KidCinder/Spear Doggo for the help on these palettes and many more.

The game now has 40 playable characters inserted w/ working supports (but not convos)

I received feedback on a few maps based on their flow, size, and difficulty, and made a few updates. Here are what the new maps look like. I’ve tested them out and enjoy how they play much more than before, and hope you do too:

New Chapter 1-2

New Chapter 1-4

Additionally, the script for the entire game is now complete. I’ll be going back and making edits, but the first completed draft is ready, and now it’s a matter of inserting them.

Lastly, “legendary” weapons are now in the game, and attainable through a number of secrets and riddles that you’ll need to solve on a few maps. I won’t spoil too much, but there will be houses that give you clues to how to find the items and what task you would need to complete. The game is certainly beatable without them, but S rank weapons will certainly help make it easier. You’ll be able to attain a few of them in Part I & II.

My goal for this weekend is to finish inserting the script for the final Part II map and continue testing it in preparation for release in the coming months.

Thanks again everyone for your support and feedback. Next update will (hopefully) be the release of Part II (18 total playable chapters), stay tuned!

[Pandan]

Hey All,

Wanted to follow up with an update on production since it’s been about a month. Things slowed down a bit, and as some of you saw on discord, there are some health issues I’m in the process of working through. It’s looking good overall, and I’ve adjusted some of my habits and am on the road to getting back to where I need to be.

Unfortunately, adjusting how I spend my free time to accommodate for a healthier life style has left me less time to work on the hack.

Thankfully, I’ve gotten a few key pieces done and have a few updates to share:

• All playable units now have mini-mugs
• Chapter 1-8 has been reworked completely to tighten up the flow.
• All text for Parts I & II (18 chapters) is added, including village, talk, and battle text.
• All palettes for player, NPC, and enemy units are now added - kudos to SpearDoggo for the big help on this.

What’s next?

• All mini-mugs for bosses and NPCs
• Insert text for Part III
• Playtest Part III’s chapters and fix a few technical bits to ensure it all works correctly.

In addition, I’m combing through the existing chapters and polishing things up to ensure a smooth experience - excited to share more with you all soon! Still aiming to get this out by the end of March, stay tuned.

[Pandan]

Hi all,

I’m excited to announce Part II of Vision Quest is now available! You can download the patch here and in the first post.

It’s been a wild few months since I last released an update of Vision Quest to the public. From the hasty FEE3 release, I’m proud to say the team and I made a ton of progress in a little over 4 months. Big thank you to SpearDoggo, AuthorPendragon, myst1cp4nd4, and Zaim who were all super helpful in creating mugs and palettes for the release. Would not be here without them.

Also want to give a big thank you to Snakey1 for giving me incredible detail in answering my noob hacking questions - have a much greater understanding of how to make things work under the hood thanks to him.

And of course, a thank you to the community for the support from FEE3 and in general over the past few months.

This update includes 18 playable chapters, picking up after the events of 1-E with Storch and his companions. I won’t spoil everything here, but please keep in mind a few things:

• Maps may have some tile errors/changes. Working on fixing these. Additionally, I recognize aesthetics on some of these are bad, and if you want to take a stab at fixing them, feel free to. Would appreciate the help.

• Not everyone has talking/blinking frames. Some of the mugs are set to have mouth movement at 255x255 so they flicker in the top corner.

• Some of the art (in particular, my own, is not great. If you want to spruce it up, be my guest)

• Some battle backgrounds are weird / out of context.

• There are probably more bugs and weird things that I’m not aware of, so if you catch them, please share with me here or on Discord

• The patch ends at Chapter 2-E. You can open it up in FEBuilder to get a teaser of what’s being worked on in Part III and add a “Goto next chapter” command to test it out in its current (mostly incomplete) state.

Additionally, I want to highlight that there are design choices that deviate from conventional GBA FE (high HP values, skills at level 15/5, etc.) and hope that you enjoy these changes and aren’t frustrated by them.

Appreciate any and all feedback either here or on our discord. Always open to suggestions. And of course, any bugs you catch that I miss would be great.

Part III is currently scoped at 10 chapters and will require quite a lot more work to get off the ground. I’m excited to continue working on it and getting this ready in the future as we get to the home stretch of completing the game, for a proper v1 release.

Thanks again for the support, everyone. I hope you enjoy, it’s been fun building this so far!

tl;dr
Download Link for Vision Quest v.04 (18 Chapters)
Link to Discord

And a few screenshots to show off some of the updates:

\

Edit: As a reminder, Hard mode has not been tested yet. Please go with Normal mode for the designed experience, thanks.

[Klokinator]

Hey how do I tell when we’ve finally reached chapter one-

oh nm I figured it out

[Pandan]

Plot twist, that screenshot is from chapter 18

[Pandan]

Hey all,

There was an error in the patch that caused the infamous res glitch (among a few other small issues that got pointed out). I updated the patch and put it on Dropbox.

Please let me know if you run into any other bugs, appreciate the support!

[Pandan]

Hi all,

I’ve seen and received feedback about the game’s difficulty. It’s helpful to get this type of feedback and specific instances where the game feels too challenging or unfair. As the sole designer and developer, I don’t have a ton of gameplay feedback other than my own and a few seasoned members of the community who have shared in depth notes with me, but who also are generally aligned on the type of difficulty they enjoy.

While designing Vision Quest, a goal from the outset was to make a game I would enjoy playing, and I tend to skew towards the more challenging side. So I understand if you find the “normal” mode is more difficult than say Eliwood normal or vanilla FE8.

I am in the process of scoping out the use of Easy Mode to lower the toughness of enemies to allow for a more casual run of the game.

I am also exploring adding a few prepromotes to the story (and a secret character or two) to hedge against getting screwed and make the game more bearable for those who want to play iron man, or simply have poor luck with levels.

In the interim, I’ll share some tips to help you out.

• This game, unlike most GBA FE, is PP oriented. I took a lot of inspiration from FE11 on this front (and also FE5 to an extent) and enemies are generally going to hit hard, so you’ll want to avoid getting countered.

• There are a ton of stealables in this game. Check inventories of enemies. There is something useful almost every map. You’ll need to steal stuff to get a steady supply of gold to buy weapons.

• Speaking of weapons, if you try to go through the game only using irons or base tomes, you will most likely have a tough time. The enemies have high HP and ORKO is the exception, not the norm. There are a lot of effective weapons scattered throughout the game to help you dismantle enemies quickly, and you’ll probably need to use expensive weapons more than you would normally in GBA FE to prevent yourself from getting overwhelmed.

• There are also S rank weapons (one per weapon type) hidden throughout the game. There are hints or side objectives you can complete to earn them. They’re 15 use, but with super high MT, and should help when you’re in a bind later on.

• There is a barrier staff early on and lots of pure water. Use them. I know I never needed to in vanilla GBA, but they make a difference here on some maps.

• Skills are gained at level 15 base, level 5 promoted.

• Supports are gained within range of 3, so units do not need to be adjacent to each other to build supports. Supports were designed to be faster, and the flexibility should help you access their bonuses sooner, which should also offset some of the difficulty (and hedge against unlucky level ups). You can view everyone’s support partners in the “support” screen in battle preps so you can plan accordingly. Affinities work as they do in vanilla.

I’m excited to continue working on the game and making more improvements. I hope this is helpful to you as you play through. Please hit me up on discord (or post here) if you have specific feedback, would love to hear more about what you like and don’t like about the game.

Thanks all.

[Pandan]

​Hey Guys,

Hope everyone has been enjoying the most recent release of Vision Quest. I’m back at work and making some improvements in prep for the next release, which barring any weird bugs in the current build, will be a full v1 release. Not committing to a timeline just yet - I’m in between jobs at the moment and my free time will vary pretty considerably once I do get up and running with new employment.

Want to share a few quick updates out to give you a peak of what’s to come:

Music:

Fixed a lot of the tracks (Thanks Scraiza​ and Chair for their help) and imported a few new bangers:​

VISION QUEST SOUNDTRACK: From Enemy to Friend (FE4)

(Thanks Scraiza for help on the loop)

VISION QUEST SOUNDTRACK: Ken (Street Fighter II)

(Thanks Scraiza for help on the edits)

VISION QUEST SOUNDTRACK: Pokemon Pinball Blue

(Thanks Chair/Scraiza for the anvil tutorial, fixed up the shop music!)

Maps:

Thanks to Pikmin1211 for his help on map insertion, we now have some nighttime palettes for the many village maps in this game:

(Chapter 1 now appropriately taking place at night)

Thanks to feedback from Bloopy, I’m working on revamping some of the existing maps to improve their flow.

Chapters:

All of the chapters are now inserted into the game and just require some testing/balancing on the gameplay side. There are 2 chapters left to insert text for, and the script is complete and undergoing some revisions. Looking to have v1 with Easy, Normal, and Hard mode enabled to satisfy a broad audience.

Big thank you to Bloopy for playtesting the current build and sharing valuable feedback on both story and gameplay.

Characters:

The cast is now set at 47 playable characters, including a few secret characters. No Kaga fan would make all recruitment easy, and I definitely want to encourage exploration while also providing a large enough cast to make iron man a viable mode of play. All of the supports are functioning technically as intended, and I’ll go back and add conversations after the v1 release.

Additionally, we recruited a few new artists to the team, and am proud to show off some updates to the visuals. We’ve come a long way:

Onisim by Laurent_LaCroix

Storch by a collaboration of all the artists: Card, Zaim, Laurent_LaCroix, Melia, and Zanryu all helped on this.

Helga by Laurent_LaCroix

If you’re interested in playtesting, helping on writing/editing, and/or art, shoot me a DM. We are making great strides and I’m excited for the next release.

[Pandan]

Hey all - team and I are making a lot of progress, I’m going to start updating the first post with periodic progress reports (and new screenshots) to show how much we have left to do. Here’s the most recent one as of today:

Progress Report as of 4/8/19

• Text inserted for 29/30 chapters, final chapter and endings remain (supports to come after v1 release)
• All maps completed (some will be reworked w/ playtester feedback)
• 21/90 custom mugs complete, all have concept art created
• All palettes created and inserted

If you’re interested in helping out w/ art and/or playtesting, let me know. Thinking of doing a private beta run ahead of a public v1 release.

[Pandan]

Hey team - been about a month, and want to share a quick progress report with where we’re at:

Progress Report as of 5/6/19

• Text inserted for 30/30 chapters, some event reworks and rewrites, but it’s all there now (supports to come after v1 release)
• 42/95 custom mugs complete, all have concept art created (added a few more variants for cutscenes)

We also recently added the new salvaged paladins and will be adding the new knight animations soon too.

Playtesting is under way and I’m making edits based on the playtesting team feedback. If you’re interested in helping out, please feel free to shoot me a DM. The current timeline for release (v.06, 23/30 chapters) is “soon”.

[Alusq]

I’ve been casually playing your game over the past month or so and have been writing an in-depth review on it. It started as a simple stream-of-consciousness thing where my goal was to make various suggestions related to gameplay, but has since ballooned into a pretty comprehensive critique of both gameplay and writing (which is a testament to how much I like the initial story premise). I just finished part 1 of the game and I expect to finish my review within the next week or so; do you have opinions on where I post it? Going forward, I would like to offer to write similar reviews for other people’s projects, but given there are places in this one where I get pretty relentless in tearing apart certain plot/gameplay beats that hurt my experience, I figured I’d ask you about it first before publicly posting it. Would you rather I send it to you in a message instead of posting it here once I’m done with it?

[Pandan]

Hey man - thanks for checking it out.

Yeah, feel free to DM it to me first so i can address anything in particular that’s already been changed. I’ll say that I’ve made quite a few updates to Part I that’s still IP, but I’m curious to hear what your thoughts on the current build since i’m sure we’ll get some new ideas. That cool?

[Alusq]

Will do!

[Pandan]

Hey all,

Know it’s been a little quiet on my end. Unfortunately, my computer had a hiccup and all of my hard drive was inexplicably wiped. Currently working with a repair shop to see about the nature of it, but they also seem confused by what happened. I spoke with them today and they attempted to restore the memory, but no luck. They’re running a hardware diagnostic and I should find out if my hard drive is salvageable or if I’ll need to start over with a new drive.

That said, I’ve lost about a months work of on the project, which is predominantly changes made to the playtester patch from the end of April.

Thankfully, this isn’t as bad of a setback as it could be. Confident I’ll be back up and running soon and will be back to where I was in the coming weeks.

A release of part III and the 23 chapters is still on the horizon, but is just a little further out than initially planned. I don’t have a firm release date yet.

Thanks again for your continued support and patience. Looking forward to sharing the work with you when it’s done. I’ll keep updates coming and share them as there is stuff to share.

[dancer_A]

I know the feeling of losing everything out of nowhere; good luck in getting back to where you were!

[Pandan]

Thanks dude, appreciate it. Am overdue to see the updates you’ve made to Fractured Realms as well. Been a while since I played!

[StreetHero]

Moving boss with bolting? Almost gave me a heart attack.
Anyways what is the blinking arrow at top left map?

[P33RL355]

That’s the Escape arrow. Considering it’s at 0,0 it’s probably enabled by accident and does nothing.

[StreetHero]

Chapter 1_11 there is a door that i can’t open using key, not sure about lockpick and unlock but i guess it’s the same

[Pandan]

Peer is right - the arrow is a mistake and was removed.

Similarly, 1-10 was fixed and now the boss only moves after a certain number of turns. Also the objective works as intended now which makes the chapter much better (in my opinion)

Good catch on the door, should be fixed in the new version when it comes out