Well said.
I have no clue either but it’s still my favorite scene to voice act, so I appreciated the random goofiness they added.
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Streets won’t forget when this was in all our forum signatures…
This forum banner brings back nostalgia. Don’t know why, but got this feeling about it.
The party split? That’s not going anywhere… but this time, you’ll have explicit warning, and there’ll be droppable failsafe weapons and preparation screens (as well as a new unit on Renair’s end). Units will still leave you… but their experience won’t be wiped, their gear left in the convoy.
Surprised to hear about the party split not going anywhere, really gives Musain to stand out with Renair to take the fall for Arcus by being taken from the Musain army as a decoy along with a couple of other units who volunteered and ensure Renair’s survival while Arcus is in charge of Renair’s crew to ensure their survival and reunite with Renair in a couple of chapters later. On the plus side, a nice warning to ensure that the coming chapter can be difficult if you are not prepared for what’s ahead.
Temporary allies! … Will have blue paint dumped over on them, instead of green units plugging up tight corridors.
Having some temporary allies is nice to have. Don’t have to worry about green unit AI being rash and having them under your control.
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Of course it had style, Savanh was there, and he was the Swagmaster. 
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I seriously can’t wait to play something from this again. please have displayable growths
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Unfortunately, your pleas will go unanswered. I’m not a believer in displayed growths in-game. I feel they’re a band-aid solution to units with ‘trick’ growths, and it’s better to just… not have units whose growths are an unpleasant surprise, and thus preserve any pleasant surprises. So while I prefer them to remain behind the curtain, there won’t be a situation where an underlevelled unit arrives with poor bases and also just has bad growths.
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I’m glad to see the Savahn/Severin love, he’s one of my favorite designs from the OG patch that I personally made.
Anyway it’s time for
MUG UPDATES
Corbeau, Warrior
This barbie’s starting a revolution
So in our efforts to make Do5 more ironmanable, we’ve added a lot of characters to the playable cast. Often they’re the bosses with the more polished mugs after beating them (and then I polish them up some more)–in Corbeau’s case she’s originally the NPC guy leading the rebels in chapter 13, but ultimately he’s a polished up gerik splice (a really nice one, thanks Char), so we decided to originally swap his mug with a full custom minor boss mug planned later in the game
that is, until last night, while I was doing full body design sketches based on each mug to make sure all the characters can fit the vibe of their country of origins (or in some cases, country of destination), I was like
“You know this guy would fit a lot better as a boss in Vishara than Musain”
and given that I’ll have to make Vishara bosses later anyway, work now? work later? I gotta work either way so I made someone much better fit for musain’s vibes. Really I just wanted to make a pink and green palette character because I like that palette but hey, Musain’s 2012 roots is full of Les Mis references and so I’ve been looking at 1830s France for vibes and roses are pretty french right
Meliza, Formerly Melisandre, Cleric
2011 Do5 was also full of FE4 references, and I’m a huge Judgral lover myself, but we want the Do5 characters to be fully their own. Melisandre used to be visually a Tailtiu expy, and we didn’t want that in 2023, so for a while we used a beta Fleur mug as a stand-in.
Then one day I was looking through the old files I found a sketch I’ve done around 2015? ish for a planned Meliza redesign back when we were going to revive Do5 for the first time.
I liked the design, Sakusa also liked the design and encouraged me to make a sprite this one, especially since it fit the Musain aesthetic better than the beta Fleur mug we’re using before.
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Is Corbeau supposed to be a dude or a chick? Lol
Between the soft, rounded features, the feminine presentation, the ample chest, the hourglass figure, the reference to Barbie and the use of the pronoun ‘she’, it is left as an exercise to the reader. The ‘he’ refers to the mug that was in use for the character in the same role, and is now going to be a boss down the track. That mug was actually originally the Chapter 16 boss, so appeared in the dev patch, but he looks more Visharan than anything - certainly not an Aukeman duke as he originally was, which was why I moved him to being the rebel commander in the first place.
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for a bit more context this was the mug corbeau replaced
who originally was slated to swap roles with this guy
but guy1 didn’t really fit musain’s vibe and guy2 (the Original Original holder of the role) is a cleaned up splice and we want all our player mugs to be custom so
i made a custom design that actually fits musain’s vibe and moved these two to more visually appropriate roles for them
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I’m really, really interested to see how Corbeau’s color scheme ends up looking on her battle sprite. With the art going alongside it, she almost has War Cleric vibes to her, which is making me wish that someone would have made a Bow animation for that, just to have an option to use that instead of the female Warrior animations on the repo…
Can I just say that I love the regality of the new Meliza design? She feels like she fits right alongside Fleur now and makes sense to be her sister, capturing the noble look but still giving nice, priestly vibes.
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man war cleric animation would fit really well for her now that you mention it haha
thank you!
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Oooohhh gotcha. Yeah he kept saying “he” and “him” but my eyes were telling me differently so I just wanted to make sure. Thanks!
@luminescentblade
The new mug is amazing! And definitely fits the vibe you’re going for. Green and pink are one of my favorite pallets so kudos!
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No worries, english isn’t my first language so sometimes I can definitely be more clear in sentence construction haha
thank you!
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I’m obsessed with the juxtaposition of the intricate, detailed costume and hair designs against the silly little emoticon faces in your concept art
I’ve already mentioned how much I like Corbeau’s design in the FEU Discord, but Meliza’s new design is also very nice! Dream of Five is shaping up to have a really consistent, coherent vision and aesthetic for its character designs, to a degree that’s quite uncommon in a fan project. I think it’s really cool!
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Haha thank you! Im just too lazy to draw faces when I design outfits but the emoticon faces do give the concept art a little fun touch : )
I’m very glad that’s coming across well! Yeah having coherent aesthetic trends for each nation is something that I’ve wanted to do around 2013 or so, but college workloads and stuff, now that I both have full creative control and work from home i’m able to polish up the visuals to my vision and I’m glad it’s paying off!
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I had some fun to wrap up my evening tonight…
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oh shit that looks great
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Is the dodge animation fixed?
I don’t really have anything particularly interesting to say, but it’s progress update time, anyway. Mostly because, in a highly-caffeinated fugue, I cobbled together the entirety of 7A, um, today.
Original Do5 Team, Decade-long Nefarious Plan Meeting, 2013 (colourised)
It’s helped by the fact that 7A is a pretty straightforward chapter, and of course by the fact that the map was there to start with, I only had to make minor adjustments to make it less completely linear. The chapter before and the three right after are all gimmick chapters to some extent, so it’s not unwelcome. And of course, I knew what role it had to play. But there’s some pretty-looking eventing, as I’ve finally grown somewhat used to the engine. There’s some flourishes now, and Do5 needs its flourishes!
Now, conventional logic around route splits follows an order. Going from preferable to last resort:
- Do not have a route split.
- Do not have a route split.
- If you have a route split, make it short. Make it, ideally, one (1) village.
- If it’s got to be a few chapters (must you?), then keep them close together
- Seriously just don’t fuck with progression. Just do the same thing twice with different window dressing. I am begging you
- And if you must, then at least make sure people have consistent experiences. No sidestories!
- No recruitable characters only accessible in those sidestories, if there must be sidestories!
- Look, just… reconsider, alright?
Well, we’re a little far gone for that. There’s a lot of variables between any two runs of the game, and getting ‘100%’ of things is probably just not viable without a guide, and I have no interest in making a guide (well, one that has all the secrets in it, certainly). Because I am very stupid, there are 22 route-exclusive characters (though two are near-identical). I have spreadsheets. I’m trying to ensure loot is approximately similar between routes, and all the big things are accounted for. You get the same number of Master Seals in each route, but an Energy Ring in Musain vs. a Speedwing in Onduris, shit like that. I’m not going to get the balance right first try.
And then there’s the whole ‘secrets’ thing…
So funny story. Lumi tells me that between faster enemies, far better allies and the buffs to Bellona - now route-agnostic - Ioan seems aggressively mid at the moment. Cathale is tougher, Driscoll is stronger, most units are faster and more skilful. Especially since, without his Prf, he really doesn’t have what makes him special.
“Wait,” I type. “Ioan had a Prf?”
Yeah. Tiny room in some out of the way area, Ioan got the buff he massively relied on to help him be one of the best… well, one of the usable units in OG Do5. I never even knew it existed. It’s fine for me to miss things, of course, but it was core to his identity as a unit. Similarly - though far better telegraphed, a house told you this directly - was the wing spear drop in Ch2. Event works the same! You should still read houses! But it’s not a wing spear, anymore.
great first level, thanks mate
This does make the job of testing harder. DoW didn’t have that many surprises, not much impactful missable content (outside of, like, chests with thieves running at them), generally I don’t think was that much easier from a position of omniscience than going in blind. Do5 is not like that, and no faithful definitive version of Do5 could be like that, but we can limit its impact and see how things go without it. It makes sense to set a high mark of, well, ‘I can accomplish it’. I’m going in with omniscience, I’m seemingly quite to very good at FE judging by comments on DoW’s difficulty, fair to assume that if I can’t make it to a stretch objective then only a small minority of players will. Lumi doesn’t have omniscience, but is significantly better at FE than me, so it probably evens out. But another playtester isn’t as strong a player, critically has no experience of original Do5, and, importantly, I don’t tell them shit. The sidestory chapter in Onduris is tough, but I managed to get the stretch goal at the peak of my ability, as did Lumi. But just as importantly, you can provably progress just fine without ever knowing it existed.
Anyway, no particular thread. Just a ramble, I guess, on the process. I hope, by the way, that it shines through that me and Lumi are just, really fucking excited to bring this through. I have been deeply tempted to release Onduris now. We’re still ten or so supports out, though. Musain’s ten chapters long and this marks two, though there’s going to be some script fuckery to make 8 through 9 work, while 10, 11 and 14 will be changed up a bit.
Arcus learned the hard way that the people of Musain expect you to clear your Goddamn plate or face the consequences. Don’t you know there are starving children in Gral Sethes?
There is a very, very low chance - but technically still a chance! - that I will have both routes ready to release the day of the FEE3 video (if that’s the case, its supports will be incomplete, and realistically barely started). It is overwhelmingly likely that Musain will be complete (with its supports!) before Christmas, rendering the final public patch completely obsolete. That’s the main milestone I’m aiming for. Progress is obviously going to slow after that, as there are only three maps I have to work off. Though there’s probably only 11-12 maps after the split anyway, so… er… judging by the speed I got through Do5, it’s honestly not unlikely that FEE3 2024 is Do5’s final release date.
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FEE3’s schedule has been released, and yes, we are on there! Though it’s funny how far we’ve come since even releasing that trailer. My aim has always been to push out the first public release to coincide with FEE3, and the target had been to push out act 1 and then Onduris.
But I have a month. I knocked out 7 in a day and almost all of 8A in two. On this pace, I could absolutely push through and get all of Musain done… if I stop working on supports (about 21 are done out of the 30 possible through Onduris). Essentially, I think I can push Musain out, but most supports will be placeholders (at least the conversations themselves will).
I … expect this will be a landslide, but I have been wrong before. So I’ll leave it to a poll: would people prefer a basically [Complete] experience through the end of Onduris, or for a push for Musain that may encounter slight delays (or prove impossible)?
(I’m aiming for an automatically unlocked support reader when all the supports are finished, so you won’t miss out on like, Crowe/Chester forever, but it’ll be a while before you can just crack open the game and see it.)
EDIT: It’s actually not turning into a landslide, so if you’re not voting because you think it’ll be a landslide, well, vote. Though it’s not just a FPTP thing, just… will influence my priorities.
EDIT II: It is rapidly becoming a landslide in the opposite direction I expected it to landslide into.
EDIT III: Musain is coming back with the steel chair…
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