Really liking some of these new portraits.
Important news. I found out a serious bug in 4-6, wich prevent the chapter from being played. I advise to wait, as I need to release a new patch.
1 Like
version 1.70
-Fixed a bug where you couldn’t deploy units in 4-6 and 4-8
-Fixed a bug where you couldn’t access 4-8x
-Fixed a bug where the gate of 4-9 wouldn’t open as intended
-Fixed a bug in wich the summoners of 4-8 would spawn the wrong units
-Added time limits for 4-10 and 4-7
-Adjusted the turns in wich reinforcements would appear
-if the screen goes black whenever you start a chapter, close, reopen, then restart.
-The assassins on 4-7x can now use the lockpicks
-Fixed chapter 4-8x, I advise to kill as many enemeis as possible, before things get messy
-Fixed some reinforcements not moving
-Added another Latona staff in Vert’s inventory, for final chapter.
Now, the game should progress without bugs. I’m still trying to find a solution for the supply glitch, but now I have other stuff I have to do.
3 Likes
Should I write an event that, at the end of each chapter, put all of the fallen unit’s item into the convoy?
Version 1.71
-Removed some fe8 talk options
-Added a few talk options in various chapters
-Fixed female berserker animations
-Added more cutscene in the final chapter
-Added Ze diong recruit dialogue
I almost finished the story. Next patch I shall add new portraits.
6 Likes
3-1x cannot. I just tried to play it and moving any unit past the starting point causes a Game Over. I checked the ROM and I have no idea why this is happening.
Having played this hack up to 3-1x, though (which is a LOT of maps played), I have to say it doesn’t feel like it’s been playtested. The script, in particular, is fraught with spelling errors and other mistakes, some of which are explainable by ESL (which means I can forgive them) but incredibly numerous nonetheless. I also find myself unsure whether I’m supposed to take the story seriously; on the one hand, some of the plot points are rather grim (such as the matter of the sibling lords’ mother), and there is clear effort put into the tale, but on the other hand, words like “yeet” and “cringe” (in the modern slang meaning) are used in the script.
Right.
I don’t even know what to say here.
I thought we were not supposed to say that in our scripts.
I… sure.
Yeah.
The text formatting itself is also downright bizarre. The A presses do not match sentences or punctuation at all, and the text is often aligned in such a way that A presses are redundant (because there’s more than enough space to wrap up the sentence in the current textbox). An example of this:
Not even the worst case.
Stuff like this is worse. Especially when it happens several times in a row. And it does happen several times in a row.
Then you have stuff like this (red text was not spared from this, which makes parsing gameplay-related information harder than it needs to be):
That being said, I think the biggest problem by far lies in the visuals. The AI mugs do not look good and neither do many of the recolors, as well as some of the splices. The use of colors is extremely off, and there are many characters with incorrect blink frames as well. The battle animation palettes have similar issues, and there are also many cases of the promoted palettes not matching the character’s outfit in the slightest (one of the characters, a troubadour clad in purple, can promote into three classes and all of them wear green). The shading of the portraits is also terrible in some cases, with the AI-mugged characters looking unnaturally pale a lot of the time, and the modified repo mugs are often a downgrade from the original mugs. There’s also an issue where some portraits use FE6/7 colors while others use FE8 colors, which contributes to a lack of cohesion, particularly when mugs in both colorations appear on the screen at the same time.
AI mug (based on the pallid skin tone, that one seems distinctly AI to me), splice in FE8 colors, and FE7 color mug, all on the screen at the same time.
Similar stuff here. The mug on the right looks like it’s from a different game, and it also has a filter that looks like the FE8 flashback scene filter. I’m assuming that’s also an AI mug.
But this is far from the worst thing.
Red outline for the cape.
Two promotions, same unit, and neither has the right colors based on the mug.
See the two mugs on the right. There are so many problems.
Right mug looks like she’s dirty rather than dark-skinned. It’s a really unhealthy-looking skin color. Left one, on the other hand… well, I seem to remember a repo mug that looked vaguely like this, and this one is definitely a downgrade if I’m right, particularly in the face/head area. I know that artwork is difficult, but just keep the mug like the original if you’re not improving it, please…
Choose your fighter.
I never want anybody to look at me with those eyes.
I’m genuinely unsure where the eyes are.
That is definitely not an icon for a hammer.
Separate class for female Soldiers. Still called Spearman, for some reason. Also, those are not recruits, so I consider the Recruit map sprite out of place here.
This I know is a repo mug, and the colors are… well, the whole mug is crusty now, what else can I say.
Even a certain class sprite wasn’t spared, and I’m not sure why it was modified to begin with.
Witness the steel pegasus.
Speaking of “I’m not sure why it was modified to begin with,” the fire and thunder affinities are completely messed up, and the water affinity looks like it’s been petrified.
The other affinities look normal, which makes this especially jarring.
I’ve also come across several instances when I needed to fix the ROM myself because I was facing an issue. I encountered a talk conversation that broke the game because there was an error in its event (it caused some unknown unit to spawn and die, and the talking unit vanished from the map. Crazy stuff.), and I had to give Steel Lances an actual hitrate because they were given 7 Hit (yes, really. You read that right. Steel Lances have 7 Hit, as opposed to every other weapon in the game). There was also a chapter end event that required a fix on my part because the game would hang and fail to progress to the next conversation.
Enemy with the epic 7 Hit Steel Lance. There was a map where an entire group of these spawned as reinforcements, and as you might expect, they were not exactly a threat.
I fixed this eventually, but it was funny.
The maps are probably the biggest positive highlight, as they look quite good and play reasonably well, although there does seem to be an emphasis on putting a ton of terrain in the player’s way. And speaking of putting things in the player’s way, almost every enemy has either an effective weapon or a killer weapon, which can result in ridiculous movement forecasts such as this one:
It’s like a minefield.
I’d say the gameplay is, overall, the part I enjoyed the most, and my favorite map was the sidequest early into the game where you control a fleet on a winter map. That was fun to figure out.
Unfortunately, I also can’t say the eventing is very good, either. In a lot of conversations, characters are moved without turning them around, creating a strange effect – and sometimes, characters overlap with each other, because a portrait isn’t erased. The erroneous blink frames in a lot of mugs also make certain story scenes much more funny than they should be, because the characters’ eyes keep moving around on their head, for instance.
My man has been cloned. No, this is not deliberate. He just wasn’t erased at a certain point of him moving.
There are also miscellaneous eventing problems. For instance, almost every transition in the whole game so far has been glitchy, which is something that occurs if you don’t fade in/out in your eventing properly. Then you have stuff like this:
Reality breaking in the background. That’s not what the map is supposed to look like.
Receiving an item. This is not an isolated incident.
As you can see here.
The classic. Playtesting would’ve found this immediately. Stuff like this is the reason why I don’t think this was ever properly playtested.
I tried to preview a class. Tried. The promotion animation was skipped as well.
Me when I ToggleMouthMove.
Me when I [.A].
One of those is not like the others. (This happens more than once throughout the hack.)
Me when one Sacred Stone remains. The visitable houses in 2-E also had events that are clearly meant to happen in future parts of the story (they featured characters who were supposed to be in prison at the time).
There’s also the part where act 2 has a different army from act 1, but shares a convoy with act 1’s army, which is clearly unintentional (the end of act 1 outright tells you that your money and items are gone now).
All in all, while I’ve actually been having fun playing this project, it’s… extremely flawed. It needs a lot of fixing, like a near-complete overhaul of the script, the eventing, the eventing of the script, and the visuals (other than the maps, because those look fine, apart from some tiling errors introduced by tile changes – 3-1 has an issue like this in the middle of the map after a certain pathway is unlocked). I can see this being a good hack, but, uh… a lot of work is needed. And actual playtesting is needed. I shouldn’t have to fix the ROM to play the game, and I’ve had to do that several times by now.
5 Likes
I’m sorry that you had so many issues. But I’m thankful that you had time to express your discomfort. I’ve been working on this project for almost four years and while I’ve been trying to spare as much time as possible to fix this mess, I’m still so far away from the goal. I would you like to find more people to help me, but I’m cheap and not many wanna work for free. I’ve been very busy lately and frankly, if I don’t find people who wanna help me (for free), I think I’m gonna let this project simmer in the background. I would like to move on with my life. There are many things I would like to do and I got tired of fe hacking. My biggest mistake was to make it this big.
I should’ve made it smaller (20 chapters) but I got overconfident and overestimated by abilties and my time on this earth. Honestly, I feel frustrated. I’ve been working so hard to accomplish a project, all while studying for my exams, and I’m still not done with both of them. Maybe I should’ve never began this project to begin with. Since I was 10, I always wanted to make something that people would enjoy, you could say that this is my call. I would like to be a game programmer/developer, but after so many years I have so much to learn. It feels unfair for all the time I invested in this project (wich I decided) to have still so much to do.
Sorry for my venting, but life isn’t going great for me.
Originally I wanted to make a gameplay focused hack (wich is still the main focus of the game) then I tried to put a story. A friend of mine is currently helping me with the story, and so far, he’s liking it.
Regarding the convoy problem in part 2, I’ve been trying to fix it but to no avail. Maybe I need to dig deeper, but I’m not comfy with assembly.
All in all, I reached my goal to make something that can be played without game breaking bugs…well, until you mentioned 3-1x. I admit that I didn’t playtest some chapters. I hope at least that you found some enjoyment in what I made. I will stilll try to correct my mistakes (after July I’ll release a new patch) but don’t expect me to finish this anywhere close.
It’s okay. I wasn’t trying to put you down, really. I was just being honest.
I did. Like I said, there are things to like about this, and at least the gameplay is good enough to not filter me. I think mapmaking is definitely your strength, all in all.
3 Likes
And I know making a hack isn’t a small thing, especially one this long. I see potential in this, and I do want to play it to completion. It’s just that I think a lot of stuff needs to be overhauled (which, I realize, is obviously a tremendous effort).
I feel like you might’ve benefitted from playtesting consistently. By fixing stuff as you went along, you could’ve prevented repeated errors, and you would’ve probably ended up with a more polished (although, most likely, shorter) product.
I can’t stress this enough – playtesting is massive. It always catches something. The obvious things, of course, but also miscellaneous things. There have been bugs and incorrectly working things in other hacks that would never have been caught without playtester/player input.
1 Like
I know, but apart from people writing here, I got only a few people playtesting my hack. I asked Akira Sou if he wanted to stream it (even though I know that it looks messy) but he’s busy.
I would like to have more people work with me, especially in the writing and portrait department.
For everybody else, another patch will be released at the end of July.
I’ve got a bit of free time in the weeks to come - I wouldn’t mind taking a pass over some of the writing, if not just to catch some of the scripting errors/typoes, if you’re still looking for help.
I’ll play the current patch over the next few days, if you’re looking for feedback on that as well.
You can write here or in private for any errors that Vulgard didn’t spot. I really appreciate your interest in my mess of an hack.
Y’know, this is just my two cents, but if you ever want to like, really let it go and move on…
Why not make it open source?
Like make it where people are free to tinker and modify and develop the hack further themselves. Release one final build into the wild, and… there we go.
Something for someone else to see somewhere in the future and decide to try and fix up themselves.
And moreover, they can release it publicly for other people to try and download to experience for themselves (provided they credit you as the original source).
That way rather than someone having to fix it themselves, or wait for a fix that will never come, someone else could have already done it for them somewhere else. (Think like a bugfix mod for a game on Steam).
… though all of this is just an idea. It’s ultimately up to you what you wanna do with it. It’s your hack, after all.
I prefer to monitor the development and polishing of the hack. The only things that are missing are some talk convos, fixing portraits and some bugs. I don’t wanna see people overhauling chapters like turning a seize map into an escape. I know about the Dream of Five Remake, and with all due respect to Parresia and his effort in the maps, portraits etc. (I played the rom) I can see that the remake is too different from my liking. It feels to me like a completely diffrent game from the original(still good though), and while I can say that is surely an improvement, this isn’t the Dream of Five that I once knew. It’s like I remake a fe6 but with new units, fix weapon hit rates and give Roy an early promo, wich is an improvement imo, but it’s isn’t fe6 anymore. It’s like I take a copy of the Mona Lisa and give them a mustache. But if anybody wanna help me in things that I need, then I’ll gladly accept it.
Maybe I’ll consider making it open source, but with the rule of not modyfing the chapters per se. They can modify the unit stats, unit portraits, fixing some trivial bugs, but I’m adamant on the chapters.
4 Likes
do5 bros…we lost. its so unequivocally over
9 Likes
I don’t think Dream of Five is really applicable to your analogy–for what it’s worth opening up your hack or not is totally up to you, I have no horse in this race, but we are also the original devs on Dream of Five in the first place so it’s also our choice as the original team to do as we wish.
Astra’s the third person to beat the new version, even, after myself and Parr.
5 Likes
What the original devs plans for a game they are making can vary over time. Now that I’m older there are many things that I would’ve done differently with my hack. Even then, there will be things that despite our effort as devs, nobody will like. For example, I never liked the fact that Kolbane reclassed into a soldier. For as much as I love the soldier class, it was ingrained into me that Kolbane was a born mercenary. I’m not telling you that you cannot change classes, but it feels “wrong” to me. It’s like if you find a long lost friend and you find out that he changed proffession, nationality, character etc. I would still use him as is, though.
I dont care if you like the original more or the new one my issue was using us as part of your argument against opening it up to the public. we were never the public. This is misleading.
3 Likes
Sorry for the misunderstanding, I had no intention to mislead.
3 Likes
Version 1.72
-Updated many portraits
-Fixed palette of Salafir and Paolus
-Fixed a bug in 3-1x which caused a Game over in the first turn
-Fixed some typos and dialogue bugs
-Adjusted some skills, in particular, mages and mercsdon’t have class skill. I did this in order to make the game a bit simpler
-Fixed the black pegasus portrait
-Fixed a minor graphical bug while promoting Sika or Machali to Deva/Harrier (battle anim are still missing)
4 Likes