Hiya. I’ve been working on this romhack of FE8U. There’re two things I’ll focus on in this romhack:
Eyecandy. Custom game intro, custom chapter intro, flashy battle animations, etc. None of these things are necessary in a romhack. Unfortunately, they're really fun to make. Considering the letter-count is the same, I'm still considering re-naming the project to FE Eyecandy.
Gimmicks Features. Danger radius, backup suspend saves, Lights Out puzzles, etc. Some (most) features may be familiar from newer FE titles. Others have taken inspiration from elsewhere.
I’m trying to use these focus points to serve the motto:
Let's make something unique that could pass as another official FEGBA release.
Granted, that's probably far too ambitious to be realistic, so I'll mostly prioritise the "unique" part, with the whole "pass as another official FEGBA release" coming in as a distant second.
Download
Download the patch here. Just pick the newest release and click on the Project.ups file to download the patch. Use NUPS or some other patcher to patch the patch to an FE8U (Fire Emblem The Sacred Stones, North America region) ROM.
Features
Backup SuspendSave: The game autosaves after every action you take, however you can make a backup save which you can return to a limited amount of times. Whilst autosave won't overwrite your backupsave, you can freely overwrite your backup save whenever. Just like FE8's autosave, your backupsave will be deleted if you save in-between chapters.
Press select whilst hovering on an enemy unit to display that unit's danger radius. Press select again to hide their danger radius. Press select anywhere on the map to either display every enemy unit's danger radius, or, if any danger radius is active, hide every enemy unit's danger radius. Mind, having too many danger radii active at once might slow down the game. Danger Radius is cleared when resetting the game or when player phase ends.
A few Lights Out puzzles. Only the first one you'll run into is mandatory.
Custom game intro and chapter intro. Those things you'll probably skip most of the time, but they're there.
SkillSystem, so skills are a thing. Player units will each have a personal skill. Some classes have a class-specific skill. Player units will unlock their class-level up skill at level 5 and every 10 levels from then on. Generic enemies won't have any skills.
RNGRandomizer: RNG sequence is iterated every frame. This should make it a bit harder to RNG abuse. Still using 2RN though.
There's still numerous other features either planned, WIP or implemented but unavailable at the moment.
Known issues
Could potentially change a lot, so I’ll just refer you to the README.
Screenshots
Not everything shown here is currently available yet.
I like eyecandy and implementing features, but building chapters is not that interesting to me. I also expect real life could get busy soonish. Releases will be quite infrequent. Sorry.
This is my first full-fledged hack, or intended-to-be at least. It’s also early days yet, so I’d appreciate feedback. Whilst pointing out weak spots and leaving it at that is still helpful, I’m more likely to change something if you provide suggestions on how to change/improve it, especially if they’re small changes.
…Seriously, though, this is looking slick! Great job on all these custom touches, truly! This hack looks wicked impressive.
If you’re not so passionate about designing chapters, though, you could look into teaming up with a buddy who is? Combine your strengths! …If you want to, of course!
Did a quick run through of the 2 chapters, a nice ride.
The puzzle made me feel like a buffoon but I got through with a few lucky clicks.
Too early to really say much about the gameplay. One minor gripe is that anathema on Simon makes it more likely for him eat the exp with a crit from the 10 crit.
I noticed a minor graphical issue with the battle screen.
I did consider that, but I’m worried about what could happen if me and my hypothetical partner disagree over stuff. I tend to come up with spur-on-the-moment things I like to implement, so I suspect partnership could be hard. I also like having control over the whole thing.
I’m not sure if you were aware, or if was communicated poorly, but Simon isn’t targeted by the enemy AI unless he initiates combat with an enemy. Anywho, if more people see this as an issue, I’ll reconsider his skillset.
I’m not sure what the issue is. Is it the HIT, DMG and CRT text and corresponding values being flipped on the right side? If that’s what you mean, I did that to mirror the left side. Do you think it looks off?
The patch that makes the battle background 255 colors is wonderful.
I didn’t expect this to be possible, as magic fade-ins and the like are pretty complicated.
I think it will be a better patch if compatibility with existing background data is taken into account.
I think it If TSA!=0, should be processed as existing data.
Her sounded more natural to me. Regardless, I’m not a native speaker, so I’ll take your word for it, and change it.
Player units and enemy bosses use Character growths + Class bonus growths. The latter one is quite insignificant for T1 classes. These have Class bonus growths in interval [-10, 10]. Considering how little of a difference that makes, I should probably look into increasing & decreasing these limits at some point.
Generic enemies use Class growths, which are atm mostly identical to vanilla’s class growths.
IIRC these tend to use a specific routine, void* FadePalette(u16* paletteBuffer, u8 palIndex, u8 palCount, u8 darkness); //! FE8U = 0x80712B1.
All I had to do is change the palIndex and palCount arguments to match which palettes I wanted to brighten or darken to get it to work.
Sounds like a great idea. I always overlook these simple ways to make things more user-friendly.
Not to be a total contrarian, but unless I’m missing some context for the line, “Her” would sound a heck of a lot more natural to me here than “she” would. Given the statement could be rephrased as like “Her commanding us?!” or “For her to command us?!”… you couldn’t really replace “her” with “she” in either of those rewordings, and it doesn’t especially make sense to do so with the line as it’s phrased in-game, either.
