No she didn’t
4 Likes
Well, she did make an ASM recently if I’m not mistaken.
3 Likes
This year
2 Likes
My record:
This year:failing multiple translationpatches and then calling it quits for some time, then made gba fe better by pressuring people to do ASM because I am too incompetent, did not write an introduction because I do not need one, kind of-revived a hack with an unofficial project because I could, began translating FE7 patch into german because why not.
Next year:memes and finishing stuff up. Also, hacks nobody wants but I will make anyways.(4Kids Emblem hype)
1 Like
2019’s been quite a stressful year for me. I’d like to take a moment to reflect on some things that have happened.
A spooky retrospective
Cool things
MAFC
In late April a new format for the classic Make a Fun Chapter contest was hosted by Alusq. To mix it up, participants were given a set of assets and mechanics to use in their chapter and would be judged partially on how well they could integrate them.
Although the contest was geared toward GBAFE and GBAFE-like engines, I entered with an FE5 hack.
(Pictured: Opening dialogue. Skeleton portrait by eise)
My box of required things
Animation: Witch (Custom Magi)
Animation: Vanilla +Weapons (Knight)
Animation: Non-Sacaen (Nomad)
* Tileset: FE6 bridge (ch13)
* Tileset: FE7 Dragon’s gate (Final Chapter)
Gameplay concept: Monsters
* Gameplay concept: Talk conversations
* Gameplay concept: Effective weapons (e.g. horseslayers/wyrmslayer/etc)
Contest requirements said to pick four. The ones I picked are marked with an asterisk.
I chose to base my entry on a gimmick inspired by Elibean Nights’ Tale Select chapter, where you have a single player unit that talks to various NPC units to pick tales to play or things to view.
For my entry, the player is given four units and is able to pick their units’ classes and starting inventories through a series of talk conversations.
(Pictured: An example of class selection.)
The player is given three male units and one female unit. Male and female units have a different set of classes available to them. Each unit is able to pick a class from a pool of physical or magical units.
(Pictured: Tileset additions.)
With the Talk conversations requirement down and it being easy enough to give units Effective weapons, all I had left to implement were the tilesets. I went and redrew the bridge and the dragon statue tiles from the FE6 bridge and FE7 Dragon's Gate tilesets using one of FE5 Castle’s palettes.
I had to do a lot of research on FE5 tilesets to implement these tiles. I wrote a tool that ripped vanilla tilesets from the game into a format that could be edited using Tiled. This tool also contained some utilities to aid in editing and then exporting the tileset into a format that I could use in-game.
https://i.imgur.com/SGXCvEl.gifv
(Pictured: FE in a nutshell)
I had a lot of fun with this MAFC. My entry’s unit select and the fact that it was done in FE5 earned it a lot of praise.
You can get my entry here.
FE5 Disassembly
https://github.com/ZaneAvernathy/FireEmblem5
I’ve always promised to be open about my research into FE5. I could probably have published this sooner, but there are so many things that get in the way. At the time of posting, this github repository is able to build %16.59 of the vanilla game ($0A9E83
bytes) and mostly contains chapter events and dialogue.
It isn’t representative of all of the things I know about the game, only things I feel I’ve been able to format (mostly) adequately. There’s a lot in here that I feel that I could do better. There’s a lot that I know that is too disorganized to include. There just isn’t enough time or motivation for me to do all of it.
Even with that said, I still believe it to be an amazing thing I’ve done so far. Working on this has taught me a lot about 65816 assembly, the SNES, makefiles, git, and python.
It might be hard to look at this project and be amazed, though. It isn’t something that you can just download and use to build a hack. The code involved isn’t really portable, well-documented, or easily editable. Anything that is compressed in the game ends up as a binary dump of the compressed data, rather than in a format that is easy to understand or edit. There isn’t a way to really translate the game directly using this. In the distant future this might be useful for making a hack, but not now.
Not so cool things
Vice Article
In July Vice published an article about the Project Exile translation.
There wasn’t any mention of me and I didn’t handle that well. Without knowing a really good way to react, I prepared a public response to the article that you can read here. Afterwards I spent some time talking with the article’s author via email under the (in hindsight, crazy and rude) assumption that I somehow wasn’t mentioned by anyone they talked to while writing the piece.
I let about a month pass since our last email to actually chat with Kirb and Cirosan, who had both been interviewed for the article. What happened next made me feel awfully stupid. You see, I didn’t talk to either of them between the article’s release and the month after I spoke with the author. Had I spoken to them first I would have known how carefully and thoughtfully they detailed my involvement in making PE happen. They were very understanding of how I felt and provided loads of evidence of them showing what I had worked on. They did a truly fantastic job and here I was assuming they had left me out.
I’m still sorry about that, by the way.
Although I’ve cleared things up with Kirb and Cirosan, nothing about the article was done. No corrections or anything. The whole experience was a huge blow to my confidence and is just another misstep that I’ve taken when dealing with people. Everything, everyone has since moved on.
I think that’s for the best, though. I don’t want people to be upset at the author now. I didn’t want media attention before and I just really don’t want any after that.
11 Likes
2019 retrospective
-cancelled a hack
What did I do the past few years again
I lost my team donation fund 
late to the bandwagon but oh well
Last decade, I
-liked 2000 posts
-started an elibean(elibian? I dunno, spelling is hard) nights lp that will probably take longer to finish than EN itself
-started working on a hack, then gave up after ~30 minutes of work once i realized that Hacking is Hard™
Next decade:
-figure out how this hacking thing works
-make something for MAFC if i can figure out how to hack in time(which is not very likely)
-be 0.0001% more productive than last year
2 Likes
All I really did this year is routinely check-in to see if THWD and Ternon was running smoothly and make flimsy promises about when I’ll finally be able to start hacking. Speaking of, looking like that’ll be delayed at least another 9 months unless I finally crack and just save up for a PC now, which I just might do.
You, Elibean Nights.
How much wait…
can you handle?
Can you withstand the pressure
of one who’s deadline has passed?
The weight of the death
of that proyect?
Weak hacks succumb quickly
to a strong Mangs…
Good map design is like a toxin
to those whose communities
are unfamiliar with such
overwhelming quality…
2020, just for a moment,
grant me that power…!
6 Likes
Hey, someone might pick the canned hacks up later, so no worry.
Yeah I’m doing it myself with complete official Arch support.
1 Like
2019 for NICKT
better late than ne…vvvvvvvvvvv…errr…
- Made a stupid emotional post in my art gallery that’s still getting likes 'cause ya’ll suck.
- Started accepting paid commissions.
- Finally started work again on yet another rom hack, this one called Human Strings.
- Put all my efforts between commissions and Human Strings, doing a lot of internal world building and plotting.
- Stopped working on GBARadiance, my small kinda-project making GBA mugs of FE9/FE10 characters.
- Did a few mugs for Chair and his project THWD, including branching out into UI and menu elements by doing the status background as well.
- Finally got tired of seeing all the obvious and semi-obvious splices in my spriting collection and began extensively fixing and reworking to make them more unique.
- Got called an SJW in the FEU discord and decided to leave again, going back to just being a passing-through member.
- Stopped taking paid commissions due to lack of motivation and low self esteem.
- Lost the drive to work on Human Strings and spriting in general.
- Human Strings is cancelled.
- NICKT is cancelled.
My first post of 2019:
and then for a fun little comparison:
2019 sucked.
5 Likes
The best way to counter being called an SJW as an insult is to take pride in it.
1 Like
0/10, not enough FE7 Karel in the picture.
1 Like
2 Likes