[HIATUS] Fire Emblem: Lady of Masks [0.1.0 - Act One Complete!] {LT REMAKE ALPHA AVAILABLE!} (14/06/2023)

Believe it or not, project is not dead! :partying_face:

1-E is done, with all text inserted and only awaiting the eventing process, but I’ve been focusing on other projects for the last little while and haven’t been prioritizing Lady of Masks. There’s a few reasons for that, which I’m going to get into, but I just wanted to clarify for anyone still interesting in the hack that no, I’ve not lost motivation for the project, nor am I feeling stuck or anything else like that. Rather, much of the work I’ve done has been outside of game, planning things out and trying to figure out some details about the future of the project as I set the stage for act 2, and the wild changes that will come with.

Before I explain some of what’s been going on behind the scenes, here’s some screenshots of some snazzy new stuff I’ve been working on.

Lady of Masks v0.1.0-0maeve

Just for a spot of fun before a big wall of text ^.^

To be plain, I’ve been feeling for a while in developing Lady of Masks that I’m making a worse game than I could be making. This is due in large part to a few factors:

a.) Builder’s limitations as a tool preventing me from easily implementing / experimenting with the more advanced ideas I’ve come up with over time.
b.) Dissatisfaction with the default builder SkillSys setup that has since become outdated.
c.) Frustration with some elements of the default FE sandbox and how difficult it is to radically change it due to the above two points.

I don’t want to spoil too much, though if you’ve been paying attention in the FEU discord you’ve probably heard me talk about some of the details already, but before I feel comfortable designing act 2, I want to change a great deal about how magic units work in order to make them feel unique in a meaningful and satisfying way. I also want to push the FE sandbox in a direction that allows for a different kind of encounter design, honing in on the resource management side of the game by adding more micro-scale, map by map considerations – think 3H gambits, but with far more limitations and much greater impact. More tools, with more power attached to them, can lead to encounter design that begets creative use of those tools, asking the player to make tougher decisions than just “is it worth using a killing edge here?”

I also want the freedom to experiment with a few ways to limit the sting of having to reset a map on death – nothing is more demoralizing than getting to the end of a long or difficult chapter, only to make a mistake and lose a unit on the last turn. I would even go so far as to call it a fatal flaw in FE’s design – losing isn’t fun, and it’s too punishing, leading to a design space where the correct move is to try to make sure a player never loses. The issue is that it’s difficult, then, to make the game truly strategic without also making the player rely on save states or else replay huge swathes of the game until they get the perfect run.

I think about Slay the Spire a lot, and how that game manages to make losing fun where many strategy games fail. It achieves this through procedural generation and by very precise encounter design, which isn’t quite something that FE can replicate, but nonetheless I find myself considering the ways that the game encourages experimentation, learning, reassessment of your assumptions, etc. at every turn. I also think about modern CRPGs, with their more tactics-driven combat, and how the ability to save at any time allows for greater freedom for the player. While their encounter design is often skewed too far in one direction or the other, the extremely sandbox nature of these games allows for this kind of design. Once again, FE is more limited; the games are linear, and so any challenge must be beaten now, but the ability to try different strategies to test your assumptions about what is and isn’t possible with the toolset provided to you due to the ability to quicksave makes for a game where you’re able to try bolder strategies rather than falling back on whatever option is always safest, most reliable, most easily executed.

Save states approximate this, but can be seen as cheating; the RNG nature of the game also means save states encourage a very “whatever” approach to the game – just do something stupid and hope the numbers work out, and if it doesn’t just rewind and do something less stupid. I appreciated the turn saves in Absolution’s dev build, where you could load a map from the start of any of the last few turns without having to manually make a save and where the game was challenging enough that I was using this feature mostly to reassess my strategies rather than try to execute the same strategies but with different RNG.

It’s a delicate balance to hit, and one I’d like to hit. I think FE nails the RPG aspect of the SRPG equation in terms of player engagement – it’s exciting to level up, to get a new powerful item, to promote a unit and see what new abilities they gain, to see how far your units have come since you first got them. FE pushes all the right buttons in this equation. As a strategy game, even with all the changes I’ve already made to the sandbox, it feels too fragile – not in that it’s too easy, but that it’s extremely simple to detect and exploit simple strategies that lead to boring play patterns that are difficult to design maps around while also designing around more active and engaging gameplay.

My hope is that, by expanding the capabilities of what enemy units can do (and, for that matter, what they can be), and by also expanding player capabilities, I can push the FE formula further into the S half of the dichotomy without sacrificing the satisfaction of the RPG half. This will require a lot of work, but plain and simple, I can’t work on the game and not do this; as I said before, while I like LoM and think it’s great and love working on it, I’m also acutely aware that it isn’t the game I could be making – the game I should be making – and that, if I want to look back on the project and feel satisfied with what I’ve done, I’m gonna have to go further.

For those reasons, I’ve been using my experiences in certain group projects to learn the buildfile format, while also talking to a few users who are particularly knowledgeable in how to use them, and setting the stage for some big moves. Once act 1 is finished and released, I’m taking the plunge and porting the project over to prepare for the sandbox changes that will allow me to make the act 2 I want to make.

I wanted to give an in-depth explanation of some of my thought process, because I know a lot of people view buildfiles porting as a hack killer, and I wanted to try to explain why, for me, this is something that very quickly went from “thing I’m considering doing” to “thing I absolutely have to do.” Working in buildfiles has felt very intuitive to me so far, and I’m eager to learn how to do more and more ambitious things with my project. Far more than that, though, is that I want LoM to be a project I can be proud of, and I don’t have a timetable within which I plan on accomplishing this – the game will be in dev for a long long time yet, and I have plenty of free time with which to continue development that likely won’t be interrupted for quite some time. With the amount of time I have on my hands, I see no reason to half-ass anything; I can devote the time necessary to port the game over, and the game will be better for it – or, at least, more satisfying as a creative outlet, which is, to me, far more important – if I do so early.

What this all means is that, after the final act 1 release, you probably won’t hear from me for a little while. I’m gonna be at FEE3, of course, and the next patch will likely be out before then or, at the very latest, on the same day as whenever my video goes up, but other than that I’m going to be working on setting up a foundation for which to build LoM into the game I’ve wanted it to be for a long long time now. Hopefully, the end result will be a game that’s bolder, more engaging, and more vibrant on a moment to moment basis.

I’ll be seeing you guys soon-ish with a new patch, so look forward to it :sunglasses:

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