Post-FEE3 Discussion and Thoughts

I did the thumbnail templates, and yeah, the extra space is because of two considerations from last year:

  1. a 1080p thumbnail represents a 4.5x upscale from GBA’s 240x160 screen, which felt a bit messy to leave as a non-integer scalar, so this year the GBA assets were upscaled to 4x for ease of access.
  2. SRPG Studio projects don’t have the same aspect ratio as GBA, so last year we had to either scale them up to a non-integer scalar and induce some blurriness, or add a chunk of whitespace that looked worse.
  3. While the template was my contribution, we had a team of people doing the thumbnails, some of whom were new to GIMP, so I wanted to make the template simple to use so newcomers could use it on their own.
  4. We included the option (as demonstrated in the Frozen Throes thumbnail) for creators to include with their submission a battle sprite or cool sigil to fill some of the whitespace; in those cases it would have been obscured by the timestamp. Ideally we’d be filling that whitespace with something more interesting (a custom logo/sigil perhaps? what’s there right now is the magic circle used by witches in SoV)

I’ve never made graphic assets specifically for Youtube before, so I didn’t consider where the timestamp would be or how much it would obscure. Perhaps next year we’ll shift the borders to be bottom-right instead of top-left to allow for this (if Youtube doesn’t go changing their layout without warning as they tend to like doing :roll_eyes:)

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Out of the 3 FEE3s I’ve submitted to, I’d definitely say that this was the best of the 3 for the reasons that pretty much everyone else mentioned.

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Strongly second this. The Let’s Plays were long and all started to blend into each other while the trailers were easy to make it through and fun. Eventually it got to a point where once I saw another hour long LP i skipped through for a few minutes to see if there was anything interesting and there wasn’t. I think the point of a game show is to convince people why they should play the games I think LPs are often a very uninteresting way to do that

I think a lot of these commenters are forgetting this is a community run event. We do not have the ability to deck out every let’s player with top of the line equipment, and every entry’s author isn’t able to make a trailer.

While I understand the critique at them, they’re not problems that anyone will ever be able to do anything about.

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Not everyone who submits a project has the same goals. For relatively unknown projects, a snappy trailer is probably the best way to bring attention to it. My project is fairly well known on FEU, so I was happy to get to talk with Xil about some development insights and ideas behind the story. But I’m not bothered if someone skips my showcase because it’s an hour long LP video.

And there’s a trailer for my next hack inside a patch that comes with Deity Device, so I didn’t really need to show a trailer for it here.

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My thoughts about FEE3 is simply amazing with the line-up.
The favorite parts of FEE3 is seeing the Animation Showcase and the trailers for the ROM hacks are really good from my perspective.
The ones that I am willing to try out in the near future are:

  • Fire Emblem Shackled Power: Why? Because they gave a explosive presentation on one of the chapters and seeing a playable Guerilla class.
  • Fire Emblem Book of Exiles: I am so looking forward in seeing the public release of the ROM hack and give them positive feedback to improve a lot.
  • Lengths of Time: Pandan is giving a well-deserved sequel to Vision Quest to wrap up the loose ends from the original. Plus, he’s taking his time with the hack itself and making it like a FE5 GBA quality, with some returning cast of Vision Quest.
  • The White Feather: A ROM hack that is focused on 1920 based on Historical-facts is really interesting to try out.
  • Aletheia: A trailer that caught my eye on it which shows an interesting story and potential as well.
  • Legends of Avenir: A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure that would bring me some new routes to explore and possible endings as well. It feels like a Henry Stickmin game if you know what I’m saying.
  • The Seven Siblings: Knowing that the ROM hack is almost complete and showing off one of the gaiden chapter as well.
  • Hiraeth: Legacies: The trailer and world-building is very interesting to say at least. Plus it shows a route split that focus on the two main characters that could affect the plot and fate of the continent itself. It looks very interesting.
  • Grug’s Primitive Disadventure: A joke hack that shows an interesting trailer involving an Diamond Edition which adds new things to the hack.
  • Prophecy of Flames: A ROM hack that shows a lot of potential and hoping that Tim will be a interesting main character.
  • Myrm Emblem: A ROM hack that is purely focus on Myrmidon and Edgelords, count me in!
  • Twilight Sword: It’s a shame that the Untitled Thracia ROM hack didn’t make it to the submission, but hey, we got Twilight Sword that is made by the same creator so it was not a big loss for this year’s FEE3. Still looking forward in seeing some gameplay from that Untitled Thracia ROM hack when that time comes.
  • Heart of Hothr: We don’t get to see much FE5 hacks, but this one takes the cake which shows Eldigan’s son, Ares and his journey before meeting Seliph
  • Frozen Throes: It shows some interesting exploration in the tavern and an mysterious Caribou Rider at the end of the video.
  • The Chthonic Curse: It shows fully-recorded voice acting and the prologue. Biggest… unexpected… expectation… ever!
  • Team SALVAGED: There’s not much to say about Team SALVAGED, except that a Tactician and Spear Fighter is in progress.
  • The Lonely Mirror: The trailer itself is really great, it showcase the artwork of the favorite units that are based on popularity. Even they add more changes to the game as well. Hope that I get to play it in the near future.
  • Deity Device: I heard that this ROM hack is mostly story-focus and I want to see it for myself. The ROM hack mostly focus on Magic being the main focus and it looks like they made it more versatile based on the gameplay itself.

TL:DR
The lineup for the ROM hacks are so varied for this year and I was hoping for a sudden surprise like FE 7x with a new update or something, but alas, it’s nothing to see in the end.

Hopefully, new things will come in next year’s FEE3 with new and returning ROM hacks.

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As a viewer I just want to know these things: Who is part of the project, who is showcasing it?
What’s special about your hack and is it completed/progress so far or how can people help you, if it’s not done yet? If a video doesn’t tell me that, I’m not interested.

Mostly my issue with this stance is that pretty much all of it is something a project thread can tell me in about 30 seconds of reading. Videos, trailers in particular, just seem like an awkward format for presenting these. If that’s all FEE3 is supposed to do, we ought to cancel the event and just make a forum thread where everyone posts their text pitches.

Moreover, let’s be realistic: the vast majority of us are making GBA Fire Emblem projects, presumably ones with stories we think are good, gameplay we think will be fun, a full length original adventure, etc. This does not lend itself to different trailers sticking out in terms of what you can actually see in the game itself (Lullaby of Lust had an awesome trailer because of the high effort put into the non-game material). Despite our name, we do not have the breadth of E3.

This was kind of an issue I saw with the trailers, mine included; I went with a trailer for Storge because the game doesn’t lend itself that well to a 1 chapter LP and it had already been complete for months so it didn’t really warrant a playthrough. For Aletheia I thought I had enough genuinely new mechanics and could put together a story thing to make it stand out, maybe I succeeded. I suppose I made easily digestible content but I’m not sure if I actually showed off my projects that well, and in particular differentiating from all the other projects. I suppose if the alternative was that people simply wouldn’t watch if I had done longer showcases, that’s technically better? Leaves somewhat of a bitter taste in my mouth, but I guess that’s how it goes.

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I’m happy to see more trailers mixed in with longform LPs. LPs where the developer co-commentates to give insights into their development process are good, too.

Like I said last year. FEE3 needs to figure out its purpose. Is it a circlejerk event for this community, or is it an expo that seeks to introduce new people to hacks they hadn’t heard of before? I lean toward the latter, or rather, I think the latter should be the purpose. This means streamlining the event wherever possible to focus on introducing hacks in the best light possible to as many people as possible.

So… we got more trailers this year. That’s a step up in my perspective. Trailers and dev-commentaries are the gold standard, even if neither have the highest possible production quality.

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Well I was thinking of putting most of that in the description, at least the current state of the project and the names. Because yes, I could look that up, but look at how many projects there are. I would love to give as many as possible a chance, but I will look out for the completed ones first and of those the ones that are the most promising. That’s how I approach that as a viewer.

I think it’s easy to, when you’re on the outside looking in, say that the event would be better off with a bunch of shorter trailers and the like, but it misses a lot of key points. The first and most obvious is just how one would go about organizing such a thing on a community scale. The reality of how FEE3 is run is that things are in flux; people drop out, cancel on their commitments, submit work late or not at all, or otherwise fail to contribute for a variety of reasons. Often, this is just that something came up in their personal lives that’s more important, or they found that there were unforeseen complications with completing the work assigned to them.

One of the big ideas that was getting thrown around before the event started was the creation of trailers for each project, but the fact of the matter is that this would add a huge layer of volatility and overhead to the event. If any of the trailer creator steps off the project, that ends up being substantially more disruptive than if an LPer drops out. You can’t expect the project creators to all handle the trailer creation themselves, either; it’s a skillset completely different from hack creation that creates an artificial barrier for entry, and the goal of the event is to showcase as much of what the community is working on as possible, to encourage discussion about other people’s projects and to give players an avenue to discover new hacks.

The main reason I can see for making a switch to trailers would be if the entire event was overhauled to be about advertising romhacks to people that aren’t already in the scene; if you’re already in the scene, most trailers are honestly not going to be able to show off much that’s super eye catching unless the hack is very unique – animations from the repo that most romhack players have seen before and the promise of “good gameplay, good maps, good story” are ultimately no different than just reading the forum post pitch for a hack, but if you’re not already part of the scene they can be eye catching, easily digestible, and engaging. However, FEE3 isn’t really about converting FE fans into romhack fans, it’s about showcasing what the community is working on to the rest of the community, and there’s only so much a trailer can tell you about a hack in that context.

Something I’m curious about as well is whether or not people are really imagining the reality of what 80+ amateur community-outsourced trailers for games made in the same engine would actually be like to watch. Experientially, Romhack A will often play completely differently from Romhack B, and this can be seen pretty plainly in a gameplay showcase. But how different would trailers for those games be from each other? What about when you throw in Romhack C, D, E, and the rest of the alphabet, thrice over with change? Then the complaint would be that the showcases don’t feel distinct enough from each other, don’t give enough information, don’t match up with creator expectations (because, of course, unless creators themselves were heavily involved in the process every step of the way, we’d only have whatever guidelines we’re handed with which to create a trailer from.)

Ultimately, if the goal is to have FEE3 happen in the first place, the current framework is the one that ensures it can actually happen with minimal hair loss from the stress. Most of the changes I’ve seen recommended are, explicitly, extra work, extra manpower, and extra communication to accomplish, and all three of these are things that have caused issues in the past for the event.

Even this, which is probably the most reasonable recommendation I’ve seen for trying to address this problem, doesn’t really work 100% of the time. People would still complain about the length even if this was made a hard rule that we would enforce, but beyond that several LPers already do this. I know I, myself, tried during my showcases to offer some kind of summary of what was interesting with the projects I was aware of or that provided some kind of blurb I could riff off of, but a lot of games are submitted with no instructions beyond which chapter to play, with save files that don’t work, with bugs that have to be worked around to get the showcase to work (I know I had to go into builder and change some events around in one of my showcases to get a chapter to run properly, bc I was working off a dev build.) It’s just plain difficult to coordinate the hack creators and the FEE3 team, with no way to guarantee a timely response, cooperation, scheduling… one of my showcases was recorded on the deadline day due to how hard it was to find a time when we were both free to do the recording the way the creator wanted, and that was a creator who was very communicative and cooperative. If somebody just isn’t responding to your messages, what do you do? Cancel their showcase? Go on without their input?

Ultimately the event this year ran extremely smoothly, with very few problem showcases and, at least from where I was standing, very little organizational stress. Unless a dedicated team is set up to manage the event, rather than having it run on a volunteer basis, it’s going to be prohibitively difficult to try to expand the scale and effort of the presentation while still keeping things moving. If people want to change the entire concept of the event, change its target audience and its methodology, then they also need to be the ones to step up and commit to helping make those changes a reality, because for so long as we can’t guarantee the necessary level of commitment from volunteers to expand the event in that way, the course of action that actually ensures FEE3 runs is the one that makes the process of actually being a volunteer as simple as possible.

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The vast, vast majority of projects presented at FEE3 are in-progress. Frankly I don’t think the event can serve your purposes as a viewer, given that that is unlikely to change.

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The problem is, if this is going to be a circlejerk event for people who already know about the scene, then it’s an awful lot of work every year just to show each other things most people already know about.

I still think, and have thought for years, that FEE3 should be about showing off projects to the outside-hacking-community at large.

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That’s a nice sentiment but given that large FETubers note that hacks get less views than vanilla content (even when they put in effort to draw notice given that it’s literally their livelihood), outreach efforts like on places like the subreddit draw pretty much no notice, and the reality of the attention that fan content (in particular content that’s more original than canon-adjacent) garners in general, it feels like trying to fool ourselves into believing a pleasant lie of how much outside interest we can actually draw.

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I don’t think it’s fair to say that targetting people who “already know about the scene” means that we’re showing “each other things that most people already know about.” Even as someone who checks FEU multiple times a week and posts in the Discord and all that, I saw quite a few projects at FEE3 that I’d never even heard of. And there were several others whose names were familiar which I wasn’t inspired to actually play until seeing the FEE3 showcase and going “hey, that looks fun.”

And even for projects I already knew about it was cool to see them show off new content they’ve been working on.

Basically, there are a lot of hacks out there, and it’s hard to keep up with all of them. Even if you read all the FEU posts for new hacks (I don’t), you’re not always going to get a good impression of how they play. FEE3 helps people who are already involved in the community (aka the kinda people who are generally interested in playing new and wip hacks) to find stuff they’d be interested in checking out that they might have otherwise overlooked.

People new to the hacking scene in general will probably have a better time starting with a slightly older complete hack anyway.

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On the topic of LPs, I think what needs to change is how they’re presented- they need to feel better structured for the event.

Not to toot my own horn, but look at Starlit Souls: We chose people to commentate with that we knew (this is the part you could give or take, honestly). Radd had played the map a few times before recording, so he had a good handle on it by then. Both Amber and I were there with him to give insight to the viewers on things Radd wouldn’t have known on his own. Most importantly, I think, we chose to showcase a map that was a fair ways into the game, and had much more to show off as a result.

Regardless of if it’s for the community at large or just the rest of FEU, the purpose of the event is still to showcase your hack- and I think all of the above help with that. Even if it’s not someone you know, let your player run through the map a time or two so they aren’t fumbling through it (this can also help reduce how long videos are if they have a clear plan for the map going into it). I personally find commentary much more interesting when you have a dev to talk to, getting to learn the why and how behind some choices, or at the very least being there to play off the LPer. Nobody has more passion for their project than the devs!

Lastly, I really do think showing off later maps makes a big difference, at least to me. How many FE prologues have you all played? It’s hard for them to not all feel samey unless you’re drastically changing things up. If you show me a map from your midgame, where you’ve given the player time to collect more units and equipment, then you’ll be showing a map that has more to offer than one from your earlygame- and therefore showing me more of what makes your hack different from the rest.

Do I think that these things are mandatory for a good showcase? No. Do I think that any showcase that doesn’t have these things is automatically bad? No. What I do think is that, to me, all of these things make an hour-long LP much more entertaining to watch, and make it so that projects don’t all bleed together after a while.

Overall I’m glad we go to show off SLS again this year, and I hope FEE3 continues to improve in the future.

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This goes back to the comment I made about scheduling and communication. Not all devs can do commentary, and those that can can’t always work their schedule with a volunteer LPer. Not all devs have access to people they know who are interested in LPing their project for them, and that’s why the volunteer LPer committee exists in the first place. To the best of my knowledge, a lot of the LPers already do dry runs of the chapters they’re going to play before they press record (you can even hear me talking about my dry run in the video for Paradigm Shift, when I talk about how I actually hit a game over and had to arrange for a co-commentator so I could focus harder on actually playing the game). Several projects were submitted with no guidelines for which chapters to play and no save file included, so the only thing to do really beyond just making an executive decision as an LPer was to start a new game and record from there. And, not all hacks are far enough into development that they can really show off a later game chapter, since they might only have the early game made when they submit their patch for recording.

The organizers of the event have been pretty vocal about wanting to reject as few projects as possible, to keep the event open for the community to participate in. How, then, would we enforce making sure LPs are done by people familiar with the project with developer co-commentary? And if not enforced, what’s the impetus for a dev to go the extra mile to secure such things beyond them having the inclination to do so? There are already several showcases that fulfill all those criteria, but some people just can’t make such arrangements, and that’s what the volunteer LPs are for.

Didn’t you say, earlier in this thread, that you had never heard of me before my showcases as a volunteer? My hack is part of the event – surely, if we all knew of every project being worked on already, you’d have known about LoM as well?

It’s just not actually true that everyone is aware of every project in the scene. There were 80 games at this year’s FEE3, some of which had never been shown off publicly before, or have/had no forum post, and some of which aren’t even romhacks and thus aren’t discussed on FEU. Even if no individual viewer can be expected to watch every showcase during the event’s runtime, the videos still remain for people to watch if they’re curious about a project as a way to get a window into how that game might play beyond just reading the forum post.

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80% of the projects I saw this year we’re projects that I haven’t seen. Not all of us are “in” with all the current projects.

I thought this year was the best yet - it also seems to viewership was at an all time high.

I also really liked the thumbnails since it was very clear on my subscription feed where the content was coming from (amongst all the other FE-related stuff in my feed, that is)

Seeing all the projects side by side really brought to my attention the fact that most hacks are aesthetically homogenous - that’s not the fault of FEE3 at all but it did make me consider that we can afford to make some bolder stylistic choices.

I admit I only watched about 10 videos overall, since most of the other projects didn’t really catch my eye - mostly, this is just me giving advice to other hackers to consider making a project that is visually unique in some way. Since the community assets have greatly increased in volume and quality over the last 10 years, it’s a bit harder to make your project look unique now.

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Y’know not everybody has artistic talent, or connections to those with said artistic talent.

Time to learn

Why are you homeless just get a house?
^same sentiment

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