Why there are no (more) Lex Talionis games? I mean, I’ve read it’s the best tool and everything, but it seems there’s nothing major, but Lion Throne and most of the great romhacks are from FEBuilder.
Which tool is the best if I have 0 programming knowledge. Is LT viable?
SRPG lacks guides and I have many unanswered questions, but most things I want to do I can and it’s easy and comfy tool, just the art-style is horrible. I have no art design skills too, but thanks to tinkering with FEBuilder, which overwhelmed me and couldn’t do a thing at least I’ve learned that you can swap color with the rubber to another color in Paint, although paint.net doesn’t have it or it didn’t work for me. In that way I could recolor some character portraits from GBA to a different hair and it was fast, simple and fun. In the other hand portraits from SRPG didn’t work, because they have more colors and it’s impossible to replace just 3 colors to have completely different hair or clothes. Those graphics have more shades or something, so it’s annoying.
Note that I have no time and ambition to commit into romhacking, just want to tinker a bit, have fun for a while and that’s it. It’s too addicting and I am scared I won’t touch grass again if I fully commit, but even SRPG sucked me for a week and every single moment I’ve been thinking about it and rebalancing my little first project. Thing is I don’t like the art style and prefer GBA one and wonder if 0 coding awareness wouldn’t be a problem, especially that LT seems to not even work without installing python or java, or whatever it is (I have no idea, I know such things exist, but for me it’s black magic). FEBuilder seems okay, but let’s say I want to share final project with friends who don’t have/want to install 3rd party software like gba emulator, etc.
Its still a relatively new engine, its legacy version was around since the late 2010’s and its current version has only been around for 4 to 5 years now. Just give it time lol It’s a great engine to work with, it just doesnt have the same time and legacy behind it as traditional romhacking does.
Oh yeah no programming know-how required. There’s a dedicated discord server and wiki for asking for help and learning the basics of the engine.
Oh yeah and to build off my first answer, I can name a LOT more good LT Maker games off the top of my head if you want recs:
Myriad Fortunes (like Wii said lol hope you like blackjack!)
Embrace of the Fog (If you want a rouge-like)
Absolution (havent played it myself but seems like a solid game from what ive seen)
Thanks, interesting concept, but I prefer more conservative gameplay. As a mini-game in base/side quests - sure, but as main gameplay idea - not so much.
There are a bunch of LT games really, all you have to do to find them is search “lt_engine” and if the devs have properly tagged their games you’ll find all the lovely work.
You can also join the LT Discord and there’s a channel within that has most of the games released. Fittingly it’s called game-releases.
On another note, why would your first go to be MF, Wii lol?
If you’re looking for a complete project that’s something a little more “FE” I’d suggest Fate of the Fallen, Blade & Claw, or Daughter’s of Braghedunn.
As for the question at hand, you don’t have to install any other systems to use the exe version of LT Maker, that’s a simple download and click to use.
The only version you need to install git and python for is the git version. And the only difference being these two versions is that the git one is updated in real time.
And when you want to share your LT project with friends, all you need to do is click a button in the editor to build your project and you’ll have a folder you can zip up and send out to whoever.
And you mentioned being able to swap colors easily and not being able to do that in paintnet. You can do this pretty easily, by using the magic wand tool set to 0, pick the color you want to swap out and then swap to the fill tool set to 0, global fill, and with anti aliasing turned off. Then the fill tool will swap out your whole selection with said color. I also recently learned you can click the cog in the upper right hand corner of paint.net to change settings that will persist after the program closes.
From my own experience with my project, while it is not truly required, it can help to understand programming logic and some basic concepts depending on what you want to do. Going and reading the code (but not necesarily coding yourself) to search for what functions you can use to do wathever you need (for example, making a skill that only works in your turn) it’s also very helpful, Of course you can ask in the discord if you need to anyway.
However be careful with updating the engine because bugs can appear as a result depending on what you had done before.
There’s swap color option as well. With the magic wand there’s a problem, because some sections might be separated, even lone pixels, while rubber in paint manually moved all over the image is more convenient to me in such cases.
There’s a little lightbulb when you’re using tools like magic wand or bucket fill. If you click it it’ll turn into a sun and that makes it Global over all colors everywhere. Forgot to mention that
But I am an artist who primarily uses paint for my work, and I DO love using the right click to erase into color swap trick XD
You can change colors (for almost anything) directly in FEBuilder by clicking the underlined Palette button. Then you can change to colors by entering different numbers of clicking the color and selecting the new color. Though if you want to edit more than just the colors the sprite (such as the color distribution) you will have to import a png.
Paint dot net does have a recolour tool, its not quite a simple as the eraser tool on the OG paint, but it does allow for slightly more tweaks. Its not as obviously intuitive however.
Then it will recolour the colour you have in the primary slot with the colour you have in the secondary.
The advantage it has over the OG paint colour eraser is the adjustable brush, so you could recolour in a larger area if you wanted. Otherwise its probably better off for pictures that aren’t limited by the 15 colour limit for GBA pixel art.
Which is another thing LT has an advantage on. No color limit lol
And I didn’t ever investigate what that overlapping circle icon was.
Thanks a lot Garytop, definitely going to play with that when I get a chance. Might be a better tool for any lazy recolors than bulk selecting and using the hue adjuster
