Another development update for my forum friends ^.^
With FEE3 on the horizon, it’s gonna be a busy month coming up here, and so I figured now was the best time to talk about what’s been in the works, since I may not have much time in the near future. You might have noticed I missed my estimated “out by the end of this month” deadline on 0.0.2, and I have a really good excuse, which is that I was very busy playing Magic the Gathering.
The other, better excuse is that the scope of the update has increased substantially. As I replayed the game more and more to test the new stats, I found myself increasingly dissatisfied with certain chapters beyond the two that I had planned to rework. While some chapters, like 1-3 and 1-5, are far better than they used to be with the benefit of the more durable units, other chapters, such as 1-2, 1-4, and 1-6, are far weaker. I’ve been working on a pretty major rework of 1-6, while also working on a minor rework of 1-2 and being vaguely annoyed that I can’t figure out how to fix 1-4.
For 1-6, the tight quarters of the map were proving incredibly stifling, and the increased tankiness of your units lead to the chapter mostly being a bait-fest. It… kind of already was one… but it’s worse now. And so, a rework was needed. Minor tweaks weren’t cutting it, as I just ran into different flavours of the same map design issues, so I grabbed my sledgehammer and broke down a few walls.
The map functions mostly the same in terms of objectives, but the flow of combat has been drastically revised. Hopefully, this new version of the map is more engaging. Big thanks to RandomWizard for helping with the map aesthetics on this one, as well as for helping me with a few portraits for the 1-2 bosses ^.^
We also have a few rebalances: Wrath is updated to meet the 40 crit baseline of the hack. Keio’s tome is updated to reflect this value as well. Her purpose as a unit has been tweaked, too – she’s a little bit scrappier, with growths more oriented towards encouraging her to make productive use of her Hex skill, and her offences are slightly lowered as a result. She’s still got a bad case of coinflipitis, but there are now edge cases where she becomes vaguely tanky! Exciting!!
Malgrave has also been tweaked. He exists mainly to fill the role of your tankiest unit in the early game, which was particularly important early on in development when units were even more fragile than they are in 0.0.1. This role is somewhat less important now, so he’s being tweaked to be almost more of a secondary jeigan – higher bases to help him leverage his strength early, lower growths that will likely lead to him falling off by the end of act 1.
Also, for my light brand lovers out there, terrible news! Not only has the light brand been USURPED by a pretender item, called the flame brand, but it has the GALL to have substantially lower stats! Even worse, your sword units are having their magic stats nerfed because of how consistently they were outclassing Keio at the whole dealing magic damage thing. If this makes you mad, please vote for a magi, warlock, sorceress, or another magical/magic-wielding being in your next local election.
There are other changes planned before the next release – 1-1 is being rewritten to provide a greater introduction to Fane as a character; 1-2 is going to be extended outwards to the east to give more room for less oppressive enemy positioning and to make splitting more of a necessity; there’s going to be some additional art and music that wasn’t in the initial release; the prologue involves two new units, an additional sneak peek into some of the units you’ll be playing around with in the midgame; and finally, even more funny village conversations!
As for when I plan to release this, absolutely no clue. I already massively underestimated the scope of the update earlier, and I’m not going to give an ETA when I so strongly suspect it’ll be wrong. I do plan on having 0.0.2 released before FEE3, though, such that anyone brought in by the game’s showcase will be treated to the best possible version of this build that I can manage for them.
Oh yeah, FEE3! Lady of Masks will be there, as well as a whole lot of myself in the rest of the event as I plan on helping a few close friends with their own showcases, while also serving on the LP committee. For anyone in the devcord who enjoys watching me play hacks, you’ll get quite a dose of that action at this year’s FEE3, so make sure you watch them all
As you may be noticing, that’s a lot of work that isn’t progress on 0.0.2 I just described. Once recording starts in earnest, I may find it quite difficult to find time to make meaningful progress, which is a contributing factor to that “no ETA” decision. I am very excited to be working on FEE3, and also very excited to have my project shown there, but for anybody who I’ve spoken to in the last month where I’ve said to them “don’t play my hack until my cool update comes out bc I don’t like where it is right now,” sorry for the delays!!
Aaaand that’s everything. I was really hoping the next time I’d be posting on this thread would be accompanied with a patch, but unfortunately that hasn’t quite worked out. With any luck, that post will be sooner rather than later. I’m gonna take the chance to shill my development discord again: beyond just talking about the development of the project, we also just have a nice little community forming in there, and it’s a good place to go both for getting updates on the progress of 0.0.2 and also for just hanging out – we frequently stream romhacks and various other strategy games in there and it’s a fun time.