Hi!
I’ve wanted to make an FE game basically since I learned that romhacks existed, and I’ve been sitting on a story for one for 3 years now, and I really want to make the game, if nothing else than to share the story.
I downloaded FE Builder a while ago, and played around with making maps, but I had no idea how to make a map that’s fun. Eventually I gave up, and uninstalled all of the FE romhacking tools I had. In hindsight, I shouldn’t have done that because my desire to make the hack has gotten extremely strong recently. I even debated getting a tactics plugin for rpg maker just so I could make the game anyway, and that was what really made me think ‘I should just make it in the engine that I planned for.’
There’s a lot of setting stuff that I kinda went on about
The setting that I came up with is a continent called Erresuma, and it’s where (A very long time ago) a bunch of dragons, divine beings, and the like sort of made their stomping grounds, and fought with each other a lot. Humans came up eventually, and after they’d existed for a while, they made weapons that could protect them from the dragons and gods that were constantly fighting each other. One of these weapons was used to kill a dragon that attacked a city, which instantly made the dragons and gods worry about humans.
There’s a pretty long period of time where a lot of fighting is going on and it’s not super relevant, but basically, two gods stand our from the rest: Those being The Seraph, and Morrigan, and these two are basically the gods of fate, and the quickest way I can describe them is that Morrigan believes that each living thing should decide its own fate, and The Seraph believes that everything should follow the choices made by those stronger than it. These two will ultimately be the last two of all the divine beings, and are still around in the modern day.
But through all the gods making the environment all funky, a bunch of ‘human-like’ people exist, and there’s a bunch of mosters. These are the humans, demons, and fairies, which tend to inhabit different parts of the continent, but each of them live anywhere.
There’s also a god that was created by the willpower of humans, where during a war, their desire for power was so strong that a new god was created out of the remnants of the dead ones. This god, which was code named Ego by the demons, almost single handedly ended life on the continent, and caused everyone to team up and put it to sleep. And to be sure that no one would wake it up in the future, they built the Amber Tower to guard Ego’s body.
This is probably the weirdest bit of lore here, but I really love weird lore, it makes stories more fun for me.
But that’s the setting, and this is one of the more tame settings I’ve made, because I am incapable of making small scale settings.
The basic plot of the game is that: The protagonist, Lena, is drafted into a civil war to defend the king, and during a bodyguard mission for the prince, her brother dies, making her want revenge on the prince, which snowballs into wanting to get rid of the king, and then all of the nobility.
The main antagonists are a pair of best friends, who became immortal. They’ve been wandering the continent for a couple thousand years, and are looking for something fun to pass the time, so they slowly start a continent wide war, just to see if humans can handle it. These two are the humans that killed the most gods while they were still running around, and at the end of the game, they do the ritual to wake up Ego, and warn everyone that they need to scale Amber Tower before the god wakes up and ends all life.
But I’ve gone on about the story for way too long, so I’ll stop here.
One of the bigger things I’m worried about is that I don’t know how to make maps for FE games. I know generally what things are good and bad to include, but something about actually doing it confuses me. The main thing that discouraged me though, is that I can’t make music or do pixel art. I tried making a few characters a while ago, but they were just recolorings of other characters, which is extremely boring in my opinion, and I didn’t even want to touch music.
So basically, I guess my issue is probably that I focus on every single thing all at once, and try to do everything myself, because gifted kid syndrome has never truly gone away I guess.
But I really want to make this hack now more than ever, so I would really appreciate any advice on making maps, or sprite work, or music making.