We are the Headband Gang, a team that officially formed about 2 weeks ago. We set out with the goal of making our own Fire Emblem project. We’re mostly greenhorns with a few experienced people thrown in to help us out. In that time, we worked around the clock to create an alpha of our hack, that entails the first book of our story, Fire Emblem: Scourge of Proxima!
The game focuses on the life of Ulyaoth, prince from the nation of Proxima, a kingdom known for its might and pride. Ulyaoth, the middle child of King Alteon of Proxima, is sent out to quell the bandit menace encroaching upon society. With his loyal servants Sir Imperial and Sir Rufus by his side, he sets off to hunt and destroy every bandit in Proxima. His journey leads him down a dark path, where his ideals are challenged by a grim reality. Nothing is as clear as it seems.
This alpha will over the first "Book" of our story, Sin. It consists of a prologue and 6 chapters (Prologue to 1-5x, any further is regular FE 8) following Ulyaoth as he travels through Proxima. In Books 2 and 3 we will expand upon the world, but we divided our game into Books so we could focus on creating one portion of the game without overwhelming our new team. Below is the link to the first official build of our hack, please let us know what you think! Note: The game is optimized for Hard Mode, so play that .
They did it so fast wow
And now i feel like I’m lazy and full of s*** no its because I ate too much .
I’m excited to play this
And more excited to do more work too
Yeah, the plan is we want to deal with it in chunks so we aren’t overwhelmed by the sheer amount to do. It helped keep us focused to some degree as well!
Oh, wow, this looks really cool! I like the design philosophy of splitting the project into multiple books, too!
I’ll play the hack later to see what I think of it, but I like what I see so far!
To think y’all finished this in two weeks. I was part of the development team, and I’m still kind of shocked about it.
Anyways, to anyone who reads this, please give us critique, and hold nothing back - these guys are new, and anything you can say about it will be helpful. I hope y’all have fun playing it, though!
Just played through it, it’s quite enjoyable. Feedback n stuff incoming:
Here's a few whoopsies:
Derrick has weapon ranks in axes and bows Short bow has no description, if you want it blank just put [.] and it won’t bork the stats displayed There’s a few characters who still have descriptions from vanilla
General Stuff:
The varying objectives and gimmicks do change things up, makes each chapter fun to play.
I see you’ve added the skills system but there’s no personal skills (aside from best skill) or class skills (aside from canto and the thief skills), what’s up with that?
Any reason why the lord doesn’t have a Prf weapon? (If it’s story related I wouldn’t know, I just button mash through dialogue like I do with everything else).
Aside from 1-1, I never really felt forced to use Impy
When eventing reinforcements, it’s nice to move the camera over, wait a bit, spawn them, then wait a bit again (CAM2 -> STAL -> LOAD -> STAL). Really makes sure the player knows there’s new enemies (not needed for fog of war maps, cuz duh).
There sure are a lotta poison weapons. Not really a complaint, just not something you see often in hacks.
Gameplay Stuff:
Prologue: Lotta work put into this one, even has a fancy cutscene map. I wouldn’t recommend any changes, it does what it needs to do.
1-1 : This chapter was a lil tough, forced me to use Impy (Jeigan ftw). It presents itself as your run of the mill ‘cut through the enemy and kill the boss’ early chapter; but that gets thrown out the window as soon as the reinforcements show up from the mountains. It becomes much more of a defense chapter but without any chokepoints, which I really enjoyed. You get a gold star for 1-1.
1-2 : Kill the bandit, Where’s Waldo edition was definitely a fun gimmick. First time I got fucked because I was moving at too fast of a pace. What’s up with the weird range+turn hybrid based reinforcements? Is it to make them some kinda ranged based ambush spawn (they’re set to spawn on ally phase)?
Maybe add additional enemies hiding with Briar? In all likelihood every other enemy is dead by the time you find him. Then he just kinda sits there by himself with a handaxe, kinda anti climatic. You still get a gold star though, fun map.
1-3 : Killer weapons in a fog of war map are a real dick move. I really liked the torches as green units gimmick; however I never really did feel any pressure to escape, the abundance of forest and mountain tiles made it real easy to take care of the enemies as my dudes took a leisurely stroll to victory.
1-4 : It flowed nicely, and the range based reinforcements were a nice touch to add pressure both ahead and behind the player units. The throne room was a lil boring, with the 3 dudes standing in a row just chilling out.
1-5 : Not sure how fast you expect the players to reach the green units, but I was like 2 turns away from talking to Cherry before they showed up and just kinda chilled out off in the distance. I never really had any difficulty pushing forward, then by the 9th turn when I got the warning, I was already at the top of the map.
1-5x : Probably my favourite. From the title to objective and everything in between. Having multiple paths you can take was great. No issues here. You get a gold star for 1-5x.
Art Stuff:
Lovin’ the mugs; Rosetta is best girl. I don’t have any actual constructive criticism for you here since I’m no artist. I just wanted you to know who best girl was in case there was any confusion.
Music Stuff:
Don’t think there’s any custom tunes here, have you checked out the music repo? We have over 100 f2u songs:
-Personally I think a lot of the gameplay critiques you say have some validity and I’ll work to adjust them to be more fun. Also all the errors you had listed have been fixed.
-In terms of skills, the main reason we have the skill system is to display growths, however it’s also nice to display class skills. So for the most part it’s a visual/quality of life thing. (Also Rosetta and Impy get to have “Nice Thighs”). It’s possible we will add skills down the line, but for now we’re keeping it mostly vanilla.
-For the personal weapon, we want one eventually, we just haven’t really thought of what it would be or when we would get it for Ulyaoth.
-For music we definitely will consider it later down the line but for now we wanna focus more on the essentials of our game. However, I do appreciate the repository link and I’ll look into it.
I hope this clears up your questions, and we all appreciate the feedback. Thanks for playing our hack.
Thank you so much for the super detailed feedback!
We’ll fix those whoopsies as quick as we can for sure, gotta make sure everything looks clean.
General stuff:
We added the skills but we decided to hold off on them for now and will incorporate them later to some degree. It would have been a whole extra level of balancing we weren’t ready for.
Same thing with a PRF weapon. We wanted to add them looking into book 2, we wanted to keep things vanilla item wise as we set a deadline for ourselves to keep the process moving. We already are in the works of adding more dark tomes to make the progression flow better!
Gameplay Stuff:
We’ll definitely look into further balancing into 1-2 and 1-3. For 1-2, we were going back and forth a lot of how the ambush spawns would work. We had the idea of having reinforcements appear with Briar but felt at the moment it would be a bit unfair if even more spawned with him if other units already had moved.
In 1-3, the enemies were all supposed to be hidden turn 1 from the torches, maybe we can make slight tile adjustments to make the enemies advance faster.
1-4 was a bit weird to balance in the throne room, we definitely can try to spice it up a bit. Looking forward we will expand the game, so everything else will probably get rebalanced to change how units progress.
1-5 we could probably make the reinforcements spawn sooner, we want the player to feel some fear when they spawn.
I personally like the odd composition of units to it, it’s much more fun than normal 5x.
Thank you for your comments, we’ll do our best to make this hack even better in the future!
I’ll admit that the killing edge myrmidon in Ch3 was my idea. The mentality was that they’d be a scary unit that would push the player forward.
Though, judging by your description of Ch3, I can’t tell if it worked or not. Regardless, I designed Ch3 from the map, to the enemy placement, so point all the blame at me there.
I got a chance to play this yesterday, and I sent some stuff in DMs, but I wanted to go ahead and play through at least the first few chapters again so I could possible rearticulate my bigger thoughts and get a sense for how the plot feels when I already know what’s coming. Figured I’d share my refined thoughts here so that the entire team can see them, rather than just Flare.
Gameplay
As far as gameplay goes, I agree with everything Chair said up above. I do have a slower playstyle than Chair, which led to a lot of blank turns where there wasn’t much motivation to do anything. I’m normally okay with this in the middles of chapters, but for example in Chapter 1-1, most of those blank turns happened while the boss was the only enemy on the map. (When I say blank turns, I generally refer to turns just reorganizing inventories or prepping to move forward in the chapter, not just ending turn without doing anything)
Art
I do think some of the portraits are a bit awkward. The shading on Garo, for example, seems a bit janky to me, but I’m no artist. Most of the other mugs look good. Impy’s mug looks great but I’m not sure how well it fits the tone. I know it’s his character, but the santa hat and cup are just out of place.
Writing
The big thing for me, personally, was the plot. The writing itself was nothing special, but it was far from bad. The tone was inconsistent, and even playing through it a second time, I still felt like there were moments where it should have been more serious or could have been lighter. It’s difficult to see exactly what the team wants as far as tone goes so it’s hard to say one way or another. As far as the plot goes, I felt like it moved too quickly and didn’t always make much sense. I would advise trying to add more dialogue that really pushes Ulya to act the way that he does, as well as make the transition between Chapter 1-2 and 1-3 cleaner. I don’t want to spoil for anyone who hasn’t played yet, but I think I detailed this fairly well in my DM to Flare. Upon playing for a second time, the basis for the plot itself is good, but the execution is fairly sloppy, and that may just be from the fact that there’s only been two weeks of work put in. Cleaning up the plot shouldn’t be too difficult, even without adding chapters (though I personally might recommend adding one or two to this first arc)
All in all, I think that the gameplay of this hack is really interesting and brings some ideas to the table that we haven’t seen much of. Especially considering that only two weeks of work have gone into this, I’m really interested to see how this turns out! If you guys make a Discord server, I’ll be sure to join and playtest whenever be possible. Good luck with continued development!
I can’t really say much about the gameplay since I wasn’t involved in that, but for the art, will say we’re working on that. My mug in particular, I think Vandal commissioned Glaceo (the guy who made my mug) for a hatless version, but I haven’t heard anything about that.
Will see what we can do about the writing, though.
And thanks for the interest in our hack! We’ll be sure to work as best as we can to improve it
I can say for sure that the story was handled a bit messily. A few people argued that humor was unfitting for the events, while others argued that we shouldn’t just make everything so gritty. One of our writers, Alessio, also complained about the consistency of the writing, some chapters’ dialogue feeling plain and whatnot.
And as Imp said, it’s nice to get this feedback. We appreciate the time you took to write this.
Thank you for the feedback! We’ve been at work trying to improve the writing, the initial process was a bit disjointed as a whole. We’re planning on addressing this and streamline how writing works. Hopefully we can make it a lot more consistent for book 1 and in the future!
Hey there,
Thanks for your input on the hack! I’ve been thinking of ways to fix the story and the inconsistency for a while now. We had a system of rotating authors but that system seems flawed. Plot is currently being reworked as has been said before. Do you want to join the server (and possibly help with Playtesting/some story stuff)? Your help would be appreciated! If so, DM either ZFlare, Imperial or myself (Prince Periwig #8170) and we can put you in there.
Thanks for your comments!
-Alessio
We’ve been hard at work fixing up Book 1 based on people’s critique. So far, we’ve completely redone the script and the maps, and eventing should be finished soon.
Expect the v2.0 to be out in about half a week-ish.
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Derrick has weapon ranks in axes and bows
Short bow has no description, if you want it blank just put [.] and it won’t bork the stats displayed
There’s a few characters who still have descriptions from vanilla