Title doesn’t leave much to necessitate further explanation but I’ll give it anyways.
I’ve been here for almost two years now, and while that’s fine and all, I know that the hacking community has flourished during and even before the days of DSFE, and many veterans from those days are still here.
For those of you have have been here before Awakening was released, when did you join, what made you join, and what has made you stay? For those of you that have been here for less, do you think you’ll stick around as long as the veterans have by now? Why?
And if anyone has any interesting stories from those halcyon days, feel free to recount them; I’d love to hear them.
Been on FEU for only 5 years, but in the online fandom since 2005ish. Originally joined because I had just finished playing FE7 and wanted to look for tips, tricks, etc. - things that I might not have known about, since most other games that I had played had cool stuff like that.
What got me to stick around originally (besides the games themselves) was seeing what I had assumed to be a screenshot of characters that weren’t playable in the game being playable, which I then found out was a sprite mock up that someone had done. This intrigued me, and so I started trying my hand at making similar concoctions (they weren’t good at all) and eventually befriended some of the others in the spriting board and learned from them and developed my craft. I ended up joining the IRC chats, following the hacking threads, being part of early attempts at modifying graphics (back when you had to line up portraits over the character you were replacing or had only small boundaries outside of the existing frames of animations to modify to), etc.
After that, I was kind of ingrained in the community, and gravitated towards friends’ hacking projects and, then, just general graphics making for the community since I had focused most of my efforts on that or planning, data, chapter layout, and writing (and no one really needs too many “Idea” people). After SF updated their forum software and stupidly required users to use their e-mails to login instead of their usernames which everyone had been using for years, I transitioned over to FEU “full-time”.
hi my name’s runa, i’ve been here for a bit more than two years (with a large break), so that doesn’t entirely make me a veteran. however, i was here before the huge febuilder boom, so that’s gotta count for sumn’!
i remember hacking before i had discovered feuniverse, trying to read off of ut1 and inserting mugs using feditor. struggling to get map changes to work with mappy, hacking fe7 of all things (yeah that’s right i’m calling you out, current fe7 hackers. fight me.) i remember being so happy when i finally inserted a battle palette after like three hours of constant work, and i remember wanting to insert music but wishing there was an easier way than the method in ut1, where you had to use that mid2agb with that random girl’s face in the rom. i never ended up getting that to work, so when i learned buildfile was a thing and i finally got a custom song working, i think i almost cried lol
i hope i can stay around for as long as some of the big boys, i’ve got a project to finish! as for if i ever finish that, i’m not entirely sure if i’d stay or not. but it’s not like i haven’t made friends or anything, so i’d probably stay just for the company. if i have time, i’d love to help with other peoples’ projects, even if those projects only ever really want transcriptions of some obscure jrpg boss theme that’s five minutes long with a prog chrod progression and full orchestra. but this community has helped rekindle my passion for composing music, and i’m really thankful for that <3
I’ve been around fire emblem since 2003/2004 when I first played FE7. I was an active member of the Neoseeker community in those days, but also frequented Sanctuary of Strategy and Serenes around that time if not a little later. Was on and off with it over the years but by the time FE11 came out I was not really into FE.
I remember attempting to dive into hacking when nightmare was new, so probably around 2009-2011. I played an old build of Tactics Universe (pre TLP) as well as Ostian Princess, Elibian Nights but never beat any. I mostly got into fan games because once I learned about emulation I wanted to play FE6 so badly. I manually randomized FE7 in nightmare and sketched out multiple projects, but found the technical hurdle too daunting at the time.
I went to uni and largely stopped with FE stuff after my first year. Didn’t get back into the community when I attempted to hack again after Builder was released. I was stoked at how much more accessible things were now. In particular, I remember hearing about VBA being done in a week and thinking that was an insane achievement, and wanted to see what else was happening.
Hacking used to feel way more closed off and sharing was seemingly discouraged. It’s nice to see how far the community at large has come since those days, and how much easier it is to make stuff thanks to the tools and shared efforts.
I like helping people and enjoy FE talk so I’m sure I will be around even after my project is complete.
Edit: as for why I’ve been around so long, I never was really active in this community until I started hacking, and also fell out FE more broadly for a good chunk of time, too.
Ever since I first played TLP, I always wanted to make a hack, but I wasn’t able to until 2018 when I found out about FEBuilder and got a laptop to use. I joined FEU in July 2018, and throughout my many hacking adventures, I’ve stayed here to eventually post a project and see what’s going on in the hacking community.
I remember playing FE7 and FE8 wayyy back in 2003-2004 when a friend introduced me to fire emblem and it was love at first play. Since then, I always dreamed of making my own fire emblem game with my own story as I’m a big story person. But the community and tools weren’t as advanced as they are now so I just kept dropping in and out of serenesforest and bwdyeti’s old site like back in 2011-2012. Started serious hacking and story boarding around 2015 and have been constantly just playing around with stories in my head since then. FEBuilder turned out to be a big help and the GUI i’ve been hoping for since 2015 when nightmare, hexator, event assembler, and feditor were the go to for hacking.
I remember I was thinking about how fire emblem was dying out before awakening came out to revive the series. And hacking was a way for me to just “keep it alive”, but really glad the series is as popular as it is today. Fire Emblem, Golden Sun, and Chrono Trigger were the defining games for me and my interests in my childhood.
I hope to still be around long after I complete my hack but you never know with life getting in the way. Even if I’m mostly lurking most days, I hope to still be around and help with my limited knowledge. After college, it just seems to be less and less time in a day, with only a few hours to work on my hack after work. But, I plan to finish no matter how long it takes.
I’ve been playing FE for like a decade now, though mostly only GBA FE. After getting 100% on FE7 and FE8, I started looking into hacks and hacking. All the pre-FEBuilder stuff looked very daunting, and I wouldn’t try to make anything until a couple of years ago when hacking tools got better and other custom engines started coming out. With a certain engine, I was finally able to make something. And now that I have, I can finally make those fan games that I’ve always wanted to make. When they’ll come out though, I have no idea; but they’ll come out. Eventually. Hopefully.
I doubt my perspective will really be all that interesting, but I read the responses others gave and it made me want to share my own now too.
I honestly can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t around the FE communities in some form. I never really made accounts, especially in the early, early days, but pretty much since I got access to the internet, my primary focus was on the games I liked and communities focused on them. I was always shy as a kid though. I still worry about looking dumb a lot or being a burden, but it was worse then. My memories are vague, but I remember when word was first starting to spread about some of the earliest hacking breakthroughs. I think I first learned about them through the gamefaqs boards, and oh lord does that take me back. I was hanging around those boards from around the time I was 10 or so.
I’ve come and gone with a lot of communities over the years, but I’ve stayed pretty constant with FE ones because it’s a series that just seems to garner dedication and love from its players. No other GBA and earlier era game series has this much of a dedicated hack/custom creation following (that I know of). Not even the GBA pokemon games have as many tools that are as easy to use or well-made as the GBA FE games. That spirit has always pulled me in, and I share in that spirit too. If I had the skills, I’d have been trying to make my own tools long ago.
I’m going to be 26 in less than a week, and I think the most constant hobby I’ve had throughout my life has been hacking these games. I’ve hacked each and every game that’s officially come out in English, and played every one that’s been translated at all. And I honestly feel pretty proud of that fact, and of the time I’ve spent watching the community grow over the years, even long before I started actually participating in it.
I don’t know if I’m really a veteran, but I’ve been part of FEU/SF for about five years.
The hacking community has developed some seriously wild tech in the past few years and I’m glad to have been involved. I joined the community for art but quickly switched to the technical aspects of hacking. I knew I was skilled when CC was rounding up wizards for The Destiny and I was added to the group (even if the project halted before I could do anything neat). With The Destiny and circles’ buildfile demo (flashbacks to FEE3 2016) the Everything Assembler revolution was beginning. Then, in 2017 came the skills system.
We’re still moving forward, with fancy build systems (shoutout to Stan for literally everything he does, you’re incredible), organizational structures, tools, and more being created all the time. I think more people than ever are writing their own assembly.
I stick around these days because I like the people here. They inspire me to do wacky things and challenge what I know about hacking. I don’t think anyone could have predicted using EA for everything, or that FE8 would overtake 7. I don’t think the people fiddling with Nightmare modules and a hex editor could have predicted that we’d be writing Makefiles and posting our projects on GitHub.
Finally, I guess, I don’t know how long I’ll stick around. These days I think I’m here for the people in the community, and spend less time hacking games.
Apparently been here at FEU since 2014 and Serenes Forest I think 2011 so 6/9 years respectively. What made me join was battle sprite tutorials and I think my goal back then was to make a hack that showed just what the fe7 engine could do if one wasn’t worried about not making it too wild like the original fe7 was. Found out about Ragefest and focused more on that but it changed into something else in the end and kind of feels like I wasted a lot of years with barely anything to show for it.
Now I am working on my final project for FE hacking I am hoping achieves my original goal with dynamic maps during battles, complex chapter goals, and advanced AI. However this too is taking a long ass time because I keep revising the gameplay if I don’t think it’s interesting/fun. My deadline is the end of this year no matter if it’s finished or not. Then moving on to pokemon hacking.
I plan to still be around but as a lurker like I was at the beginning. I hate discord and absolutely hate it’s impact on all forums in general so I won’t be surprised if I am considered a ghost member of the community due to my low activity but I am still here.
FEU, on and off for probably 13 years? Maybe a bit more?
I say on and off, but it was a BIG off of about a decade, where I left the whole FE scene. I originally joined FEU because I had a bunch of friends here, and then it became Tactics Universe and I left, because I wasn’t into the hacking scene.
Decided to come back because I felt like pixeling again and FEP was mostly dead, and I found some friends still around. Got involved with a few hacks in my first month back and never left.