I hope to make my own fangame one day, but I just need to make sure that I don’t go off topic and also, I need to come up with plans for writing to. So for me, it’s probably all of these except for maybe Finding the Motivation.
I checked gitlab just now to confirm this, but I started a project February of last year and had four separate months where I made 0 or 1 commits throughout the entire month, so I’m gonna say “finding motivation” has taken the largest % of time for sure.
For me it’s debugging by a large margin, followed by writing and music. A lot of the stuff I’m doing ASM for isn’t well documented so I spend a lot of time decompiling and reverse-engineering and then debugging in No$gba (which doesnt have speedup >:( unless i want to play everything at x2)
With a remake you have the advantage of a lot of stuff being written for you already, but Gaiden/Echoes have a lot of maps that straight up don’t have any dialogue and things need to be created wholecloth that don’t feel out of place next to the source material. It’s definitely a thing I have to be in a specific mindset to get done.
Music, just due to listening fatigue, is one of those things I have to drop for a bit and come back to in short bursts, and also something I have to turn off my regular working music for so I don’t enjoy doing that when I’ve got a good playlist going.
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Definitely playtesting (which includes balancing), especially since my game is meant to be difficult, which means I have to repeatedly playtest every chapter to make sure they’re beatable, fun, yet difficult, all by using underleveled, lowered growth units with almost no class-effective weaponries.
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Big mood but I’m able to speed up on no$ with backspace… at least that’s what it’s mapped to for me. It’s not quite as quick as other emulators, but it helps a lot.
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I’m shocked that writing is 2nd place. IMO that always come super easily to me support and all.
My main issue is I stare at the map for the next chapter, not wanting to place enemies or design the level, or any secrets, or side objectives, or recruitmetns. That takes so much outta me.
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From experience, the poll is as good as over after a day, so wow.
Did not expect finding motivation to be that high, but I guess life is a tough nut for everyone.
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Not only that, some people often stop and wonder how they’re going to get anyone to actually care about what they make. Is it the author that people have a problem with? Is their work just so far below a seriously high standard? Are they not good enough? Or is it a conspiracy against them? Like, one of their old friends poisoning the well because they feel the author doesn’t deserve any attention?
I mean. If people love producing content they’re going to keep on doing it, but lacking answers to the above can be a real motivation killer.
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"This person left a bad review of my hack…
It must be a c o n s p i r a c y to ruin my reputation!"
-Mycahel’s mind, circa January 2020
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Well, in your case, you got one. That’s a good sign.
I wish there was a delete all function in febuilder because it takes so long to delete all the tutorial prompts and unneeded continue conversations while making the start event, that is the most time consuming thing for me
editing over maps takes a lot of time too I wish there was a feature where you could fill the whole map with something like plains tiles that would cut the amount of time actually implementing the map in half
Use something like Tiled that has a bucket fill, then, instead of just FEBuilder’s map editor.
Use the tutorial disabler patch
And hold delete in an event to delete many lines quickly.
Or allocate new data for the event / list of events to start from a blank slate.
For my hack, I realized writing supports was going to be absolute misery, but I wanted to keep something similar in the hack, where my units could have some down time to talk to each other so I could build my world and characters. So I decided to add a few “Respite” chapters in, where there’s no enemies and the player can end the chapter immediately, or sit through as much or as little flavor text as they desire.
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Definitely debugging for me. As a total novice working primarily to understand the tools, my goal is just to make one single thing playable from start to finish just so I can get a proper grasp of everything. As such an unskilled and clumsy hand, I’m constantly breaking everything. I don’t often have critical issues I can’t solve on my own thankfully, but the number of experiences I’ve had like:
1: Finish making chapter. Boot for testing.
2: Game boots, load file, black screen forever.
3: Quit out, double check everything, add in missing stuff.
4: Reboot. Game goes AOINSJDOAIJSDUNSFUSCREEEEEEEEEEEEEE–
5: Shut down ASAP. Go back, fix more.
6: Reboot. Game goes in, load file, enter the wrong chapter somehow.
7: So on and so on…
…is off the charts. But hey, at least I learn a little more with each new massive blunder.
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I am a type that I like to create and when I do something I only do it for passion so I think the longer the creation of my mod is the better for me.
So when I create a mod I like every single thing of what I do and there is no downtime or that I hate.
But if I have to make a choice it is the playtesting, I think the hardest thing to do is to create a good balance of the game so as not to bore the player along with a compelling story that manages to make the player emotional and does become fond of the characters you have created.
Being a fangame and not having total control of the game, many times I have to create atmospheres and stories that fit the maps, music and graphic style of Fire Emblem.
But that’s okay with me, having to create every single thing from scratch would make it impossible to create anything without a development team to help you in the process.
I think I found the title of my hypothetical autobiography.
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This is probably oddly specific, but one of the biggest mental blocks for me is figuring out how to make the mountain tiles look like anything other than a brown blob. Something about them feels extremely unintuitive every time that I had to add a mountain range into a map, and I literally spent hours examining the mountain ranges in the vanilla maps to try to get a feel for how to place the individual tiles. In summary, I hate making mountains more than just about anything else.
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I hate mountains too, but if you want to try more at it, this guide might help:
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Graphics in general are a big gray area for me, especially mapping. Nothing more exciting than combing through every single pixel for something that might not look perfectly how I imagined, then giving up in frustration.
This is a combination of me being a perfectionist yet simultaneously too lazy to actually strive for perfection.