Fire Emblem: Spectrum (v0.31, 9/30 chapters released)

What would you do to make a name for yourself? To build a legacy you can be proud of?

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Hello, my name is SirNicee, and I’d like to introduce you to my primary project, one I’ve been working on and had the concept for for nearly a decade, but never had the means or the drive to actually make it a reality until recently. It’s been every variety of fanfiction under the sun, but thanks to the advent of programs like FEBuilderGBA, I’m able to make it into a proper game.

I’ll give a quick disclaimer that development has overall been very, very slow. Chapters 3 and 4 took several months on their own for me to get through despite their simplicity, but the following chapters were a bit swifter, and 7x actually only took me a few days to figure out. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t expect super fast development on this project, it’s definitely more of a hobby of mine, but any chances given would be appreciated.

Click below for a few blurbs on features and such.

Screenshots

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Story

The Republic of Sardon is a young nation, having earned its independence twenty years ago through the Hailspring Pact, the end result of a lengthy and violent war with the Kingdom of Davin. The nation has enjoyed the benefits of independence thoroughly, and has become an important trading power with economic influence spanning across the continent and citizens enjoying relatively comfortable lives, even among the lower classes.

However, this would go challenged following allegations that the Hailspring Pact was, in some unspecified way, fraudulent. According to Davin, Sardon failed and refused to abide by the terms of the treaty, thus they declared it their right to take their land back by force if need be. This leads to a slow, creeping invasion, with small clusters of Davinian soldiers stationing themselves in Sardonian neighborhoods and muscling out any opposition. Enemy soldiers would be killed, while civilians would be imprisoned in old forts that Davin took over.

The story focuses on a small band of young adults who are looking to stand up to Davin’s occupation by any means necessary. Initially starting as a deliberate altercation with authorities to get themselves imprisoned, a letter from a supporter would send them on a journey that amasses the entire continent, leading to a larger, bloodier war than the Hailspring Uprising from 20 years prior.

Features, Current and Planned
  • 30 chapters planned: 25 main, 5 paralogue/gaiden. 9 (8 main, 1 paralogue) are currently accessible as of v0.31.
  • ~56 playable characters. 21 are currently accessible as of v0.31. This should make the game relatively ironman friendly.
  • Skills, including personal skills, limited class skills, and skill scrolls. Proc skills are only planned to be accessible through skill scrolls, if at all.
  • Each unit will get one skill before and after promotion, a la Queen’s Sword, to help give them a more distinct identity from their peers.
  • Days of Ruin styled tactics cutscenes that can be accessed in every map.
  • A single, infinite-use Master Seal available from the second half onward. Now you won’t run out of items to promote your favorite units.
  • Assorted non-support map conversations that flesh out your units and even give you bonuses, such as items or even stat boosts.
  • Supports build FE9-style, which is the style of the time.
On Gameplay and Difficulty
  • Three difficulty modes implemented. Primarily just autolevel changes, though there is one instance in the current patch of Hard Mode adding extra reinforcements to discourage a strategy to cheapen a side objective.
  • Balancing is done on Difficult to ensure that it’s completely doable. This could lead to the side-effect of lower difficulties being too easy, but those worried about challenge will likely stick to Difficult anyhow.
  • Most gameplay is built around trying to kill enemies on player phase to minimize enemy phase damage. Enemies are strong and not terribly inaccurate, so taking as many out as possible.
  • Not designed around ironman, but due to the high number of units you obtain, it should be possible.
Changelog

v0.31

  • Fixed the Chapter 3 armory selling the wrong items.
  • Properly implemented the Weird Lance.
  • Fixed Chapter 7x being inaccessible.
  • Fixed Rhode’s AI and death quote, and also made Chapter 8 actually beatable as a result.
  • Adjusted Chapter 8’s reinforcements to make them a bit less oppressive.
  • Marc has a new palette, in both portrait and battle sprite form.
  • A couple of typo fixes.
  • A couple of unit adjustments (most importantly, Louis has +1 Defense and Lara has -1 Speed).
  • Preliminary unit placements for Chapter 9 are done. I wouldn’t call it playable, but it should be closer.

v0.3

  • Chapter 8 is basically complete. This bumps up the total playable chapter count to nine, meaning we’re almost a third of the way to completion.
  • Extremely rough map drafts for chapters 10, 11, 11x and 12 have been inserted. Chapter 9’s map was already finished visually. Writing and enemy placements still need to be done for all of these maps.
  • A handful of C-supports are now written, specifically for those who are playable in the current build. Supports will be written at a slow trickle, likely not to be a priority in the future.
  • Because I somehow had both the Dragonspear and Dragonpike in the ROM, the Dragonpike was replaced with the Weird Lance, an anti-magic weapon.
  • Increased speed penalty on Small Shield.
  • Light magic is weaker but more accurate.
  • -1 might on Rapier and Regalia.
  • Numerous character changes.

v0.22

  • Un-nerfed Talia’s stats, smaller tweaks to other characters’ (Shannon and Helena getting Str nerfs for example).
  • The Simple Spear is now a weak brave weapon with a large luck boost. Credit to Pushwall for the former idea.
  • The Light Axe is now a throwable weapon. Giving Ashley reliable 1-2 range early should help give her more of a niche to make up for the fact that basically every axe besides Irons weighs her down.
  • Slight changes to enemy placements.
  • Fixed the lengths of stat bars.
  • Commodore’s Countermagic has been replaced with Intimidate. A far less powerful tool, but also far less buggy.
  • Aras’s Bond has been replaced with Charisma.
  • Adjusted Helena’s stats to focus more on Magic for magic sword and (eventually) staff use while making her physical combat less reliable.
  • Set almost every obtainable item to have a specific number of uses except for setting each to 0 for the default value. Setting it to 0 can cause overflow glitches and give you 90 use items.
  • Fixed Cara’s battle quotes using the same flags as other events.
  • Fixed a bug with the game softlocking if Helena was dead by the end of Chapter 7.
  • Fixed Alexis not having Shove.
  • Nerfed speed base and growth on enemy Shamans.
  • Fixed Xavier having 5 con.
  • Nerfed statboosters’ sell value.
  • Removed reaver crit.
  • A couple songs are quieter.
  • Other possible bugfixes I missed.

v0.211

  • ACTUALLY fixed Ulysses’s event, I hope.

v0.21

  • Several units have had their stats, especially growths, rebalanced, mostly for the purpose of accentuating their weaknesses. Overall, expect to see a few more 60+ and 35- growths across the board.
  • Dwight, Samuel and Ashley have new personal weapons. Dwight and Ashley I felt were two of the units who struggled the most to stand out for slots on a team, so giving them simple but effective personal weapons could help them out. Samuel, meanwhile, could have used a weapon to help him function as the Jagen-esque unit he was meant to be.
  • Gave the Fleet 25 Con.
  • Specified in the Chapter 5 Tactics cutscene which turn Roark spawns in.
  • Moved the free torch in Chapter 7x to Turn 1 instead of the Start event.
  • Let Peter actually drop his White Gem.
  • Fixed F!Fighter walking animations being in the wrong slot.
  • Swapped out the M!Cavalier sprites for a different set.
  • Corrected a mistake in Ice Shard’s description. It now clarifies that the speed buff is decaying.
  • Fixed reinforcements in 7x not being able to use their weapons + being oddly weak.
  • Ulysses no longer ambushes you when you step into his square in Chapter 4. He will only start moving the turn after.
  • Fixed several erroneous walking sounds.
  • Swapped out a handful of songs, most notably in Chapter 5 where the player phase theme was probably too intense.
  • The tiniest of progress on Chapter 9. The map is technically completable, but the dialogue is far from finished and two player units aren’t yet implemented in the map event so I wouldn’t recommend playing it just yet.

v0.203

  • Small nerfs to Beatrice, Louis and Shannon to help infantry units stand out more for spots on your team, plus a larger one to Samuel’s growths to emphasize his early game focus.
  • Swapped around unit varieties, overall having them be more on a class basis, while also lowering these personal bases. This was primarily to lessen examples of units of the same class having wildly different stats in the same map, which while initially intentional proved to be more impactful than anticipated.
  • Some classes had their bases/growths buffed slightly. Player unit bases were adjusted to compensate.
  • Fixed a duplicate of Samuel in Chapter 5’s end scene.

v0.202

  • To make it clearer that running isn’t an option for Chapters 1 and 2 (story-wise), more enemies have been made Cavaliers, including Morton.
  • Fixed peaks and mountains having lowered avoid. Genuinely don’t remember changing that.
  • Removed a mention of Chelsea + a mention of houses giving EXP in the guide. These are relics of older, non-public builds that I forgot to remove.
  • A handful of enemy adjustments.

v0.201

  • Tobias’s Provoke has been replaced with Darting Stance. As much as I find Provoke armors amusing, I was ultimately convinced that it can be far too centralizing, so after some debate I decided to give him a skill that improves his enemy phase without making him an unkillable wall as well.
  • Specified which ‘empty cell’ is important in Chapter 1. Also made it so you actually see your characters leave the other cell.
  • Fixed a few instances of enemies ‘only attacking when adjacent’.
  • Implemented an escape point in Chapter 7 so the thief doesn’t just charge at you when he gets his loot.
  • Spread people out, especially in conversations with four people, with a handful of deliberate exceptions.
  • A handful of small dialogue tweaks.
  • Removed enemy stat variance and updated to a larger version of ExModularSave. These are the fixes that Retina helped with.

v0.2

  • Initial release.
Known Issues
  • The support viewer will likely be bugged when the full game is finished due to issues with implementing more than 50 units. That being said, the actual unit menu should be fully functional and crash-free.
  • Supports are not written at this time. I’m unsure when I’ll get around to them.
  • Arguably, the maps. Full disclosure, making maps is exhausting, so if there’s any issues, it’ll probably be in stuff like the map design and the unit placement. Feedback here would be extra-appreciated.

With that out of the way, go ahead and grab the patch, or read anything you skipped.

The patch can be downloaded here.
The credits are included as a separate .txt file.
If there is an issue with credits, portrait/asset permissions, etc., PLEASE let me know whether on here or over Discord, I am on the FEU server using the same username as on here. I will have it fixed ASAP once pinged and notified.

37 Likes

EXTREMELY COOL

2 Likes

Alrighty, hotfix patch time. This has a minor balance change but is mostly bug fixes and engine changes. Special thanks to Retina for implementing a few of these for me, and also for helping me figure out they existed at all.

v0.201 Patch Notes
  • Tobias’s Provoke has been replaced with Darting Stance. As much as I find Provoke armors amusing, I was ultimately convinced that it can be far too centralizing, so after some debate I decided to give him a skill that improves his enemy phase without making him an unkillable wall as well.
  • Specified which ‘empty cell’ is important in Chapter 1. Also made it so you actually see your characters leave the other cell.
  • Fixed a few instances of enemies ‘only attacking when adjacent’.
  • Implemented an escape point in Chapter 7 so the thief doesn’t just charge at you when he gets his loot.
  • Spread people out, especially in conversations with four people, with a handful of deliberate exceptions.
  • A handful of small dialogue tweaks.
  • Removed enemy stat variance and updated to a larger version of ExModularSave. These are the fixes that Retina helped with.

Patch is in the same link as the original.

EDIT: Pushed out a v0.202 patch as well.

v0.202 Patch Notes
  • To make it clearer that running isn’t an option for Chapters 1 and 2 (story-wise), more enemies have been made Cavaliers, including Morton.
  • Fixed peaks and mountains having lowered avoid. Genuinely don’t remember changing that.
  • Removed a mention of Chelsea + a mention of houses giving EXP in the guide. These are relics of older, non-public builds that I forgot to remove.
  • A handful of enemy adjustments.
3 Likes

Gave the demo a play. Overall this doesn’t do anything super special, but it doesn’t really need to. Feels like you have a good grasp of fundamentals for map design and pacing out enemy encounters and objectives. My only major suggestion would be to vary up the growth spreads some more. Seeing the entire cast have extremely similar growth spreads that all hang around 45% is kinda lame. Show me some real highs and lows! Would help vary up units a little more. The christmas cavs, for instance, ended up not being too different for me since Beatrice’s speed isn’t all that high. Would be nice to really hammer home her role as the fast cav with a bigger speed growth, stuff like that.

1 Like

Oh, one other odd thing I noticed: the soundtrack kinda goes a little too hard. I get wanting sick tunes, but this is still Earlygame Land and you’re already pulling out Through the Fire and Flames (not actually in this hack). Save that stuff for later, yeah?

Hi, thank you for the feedback. Yeah, this absolutely is not meant to be anything super flashy, more basic fangames have always been my favorite (helps that FE8 is still probably my favorite game in the series) so doing something more grounded in vanilla-esque mechanics was a goal from the beginning.

On the points given:

  • It’s funny that you mention the Speed growth thing because I just nerfed that in an attempt to nerf the mounted units overall. Can absolutely go down the route of readjusting her stats to lean harder into the speedy cav fantasy, though it’s something I’ll need a bit of time to think on for exact numbers (same with adjusting infantry as well).
  • There’s one or two spots where I agree with you on this, mainly the theme for chapters 5 and 6. I’m at fault for that, the player phase theme chosen was very much a hasty replacement since the original MIDI I chose sounded pretty awful when inserted. I think most of the other music sounds fine, but that one I’ll 100% look into replacing fairly soon.

If you’re worried about mounts being too good, just remember to give them weaknesses to counteract their strengths. You already did a good job on this with Shannon and her nonexistent defense, for instance. Carry that design mentality to the other mounts (and just give the whole cast more defined strengths) and characters will stand out a lot more. An extreme unit is gonna stick out more than someone who’s average all around. And “average all around” is a wide net, even if units do have slight leanings towards certain stats.

I’ve asked a few others about that and yeah, I’m seeing you’re far from the only one who feels that way. I’ll probably be doing a pass-through, general player unit rebalance, mainly to give folks more distinct strengths/weaknesses, both for infantry and mounted units. Super-average growths are sort of a comfort thing for me, but I should be able to get past that for the sake of improving unit diversity.

1 Like

Alright, new patch time. This is a larger one; no new chapters, but we do have a rebalancing of a few units. Some units were slow, but not slow enough; others were weak, but not weak enough. The goal overall was largely to accentuate who’s meant to be good at what, and also to make it easier to decide who you want to use in the long run. Some units retain their more average growths, but this is intentional, some units just function better being super average, whether it be because they’re meant to simply be jacks-of-all-trades, be more supportive or have a promotion down the line that will severely improve their power.

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There’s also a handful of personal weapons, two of the three added shown above. Outside of Samuel’s, the other two are just simple, but effective weapons that give their owners reliable damage without weighing them down.

These changes will, of course, need additional feedback to help improve them; whether they’re too much, not enough, et cetera. I’ve left the last original patch before these changes for comparison’s sake, though keep in mind it also has additional bugs. Patch is in the usual spot, go give it a look.

v0.21 Patch Notes
  • Several units have had their stats, especially growths, rebalanced, mostly for the purpose of accentuating their weaknesses. Overall, expect to see a few more 60+ and 35- growths across the board.
  • Dwight, Samuel and Ashley have new personal weapons. Dwight and Ashley I felt were two of the units who struggled the most to stand out for slots on a team, so giving them simple but effective personal weapons could help them out. Samuel, meanwhile, could have used a weapon to help him function as the Jagen-esque unit he was meant to be.
  • Gave the Fleet 25 Con.
  • Specified in the Chapter 5 Tactics cutscene which turn Roark spawns in.
  • Moved the free torch in Chapter 7x to Turn 1 instead of the Start event.
  • Let Peter actually drop his White Gem.
  • Fixed F!Fighter walking animations being in the wrong slot.
  • Swapped out the M!Cavalier sprites for a different set.
  • Corrected a mistake in Ice Shard’s description. It now clarifies that the speed buff is decaying.
  • Fixed reinforcements in 7x not being able to use their weapons + being oddly weak.
  • Ulysses no longer ambushes you when you step into his square in Chapter 4. He will only start moving the turn after.
  • Fixed several erroneous walking sounds.
  • Swapped out a handful of songs, most notably in Chapter 5 where the player phase theme was probably too intense.
  • The tiniest of progress on Chapter 9. The map is technically completable, but the dialogue is far from finished and two player units aren’t yet implemented in the map event so I wouldn’t recommend playing it just yet.
5 Likes

Hm, are you sure you fixed Ulysses? The range event still triggered and he still moved on the enemy phase that I stepped into the area. Even had his dialogue play.

I know for a fact I did at some point. It’s possible I forgot to save it, so I’ll check again.

EDIT: Yep. It turns out I had the edits made, I just forgot to remove the part that causes it to trigger when entering. Fixed. Hopefully.

Just finished my run of the demo( on the patch prior to the most recent). Had a fun time, nice and tight fe gameplay. None of the maps over stayed their welcome, I averaged like under 10 turns each map which is a nice pace I find. Overall pretty much every unit contributed, though I found both monks pretty bleh. Some personal skills I found a little lacking like the f myrms gamble and Aras bond( my opinion on bond is more slanted to I hate watching the healing anim for like 3 hp). The devil sword and stalker were both very neat swords. I would bring up that I felt growths felt pretty similar but that seems to be being addressed already. This may be more of a personal thing but I was disappointed in the first two skill scrolls being mercy and relief both of which I found pretty unimportant and would’ve sold them if I was able(in hindsight relief Samuel might be the play)Swap was nice and I threw it on Louis. The small shield was also neat and successful trading of it was rewarded with surviving big enemy phases at 1hp. Overall some minor nitpicks but looking forward to more! I also quite enjoyed the ost. I managed to steal the white gem with Helena since I was feeding her a bit bias unit/actually decent enough combat with the bonus of 6 move lol.

Hi, thanks for the feedback. Glad the maps overall were good. On the points given.

  • Yeah, the monks are a pair of units I’ve had a hard time with balancing out. Hopefully the changes to unit balancing I’m doing should at least address this a little bit, and looking into a different skill for Aras is honestly something I may have to consider, same with maybe some tweaks to light magic in general down the line. Gamble’s more a skill that’ll come to play once you start getting weapons with actual crit rates, I’ll start giving those out more when future chapters drop.
  • Skill scrolls being unsellable’s a side-effect of my struggles with implementing skill scrolls in general. Giving units skill scrolls in dialogue, due to being durability-based, led to issues where each skill scroll given out this way would have a price based on the skill ID; maybe if I figure out how to fix this issue I’ll reimplement selling. I plan to keep Mercy, I’ve found uses for it, though Relief I can consider swapping for something else.
1 Like

I played Ch 1 - 3 yesterday and overall found the hack to be really solid for an early WIP. Story has a strong idea of what it wants to be, aesthetics are overally pretty good, and gameplay is generally focused. I have a couple nitpicks (some map aesthetics being a bit off like the block rivers in 3, “twenty-somethings” feeling like an awkward descriptor) but overall, most everything is good.

However, I did find that player unit quality has felt a little lackluster, so far. Part of this is enemy HP being extremely high for some classes (30 HP Brigands in Ch 3), but even against more reasonable bulk, some units fail to do any better than 3RKO. The cavs mostly 3RKOing in the early chapters is alright, but they do feel pretty same-y against most units. Rather than focusing on growths, their bases being so similar is the larger issue with them, I feel, but ultimately, it’s not that significant compared to how bad Talia is.

Her stats are a little worse than the cavs in every area, and the Prf that might buoy her doesn’t exist in the first 2 chapters and is mostly irrelevant in the 3rd (Artie can also ORKO that armor, and she can’t kill the boss at base with Regalia). And when Dwight shows up, she’s just worse than him, too; I don’t think his Prf is anything worth mentioning (it doesn’t make any significant impact imo), but he has much better bulk, better Str, and Chivalry to enhance both of those against basically every enemy, whereas Patience is pretty meh. She’s basically one of the cavaliers but without the movement or rescue utility, and if I could bench her for Dwight, I would in a heartbeat. It is possible that the Regalia will suddenly become amazing soon, but it doesn’t change how bad she is early on. I think this combat interaction sums it up:
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I don’t have much to say about other units: Artie’s obviously good, Fighter guy seems solid, Pegasus seems fine. Talia is the major outlier in the early cast and is in need of significant buffs, imo.

The only other thing I would point out is that the maps sometimes seem to expect me to be further behind than I am (like the boss calling for reinforcements when everyone else is dead in 2, the flier boss in 3 charging when I’m right at the Seize point). You could tighten that up if that’s a common trend, but if not, then it’s fine. Overall, it’s been a solid experience so far, and I look forward to seeing future updates.

Edit: Forgot one bug. Jeremy can’t be shoved because you didn’t clear his AI on recruitment (units with stationary AI display cannot be shoved).

Thank you for the feedback. Honestly, there’s a few things I can probably do to improve your issues. I over-nerfed Talia in the recent patch, she used to be considerably better but I got paranoid about her late-game performance. Likewise with the reinforcements in turn 2, they were originally a turn earlier but I got worried about them being too strict, though honestly it was an over-correction. If I’m going to change chapter 3 I’m going to need to change probably all of the reinforcement timers or just remove some reinforcements entirely (probably the cavaliers) to avoid her piling onto you in the middle of a swarm of enemies with no way to disengage. Beyond that, I can always nerf the enemies just in general.

Stuff like the rivers are going to take more time to work on and require overall heavier revamps due to the maps and their pacing being built around them, map making is something that I just do not get or enjoy doing so figuring out the best way to make them look natural is going to be a bit on the harder side.

Also have to thank you for pointing out how to fix the bug w/ Jeremy, I could not figure that out for the longest time.

2 Likes

Alright, patch time has come again. And with it an apology, because after this there’s going to be a fair while before another patch drops unless there’s a major bugfix needed. If I work on anything in the near-future, it’s going to be new maps, and those are going to take a while to make. That on top of general burnout with fixing means I’m a little tired of working on the same thing for the past while. Stay tuned for the next patch, whenever it is.

v0.22 Patch Notes
  • Un-nerfed Talia’s stats, smaller tweaks to other characters’ (Shannon and Helena getting Str nerfs for example).
  • The Simple Spear is now a weak brave weapon with a large luck boost. Credit to Pushwall for the former idea.
  • The Light Axe is now a throwable weapon. Giving Ashley reliable 1-2 range early should help give her more of a niche to make up for the fact that basically every axe besides Irons weighs her down.
  • Slight changes to enemy placements.
  • Fixed the lengths of stat bars.
  • Commodore’s Countermagic has been replaced with Intimidate. A far less powerful tool, but also far less buggy.
  • Aras’s Bond has been replaced with Charisma.
  • Adjusted Helena’s stats to focus more on Magic for magic sword and (eventually) staff use while making her physical combat less reliable.
  • Set almost every obtainable item to have a specific number of uses except for setting each to 0 for the default value. Setting it to 0 can cause overflow glitches and give you 90 use items.
  • Fixed Cara’s battle quotes using the same flags as other events.
  • Fixed a bug with the game softlocking if Helena was dead by the end of Chapter 7.
  • Fixed Alexis not having Shove.
  • Nerfed speed base and growth on enemy Shamans.
  • Fixed Xavier having 5 con.
  • Nerfed statboosters’ sell value.
  • Removed reaver crit.
  • A couple songs are quieter.
  • Other possible bugfixes I missed.
1 Like

What was buggy about countermagic?

Led to issues of the wrong quote playing if Artie had somehow managed to kill himself with it. If there’s a fix, I’ll look into it at some point, but right now it’s not a priority.

Hi there, it’s SirNicee. If you’re reading this, I take it you’re here from FEE3. If not, I’m sorry for my delivery in advance. And I’m sorry for my delivery regardless, that was like my seventh recording due to either errors that seriously killed my flow or changing the maps I was covering.

I wish I had a more substantial update to push out, but unfortunately my attention has been pushed elsewhere. I fully admit, writing this has mostly been winging it, and I haven’t had a solid plan going forward for a while. If I’m gonna make any real progress on this project, I’ll have to find some stronger focus and figure out what exactly it is I want out of this project. And so far I’ve made a bit of progress on that front.

Plans for the Future
  • Trim the chapter count significantly while only dropping the unit count very slightly. Looking at my plans, it was pretty clear that a lot of the story had a lot of fat and filler. Random fat and filler is fine early game, but once I hit the midgame I want to generally decrease the time spent doing nothing really important. As a result, I cut the planned chapter count from 35 (actually 34, as I’d miscounted my planned chapter list) to 30. Two paralogues were cut, and four main chapters were merged into two. The result should hopefully lead to a story that drags a bit less than the original drafts, while maintaining that high unit count I so desire.
  • Double down on a relatively simple feel to the gameplay. Future chapters will not be pushovers exactly, but don’t expect Maniac/Lunatic/Maddening mode difficulty even from Difficult mode, nor should you expect many out-there map objectives. I’m deciding this now because at the end of the day, my goal is to make the kind of hack that I would personally want to play.
  • Narrow the game’s tone, story, character developments, etc… Keep the story in line with an average FE game in terms of tone, pinpoint exactly where I want characters like Talia, Artie, even more minor characters like Beatrice to go, see where I go from there.

Overall though, expect progress from here to be on the slow side. Hopefully not as slow as one chapter every three months, but there’s a good chance this won’t be done until 2025 at least.

For now though, enjoy the v0.3 patch. There’s one new chapter to play (albeit in a somewhat rough, untested state, so feedback there is appreciated). Other than that it’s going to be a very, very simple rebalance with numbers tweaks and such to try to bring units I was less than happy with in line.

Changelog
  • Chapter 8 is basically complete. This bumps up the total playable chapter count to nine, meaning we’re almost a third of the way to completion.
  • Extremely rough map drafts for chapters 10, 11, 11x and 12 have been inserted. Chapter 9’s map was already finished visually. Writing and enemy placements still need to be done for all of these maps.
  • A handful of C-supports are now written, specifically for those who are playable in the current build. Supports will be written at a slow trickle, likely not to be a priority in the future.
  • The Dragonpike (previously unimplemented) has been changed to the Weird Lance, an anti-magic weapon. You may be wondering “Do the wyrmslayer and the dragon axe still exist?” The answer is yes, they do. So does the dragonspear. I genuinely never noticed the original dragonspear was still in the game files. Whoops.
  • The above Weird Lance has been given to the Chapter 3 village, with the Steel Lance now replacing Commodore’s Horseslayer. Having another horse-slaying weapon at exactly the same time as Talia getting her Prf took away a lot from Talia’s niche.
  • Nerfed the Small Shield by increasing the speed penalty slightly. This is just to give it a bit more of an actual downside, especially if someone like Shannon finds herself using it regularly.
  • Adjustments to Light magic. Slightly lower might on Shine and Divine while being a fair bit more accurate than Thunder and Elfire. There may be more tweaks to follow, I’ve gotten feedback that Aras and Alexis are both rather dull so I’ll probably need to figure out how to make them more interesting.
  • -1 might on the Rapier and the Regalia, bringing them on-par with their iron equivalents. They’re a bit too good at murdering cavs and armors, being highly accurate and having crit boosts should be enough.
  • Numerous character changes. Talia has less bulk while keeping her damage the same, Lara is slower but bulkier, so on and so forth. Generally, most characters have had some of their weaker or more average growths reduced further to try and crack down on potential snowballing later and ensuring these weaknesses actually matter.
5 Likes

Apologies for posting three times in a row, but as it turns out, v0.3 was not ready for release in the state it was in.

Yeah, I got burnt out on even playing my own hack and forgot to playtest. To any aspiring hackers out there, don’t do that. So yeah, that means bugfix. Genuinely sorry to anyone who downloaded the FEE3 build. If there’s any bugs I missed, please do post them here, this is the best place for me to see them.

v0.31 Patch Notes
  • Fixed the Chapter 3 armory selling the wrong items.
  • Properly implemented the Weird Lance.
  • Fixed Chapter 7x being inaccessible.
  • Fixed Rhode’s AI and death quote, and also made Chapter 8 actually beatable as a result.
  • Adjusted Chapter 8’s reinforcements to make them a bit less oppressive.
  • Marc has a new palette, in both portrait and battle sprite form.
  • A couple of typo fixes.
  • A couple of unit adjustments (most importantly, Louis has +1 Defense and Lara has -1 Speed).
  • Preliminary unit placements for Chapter 9 are done. I wouldn’t call it playable, but it should be closer.
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