[FE8] Fire Emblem: Tierra Maldita v1.0 [COMPLETE]

[keymavega]

Your adventure follows the protagonist, Edgar (Wraith) Calithan, as he treks through the perilous lands of Tierra Maldita, the damned land. There have been kidnappings across several nearby villages, with the circumstances of the disappearances between the victims all sounding eerily similar to each other. Follow Edgar and his eclectic group of found companions as they get to the bottom of this mystery. But be warned, in seeking answers, you will encounter many dangerous foes moving to ensure your demise.

This hack includes many things I enjoy in FE games and games in general.
If you’re like me, and you enjoy character driven stories, difficult but fair encounters, high crits, short and sweet campaigns, prfs, secrets and true endings, then this hack is for you.

Are you up for the challenge?
Download the patch here [v1.0]!

Patching instructions: How to Patch a Rom v5

Patch notes

v1.0 (1/12/23)
All chapters completed and released!

• More bug fixes
• All content in and functional

v0.3 (10/22/22)
Ch. 5a, 5b, and 6 released!

• Some bug fixes

• New maps, sprites, and other assets

• Complete support conversations

• Chapter select removed

v0.2.2 (6/20/22)
Bug fix patch

• Fixed bug where stairs wouldn’t take you to the right place in ch. 3
• Updated Lea map sprites
• Updated hunter descriptions
• Ch. 4 released

v0.2.1 (6/10/22)
Quietly releasing an update

• New original tracks!

  • Main theme (Main theme)
  • Map theme (Daydream)
  • Battle theme (Swift decision)
  • Secret theme (Forest dweller)

• Chapter select (for now)

v0.2 (5/15/22)
Ch. 2 and Ch. 3 released!

• More QoL patches
• Skills!
• More balancing
• Made some things a little more obvious…

v0.1.1 (3/28/22)

• Added QoL patches (cool health bars!)
• Edited visuals so paths are more obvious
• Overall power balancing
  • All levels scaled down so it makes more sense to look at
  • Hunters get less exp
  • Hunters have less growths
• Hunters class description updated
• Some bug fixes
  • Emulator bugs aren’t fixed. Will inquire about this before the next release.

v0.1.0 (3/26/22)
Demo (Ch.1) released!

Progress tracker

Assets and scripting

• Team SALVAGED
• Maiser6, ZoramineFae
• SHYUTERz
• LemonTart
• Aura Wolf
• Generic Pretsel
• SMITHYGCN
• Deranger
• Merpin
• Teraspark
• Mikey Séregon
• Runa
• ObsidianDaddy
• ZoramineFae
• Rootrick
• Zarg
• Sacred War
• Tanakakiri
• Some cg images adapted from Pexel.
• Kenpuhu
• Mikey_seregon
• Mariode
• GratedShtick
• Beansy
• Seal
• Shin19
• zmr
• Travant
• RandomWizard
• CapibaraInSpace
• Sme
• CanDy
• Merpin
• DALL-E
• free
• Kanna
• knabepicer
• l95
• Nuramon

Testers

• Vorpal Goat
• Pernele
• Bowiechowie82
• Ceruhi

Proofing

• Ceruhi

Full rendered character art

Edgar “Wraith” Calithan, lounging in a dilapidated bar

Simon “Leandros” Galadus, hunting for artifacts at sunset

Giulia “Regalia” Esprita, (Coming soon…?)

(Coming soon…?)

Behind the scenes (SPOILERS)

Hello! I made this section to give some insight on the story/design side of the creation process for the hack. Starting this project, I wasn’t familiar with the medium, so it took awhile for me to get a good process down for creating things for it. Hopefully by taking you through my process, it’ll provide some guidance. If not, it might just be interesting to see!

For any and all sketching, I used Procreate on an iPad. That’s my general go to when drawing anything. For creating the in game assets, I used Aseprite. My process for creating portraits was to sketch my concept as small as I could on my iPad, export that into Aseprite, trace it, then render it from there.

This yielded mixed results! If you want your sprite to look “Fire emblem-y”, you should start with a spliced base and edit it. I found that a lot of the details I wanted didn’t carry over from the sketch and my end result would look kinda funky due to certain constrictions regarding rom hacking. It also takes a long time to make things completely from scratch.

For example, above you can see my initial portrait for Wraith… Not great.

Speaking of Wraith, this was a character that I had created several years ago. Almost the entire cast originates from the Tierra Maldita world which I have been developing for a few years now. I plan on that to be a much larger project, with this hack being a test run for that. The final project won’t be another rom hack though.

You can also bring the sprite back into your drawing software and sketch over it if you want to see what you can get away with visually.

Destina and Josef are some of the people that were created solely to be in this hack. Conceptually the idea of Destina was the same as early on, being someone who got transformed by the curse, from a human to a monster, similar to the hunters. I initially wanted her to be kind of like a witch? But then I decided to go for a multi animal hybrid type of demon. In her final design, she is a wolf/deer/goat person.

I just wanted Josef to be a good anime boy. When I started sketching him, I realized that it would be so generic, there was no point on continuing. That little face here is the only drawn art of him.

“Fate” has a real name! It’s Silus
He is one of my earliest characters since I started intentionally creating stories. He was also my DnD character for 3.5 years. The drawings here also span across that time period so you can see how I got better at drawing

The short of his story is that he was a wolf that was imbued with magic powers, making him sentient. Then he was trained to be an actor (previous event unrelated) and then joined an adventuring party. His story ends with him ascending the world he is from and now travels to other ones to witness the stories of others.

I guess he’s kind of like an ‘Ana’ from the FE series, and even a self-insert at times. This is not the first or last time he will show up in my creations.

Placeholder CGs for the Ch1 demo I used while I was figuring out eventing. Would recommend using placeholders for things like that!

A few examples of sketches for my maps. My general approach was to think of the experience I wanted to give the player first and then design the level around that.

For example, in Ch3, I wanted players to feel oppressed by their environment and enemies surrounding them. They should be tactful, but ultimately be more defensive than aggressive. A fog map came to mind for this since limited visibility makes you feel like your back is against a wall, or needs to be. Initially the concept for that map was that you would huddle around a source of light (campfire) while enemies came at you, like that one Path of Radiance map.

Like sprites, I would recommend looking at a base map to start and then modifying it, for the same reasons.

I don’t see a lot of people talking about creating music for hacks, so I think I could be of some use here.

For reference, the above shows the song “Decide Your Fate”.

I use FL Studio to compose and process all of my music. For this game, I used a soundfont player and loaded up the piano sounds that’s recommended for this game. Then I created an instance of it for each instrument track. Make sure you don’t mix them together or you’ll regret it when you convert it to midi. You should generally try to keep things simple as you won’t have access to a lot of your mixing tools.

From here you just compose it. I don’t think I’m a good composer so you’ll need to go elsewhere for advice on that, but again, keep it simple! All of your favorite retro game music is probably way more simple than you think.

Once your done, convert your file to midi. In FL, there is a macro that preps your file to export to midi that youll need to do first. MAKE SURE YOU MAKE A COPY OF THIS BEFORE PREPPING FOR MIDI ELSE YOU WONT HEAR YOUR MUSIC ANYMORE. If you need loops, take that file and drop it into Anvil Studio and do all that good stuff.

Another pro tip, name your instruments what you assigned it as, so when you configure that in FEBuilder you know what it is at a glance.

On the note of keeping it simple, this is “Main Theme”.

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Alrighty, that’ll be it for now. As usual, if you have questions lmk
Hope you enjoyed this!

FEE3 2022 Showcase

FEE3 2022: Tierra Maldita by keymavega

First release intro

I am officially releasing this demo I’ve been working on for my rom hack, Tierra Maldita. This takes place in a world that I’ve been slowly building over the course of the past year or so. This hack will be fairly short, likely to be around 7 chapters. Releases may take awhile as I am the only person working on this project, but I will keep this thread updated with progress.

While there are many custom and revised assets, I can’t say that there are any particularly unique features. At least not yet.
Honestly the main motivation was to make this for myself, but hopefully there will be some of you that will enjoy this story and characters as much as I have!

If you are enjoying this project or there are any issues, please just lmk!

Discord: Keyv#9931
DMs are open!

[DATonDemand]

Goodluck on the project man

[keymavega]

Thank you!

By the way, I read your topic on shorter hacks and I agree with you!
I was thinking the same thing when I was designing this one, I hope you will like it.

Speaking of which, the link is up now

[Bowiechowie82]

Can I message you about bugs, and some mistakes? I like the look though.

[keymavega]

Please do!

[Bowiechowie82]

Riev is OP and is almost impossible to kill, the enemies are VERY strong. The info about the characters are the same as their class.

Staff edit: Do not double post unnecessarily.

[knabepicer]

I don’t think the boss is very hard since he only does 12 true damage and Homeward prevents anyone who has it in their inventory from being crit, and he’s not on a healing tile, so you just stand next to him until he dies (although it is weird that he’s level 0, same for the tomahawk warrior). I agree that the doogs being able to one-round Leandros (even if they get ohko’d by everyone’s b rank weapons) is maybe too much.

I’m not a big fan of the map though, while it’s playable, it’s very ploddy since you have to wait for enemies to come to you so you don’t get ganged up on, and it’s fairly large for 3 units.

The opening cutscene was very well done, custom CGs are always cool to see.

Sending Leandros to the bottom right tile and visiting causes a crash (on mgba).

[keymavega]

Ahh yeah I need to revise how in doing the power scaling for hunters. Tbh need to kinda redo that whole thing lol.

As for the difficult enemies, I was planning for this hack to be more challenging as it will be fairly short.

Thank you checking it out! And im glad to hear that you like the look

[keymavega]

Thank you so much for checking out my hack

I admit the map is quite dense. I did intend for players to approach enemies more cautiously here, though being completely passive might not be the intention. The dogs in particular, the interactions with them should be hard and fast (dont forget to move leandros your first turn!). I will be keeping these notes in mind for the next chapter.

Big oof on the tile crash, not sure what to do about these emulator issues

Oh also I need to change how in doing leveling just in general. I might include those changes in v1.1

[keymavega]

Hello!

I don’t know what the usual cadence is for project updates, but I will be doing them weekly. Unless people don’t like that. If you want more regular updates, do peep the Trello linked in the OP.

A lot of work done on chapter 1 & 2 this past week. Ch.1 updates were mainly bug fixes and polishes, specifically with stats and balance. This also ended up making that chapter a bit easier, I hope not too much.
Ch.2, I got most of the script written and implemented. Also did some mugs, palettes, and implemented some battle animations. I’d say the primary thing that needs to be done is all things map.
I also got ahead of myself and implemented some systems that will be used in the future (hopefully you will like them!).

My main concern currently are the emulator related bugs people have been posting about, I’m really not sure how to tackle those.

If anyone knows how to deal with emulator related bugs, let me know.

The current plan is to put out Ch. 2 & 3 the next release. I believe that this will give the player enough exposure to the characters and story to get a good understanding of the experience. Current projection for that release is in 2-3 weeks, depending on any unexpected issues.

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TLDR: making good progress, ch.2 done soon, next release in 2-3 week. Help me with bugs.

See you next week

[keymavega]

It’s been another week!

Sadly not too much to report this time. A lot of life stuff happening with not a lot of time to dedicate to this project
Also I injured myself towards the end of this week so I couldn’t do much on a computer either lol.
But as for what has been done, almost finished with another portrait and some adjustments to animations.

Next week we are coming out swinging! Hopefully will get ch2 wrapped up by the end of it.

Take care of yourself fellas

[Bowiechowie82]

You don’t have to worry about finishing the hack right now. Take some time off, I have 24 romhacks to play! Hope you get better.

[keymavega]

Thanks! I do enjoy working on this though so hopefully I’ll be back on the horse soon. I appreciate the concern

[Lukirioh]

I thought it were in spanish since Tierra Maldita means Cursed Land in spanish xD it’s a shame … We have very few projects in spanish … Good luck with your project

[keymavega]

Haha sorry to disappoint. The spanish is more related to the theme/setting of the story as it takes place in a fictional European-esq place. Im not sure how much of that will show in this hack though

[keymavega]

Welcome all to Week 3
Awesome news, just finished up Ch. 2

I’ve been working on the support system, which is implemented for the most part, just need to finish writing up all the actual convos for these next couple chapters. After that I can officially start on Ch. 3, which I wont be doing anything too crazy in that one so it shouldn’t take too long. maybe I can get it done in a week… The timeline will be the same regardless though since I need to get more playtesting in.

Also got plenty of bugs fixed, huge shoutout to 7743. This dude is goated.

Lastly in personal news, I’m still busy with life stuff, but I am feeling much better. Which means we are back on the grind

Peace and love everyone

[Lukirioh]

That dude it’s the dev of FEBuilder

[keymavega]

Hello! Week 4

A small update, bug fixes and playtesting ch2.
Will be working on writing the script and map layout for the next chapter this upcoming week.

Stay hydrated

[keymavega]

Yoyoyo, Week 5

Map for ch3 is done and the pre-battle cutscene is also done!
After balancing and better figuring out the flow of battle, I’ll be putting together the post-battle cutscene and do playtesting.
Btw, if you want to help with playtesting lmk

Expect the next release (ch2 & 3) to be out in a week or two!
And then after that… there will be an announcement.

Sweet dreams kiddos

[Bowiechowie82]

I would like to playtest. And I see that you are making progress!