FEBuilder celebrated by immediately crashing, forcing a full system shutdown and corrupting the ROM, but even that could not stop me. No progress was lost.
The work continues. Graphics, polish, a small amount of writing, a second round of playtests. Not long now.
wow, this hack is being done insanely fast. Hope last pushes for the finish line go without too much trouble
i have soooo many graphics left haha
you people are sure fast with this hack o.o,
2025, the year of actual Hag Love.
Glad you were able to recover so well and looking forward to seeing how things play out. Also this is late but
i expect to drop like 50 turns total on second run probably
So we’ve posted, at this point a while back, that things are [complete] behind the scenes but not quite ready to be called v. 1.0.0 and pushed out to release. This remains the case. I felt… well, first and foremost, I’m trying to procrastinate on the marking I have to do, but I also felt like some communication would not go amiss. So here’s what’s happening.
If it’s ‘done’, why not release?
It’s a long time ago now, but Drums of War’s first release would softlock some emulators, or possibly just if a map wasn’t completed in a single sitting. Some fuckery with counters. Worse still, when Dream of Five was released, it would always softlock on Chapter 25. Inserting the credits at the very end had been an arduous and inefficient enough process, with FEBuilder just kind of jamming all the failed attempts on top of each other, that somehow that… happened. Even now, I’ve had weird errors with tile animations that just don’t have any real rhyme or reason. Fixable! But not the kind of thing you think to check after they initially work fine, until someone pings you to ask ‘hey why is the lava chartreuse?’
But even discounting the fact that something might break, there’s also just a lot of room for oversights. Something that happened literally today is that a change I made like a month ago is to have a couple of guys use chest keys. So far, so normal. But if you get to them early, I forgot to have them drop them. Two key early items down… or, in practice, just forcing you to wait around a bit. Little oversight, big annoyance. These things stack up.
There’s changes earlier in the game, too. C1, 3, 4 and 6 all played somewhat slowly; four from the first six felt a little attritional. Suggested changes have been implemented to varying degrees (the biggest degree having been ArcherBias just saying ‘fuck it, give me C3’ and me going ‘ok’, which weirdly puts me at 2/2 on my most recent C3s being made by other people, as it was RW who saved Do5 C3), and they were, if not overhauled, revamped in such a way that they demanded playtesting. But not every change is that significant.
The thing with playtesting is that me and Lumi can’t be on top of everything at once. It’s a ~25-hour game. I can’t run it again with every change. And there’s just things I’m not primed to notice. If I beat a map in 10 or fewer turns every time, I’m not going to encounter a 13th-turn crash, and I’m not going to wait around at the end of every map just in case one does. There’s gamestates I won’t experience. And fresh eyes notice things better, anyway. You get diminishing returns with further playtesting. Lumi is more resilient when it comes to replaying (and a significantly better player…), and just having that fresh pair of eyes makes a huge difference in catching stuff… but I still want this [COMPLETE] release to go smoothly, with a lot of different experiences to lean on. So, closed beta.
And this is always going to be part of the process. But for DoW especially, and to a lesser extent for Do5 (which had a more gradual launch and a lot more initial interest than DoW), it was a process that happened in the public eye. So 1.0.0 was busted. DoW had a whole series of patches where midgame promoted enemies were like +4 in every stat from where they should be which wasn’t obviously a glitch, it just seemed like badly overtuned enemies. Et cetera. And I made patch after patch after patch, only eventually catching up and letting things settle. I want to skip that stage this time… in the public eye, anyway.
From the graphical perspective, the May dev complete patch was not… fully there, either. I posted the Hellmountain above. The Hellmountain now looks like a mountain. My endgame team included Riev, Sepia Vigarde and Second Eyes-Closed Marisa. We’re now at the point where all portraits and all six CGs are done, but some recolours / reused boss edits still need to be made, and there’s a lot more exciting changes to stuff like UI coming. Map edits are mostly done, courtesy largely of the incomparable RandomWizard.
So, what’s the ETA?
Give it a month, but I’m really looking for feeling more than a concrete deadline. A few more people have beaten the game and left their feedback, but I’m still in the process of making little fixes day by day.
Though now this quote does always now remind me of when I panicked and told a student the marking was ‘always kind of vibes-based’ and she burst into tears…
Both DoW and Do5 were in flux for a while early on, before finally just… hitting a patch where I didn’t find any issues that really made me feel, 'wow, I need to rush out a patch to fix that’. For DoW, I still remember that it was 1.15 (DoW patch numbers were also based on vibes before Lumi forced me to use ones that made sense for Do5). It wasn’t that it was the end of things, it was that the game felt like I didn’t need to chase after it with a band-aid.
I want to get it there before it breaches containment because, I think I can say without sounding particularly insane, Homecoming’s launch is going to be at least a pretty big fucking deal and a lot of people are going to play it in those early weeks and I don’t want it to blow up in their faces. That’s always been the nightmare, and it’s already happened once.
That said, while I want to get it out before FEE3, it’s almost certainly going to be ready by then.
So what concrete things are done and what is left?
That’s all I can think of. I’m very proud of what myself and Lumi have made, along with all those who have helped (and continue to help) along the way to bring this project to fruition. I’m incredibly excited to bring this to you before the end of the year. All the best.
I know, right?
Take all the time you need to get it where it needs to be! Homecoming’s been one of my most-anticipated hacks of the year since I first tried the demo, but I’d rather it not be rushed out the door. Whenever it’s out, I’m sure it’ll be as good as it can be.
(I would post Arne here as part of the challenge but I can’t embed images yet and I didn’t end up keeping Arne around long-term. Maybe I’ll have a better Arne to post when the full version drops.)
I learned TSA (thanks to citrus’s guide), enjoy some new menus
To come: new scrolling bg, battle screen, start menu graphics, and more
Look great
So this turned out to be a goddamned lie.
…
I am actually 100% kidding - as a fan though I just wanted to say that I have appreciated the status updates. Played the initial demo back in the spring and poked my head in to see if there had been any updates - and wow, you folks have actually made super quick progress through the game with a release just around the corner.
Good luck down the closing stretch and can’t wait to get my hands on the game later this year!
The FEE3 order has been announced. Homecoming’s trailer has been chosen to lead the last day, 15th November.
With it will come the first open [COMPLETE] release. All chapters, extensively playtested. All graphics, with the possible exception of promotion portraits; we’ll see. All… whatever you could name. I don’t anticipate the need for the usual swift turnover of changes.
(I do want to take a particular moment to shout out Lumi, who has been working tirelessly on the graphical end of things. It is impossible to overstate just how big a difference a fully custom and cohesive aesthetic up to and including the UI makes to the campaign as a whole. It can be easy to say ‘nice graphics’ and move on but it’s important to acknowledge that you really do eat with your eyes, and I cannot wait for people to see the full extent of her work here.)
After it settles, I plan to add a few more touches. Colourblind mode (at least as far as map sprites go), 0%/max% growths, etc. Just want to push it off until things are pretty much set, so i don’t have to keep updating X number of different patches at once. Final touch-up patches (and all those variants) are also planned for Drums of War and Dream of Five. Then it’s on to pastures new. You haven’t heard the end of Team NQR…
hell yeah
The hype is so real.
Good to know that things have been progressing smoothly. Been working through the demo for the longest on an ironman playthrough so looking forward to a complete run.
A status update: with our FEE3 trailer 10 days away, I’m happy to report that I’ve finished the absolute necessary graphics for 1.0 release, so we’re set for that.
I’ll be trying to hit the stretch goal (promo portraits) in the next 10 days, but if I don’t make it, they will be definitely in the 1.1 release.
While I’m here, I’m also gonna post my real MVPs.
This was going to be a longer post, but I got laid low by a sudden and debilitating flu yesterday, so I’m running pretty much on empty at the moment. I can only hope that I have absorbed the Curse of [Completion] into myself.
That is because…
FEE3 2025: Fire Emblem Advance: Homecoming by Not Quite Rodents (Parr+Lumi) - YouTube
Fire Emblem Advance: Homecoming at last has its full release, available through the folder link in the OP. A backup patch is available in Variant Patches in case one very specific piece of code I inserted at the very end somehow breaks something, but I doubt it will come to that (since the same code exists in DoW and Do5).
Happy hunting.
