The Fall of Thabes release

Projects
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Trailer

Original post here The Fall of Thabes

This is a fan hack of The Sacred Stones that takes place in the distant past of Archanea focusing on the final days of Thabes before Duma destroys it. There are 12(ish) chapters to playthrough. The game features the Gaiden magic system, though it is a bit buggy so this is an open beta until a better patch for that gets complete. Aside from that a full list of gameplay mechanics includes the following.

-Like in Thracia, Res is used for Magic and Resistance. This is better to have dual magic and physical users in the gameboy engine.

-A lot of dragon enemies. Also uses original Mystery of the Emblem’s elemental effectiveness on dragons.

-Due to a large majority of enemies being dragons, there is no weapon triangle.

-No staves or healing magic. Originally this was because the Gaiden magic system proof of concept I was using didn’t allow for it, but now I’ve designed the game around it. Elixirs are in abundance, but if you want a unit to heal, you have to take a turn out of combat to do so.

-Limited resources. There is no way of accessing the supply. So you have to be a lot more careful about what weapons you use.

-Trading works by SNES rules (ie it doesn’t cost an action to perform) because managing resources is so important without a convoy.

-Most stat boosters now boost one point at a time, but have three uses. Stat boosters are also quite common, meaning choosing who to use them on will have a rather large impact on how you’re army grows.

-Minimal cast, full deployment. There is no preparations screen at all. This is because there’s a lot of stat boosters to be had and choosing when to use them rather than performing an action with a unit can be critical, especially in some of the later maps.

-No weapon ranks. The game feels too short to justify them, especially when you also have magic as a means of attack. Well weapon ranks do exists, it’s just every weapon is set to E.

-Bonus EXP feature. You can give 100exp to any unpromoted unit, or 50exp to any promoted unit at the end of each chapter. Since there’s limited deployment, this should help units that are falling behind to stay useful.

Download link Dropbox - FallOfThabesRelease.zip - Simplify your life

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By some mad coincidence someone happened to release a Duma combat animation on the same day I released this game. So needless to say I’ve went and implemented that into it. So Version 1.0.1 has cropped up sooner than expected for anyone who wants to play it with a better sprite for Duma. Updated download link in the OP. Here’s Shyuter’s Duma combat animations.

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There’s a lot of obvious graphical issues in the trailer, and while I’m not a big fan of Valentia, I do think there is something of interest here to see. There’s some… spunk here. When I get the chance, I might actually consider playing this hack. Which says a lot, because I’ve never played any hack to completion.

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If you’re talking about the character portraits, those aren’t graphical issues, they’re intentional. Characters with off palette portraits are dragons. This is set in a time before dragons became manaketes or had any need for a human form, so rather than have a bunch of dragon portraits (of which don’t exist aside from a single Idoun portrait and I am not qualified to draw others) I chose to represent them using off coloured portraits.

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What about the battle palettes where the colours are all janky? Some of them have darker inner shades than outlines.

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Intentional graphical issues are not a thing. Issues are still issues.
But you do you ig
Not to mention the map designs…

and borked battle palette

although it’s a clever solution to use both merc and archer anim in one class, but then you can see the merc having borked palette since archer and merc have different palette order

Although, good luck with the hack!

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The sword animation on the archer is the biggest issue I think. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any combat animations for archers using swords or vice versa (to my surprise). The only infantry I could find that used both swords and bows were for lords which looked a bit too regal for the character I was going for there. Aside from that one though I did manage to find combat animations that fitted all classes using the weapons they have so the palette matches even if one might think it doesn’t look quite good.

And I won’t deny my maps could do with some patching up too. Especially the rest chapter on Day 2. I did have someone helping me with them but they only managed to touch up one of them. If anyone wants to help out I’m completely open to it though. The visual aesthetic part isn’t particularly my strong suit.

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There is the sword/bow myrmidon:
lorm_sp1
There’s also sword/bow assassins but I assume that would look off for a tier 1.

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I am already using the assassin bow sprite for another (prepromote) character. I never saw that myrmidon one though. I’d prefer Mercenary or Archer, but it is a lot better than having an inconsistent palette. I’ll put an update with that in it right away.

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Hey, so I’ve procrastinated this for ages, but I implemented that specific sprite in the game and used the associated Guy sword sprite too, but they don’t seem to gel together for some reason. The palette for the regular sword sprite is messed up. I’m not sure why though as they both use the same colours near as I can see. Is there some way of reordering the palette or something that can have them both working together? I got both of them downloaded from the same link on the emblem-anims website.

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Never mind. Managed to fix the palette issue by exporting and copy and pasting the palette box. By the way for anyone interested, I decided to do a let’s play of the game to provide something of a guide to people who might be struggling.

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I’m doing a playthrough guide of my game, but I keep forgetting to post it here. I really should so people have a chance to find it and I’m not just shouting into the void.

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Major update. The portraits in the game have all been updated, including the dragon mugs which previously used off palette portraits. I’ve added Casual Mode for people struggling with the game’s difficulty, and I’ve added what I call AI Tags. Items in enemy inventories that describe what kind of AI they work under. @Alastor15243 in particular asked for a way to know whether enemies are stationary or not, though there are several other AI types too. Hopefully all that should make the game more approachable to a wider audience of people.

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You might wanna look into using Narrowfont to make your AI tags fit.

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Thanks for the solution. Hadn’t heard of that. There’s quite a few other items I’d like to have the names fit.

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Oooh, interesting!
I’ll have to put it on the backlog due to IRL circumstances, but this does seem interesting!

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Hope you enjoy it when you do get around to it.

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​New chapter of the let’s play/walkthrough. I’ve discovered for some inexplicable reason, uploading long videos to youtube is much more reliable on a phone than on a laptop.

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