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 Dragonās 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 Nightsā 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 unitsā 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 Castleās 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 entryās 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
Iāve 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 isnāt representative of all of the things I know about the game, only things I feel Iāve been able to format (mostly) adequately. Thereās a lot in here that I feel that I could do better. Thereās a lot that I know that is too disorganized to include. There just isnāt enough time or motivation for me to do all of it.
Even with that said, I still believe it to be an amazing thing Iāve 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 isnāt something that you can just download and use to build a hack. The code involved isnāt 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 isnāt 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 wasnāt any mention of me and I didnāt 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 articleās author via email under the (in hindsight, crazy and rude) assumption that I somehow wasnāt 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 didnāt talk to either of them between the articleās 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.
Iām still sorry about that, by the way.
Although Iāve 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 Iāve taken when dealing with people. Everything, everyone has since moved on.
I think thatās for the best, though. I donāt want people to be upset at the author now. I didnāt want media attention before and I just really donāt want any after that.