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Fire Emblem: Black Dragon (In need of a hacking team)


TheKingBahamut
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It’s no secret that the recent Fire Emblem titles – Awakening and Fates – have been… polarizing to the fanbase. While the games were critical and financial successes, many fans have expressed extreme disdain for the “mainstreamification” of these titles in comparison to older games. Personally, I think that each style of Fire Emblem has its strengths and weaknesses; the older titles have stronger stories while the newer games have more streamlined and accessible gameplay. As I turned these thoughts over in my mind, an idea came to me: why not make a fan project that combines the strong plot and character of the older games with the newer features of Fates and Awakening into a game that everyone can enjoy?
And so I present to you Fire Emblem: The Black Dragon, a FE8 hack designed to take the best aspects of each style of Fire Emblem and combine them into a single game. I plan to bring back certain important or interesting features from some older games as well, along with some new ideas.

I wanted to wait until I had a proof of concept put together before properly posting here, but impatience got the better of me and I decided to post here anyway. I'm not entirely without things to show off, though; I have some sprites and really early script already created. So without further ado...

The Story:

The continent of Rhoden has long been the site of a perennial struggle between two major powers: The Holy Empire of Damaria in the north, and the Kingdom of Maridia in the south. The Damarian Empire is a theocracy ruled by the Church of Valkyrion, while Maridia is a constitutional monarchy ruled by a king and a council of nobles that values logic over religion. The two kingdoms have been at war with each other for decades over ideological differences, and have pulled the other smaller nations into their conflict several times. The start of the story takes place five years after the last war between the two kingdoms ended in a defeat for Damaria. Now, tensions are starting to run high for the two kingdoms and war is imminent.
As the kingdoms move towards war, a wandering mercenary named Zean O’Drake is dragged into fighting for Maridia. As he travels the continent, Zean and his friends discover that the war is part of a larger plot that threatens to destroy the entire continent, and that Zean is the only one who can stop the forces that threaten the world.

Structure and progression:
The story centers around three major Lords: Zean, a wandering mercenary with superhuman powers, Mikaela, the princess of the Damarian Empire, and Richter, a powerful Maridian general. Each Lord will have their own party and path through the game, and the player will be able to switch between the different paths at will to ensure that each party remains competently levelled.
The overall structure follows a similar style to FE8 and Awakening, with a traversable world map that players can explore at their choosing. In between chapters, players can also access a base camp, where they can manage units’ equipment, equip skills, buy weapons, items, and skills, and access support conversations.
In addition to the destination chapter, where the player must go next for story progression, the player may encounter skirmishes on the world map, where they may go in order to grind experience and money, or boost support levels between their units. To compensate for this ability to grind, I intend to make this a much more challenging hack than most FE games.

Gameplay features I want:

Revamped skill system: Skills add a lot of variety and utility to Fire Emblem games. My personal favorite skill mechanics come from Radiant Dawn, where skills could be un-equipped and re-equipped to different units at will. Skill mechanics will work similarly in this particular game.
Skills will be divided into two different categories: class-specific skills and equipable skills. Class-specific skills will be certain abilities locked to certain classes. For example, Thieves will always be able to pick locks, cavalry classes will always have the Canto ability (specifically FE9/10 style Canto that activates regardless of action), Berserkers will have an extra 20% crit, etc. Equipable skills can be bought at the base camp shop and equipped to units regardless of class, and will remain equipped regardless of what class the unit changes into, which leads me to my next mechanic…

Multiple promotions and reclassing: While I like the reclassing feature of the newer Fire Emblem games, there are times when it could be a bit intrusive using it to obtain new skills with units. To solve this problem, I’ve decided to revamp the system a bit. Instead of units having different sets of classes to switch between, each unit will be stuck to one base class, but every base class will be able to promote into one of three different advanced classes, which the unit can switch between at will in the base.
For example, a Fighter will be able to promote into a Warrior, a Berserker, or a Hero. Each of these classes will offer unique strengths and weaknesses, as well as small increases to a unit’s growth rates. If the Fighter becomes a Warrior, they will gain a small increase to their Defense and Skill, and gain access to the Warrior’s unique class skills. If the unit becomes a Berserker, however, they’ll get the Berserker’s unique skills and an increase to HP and Strength. This will give the player the option to customize their units as much as they want, and since many other skills can be equipped, it means that the reclassing feature is entirely optional to give units all the skills the player wants.

FE13/14-Style support system: One thing about the older FE titles I despise and one of the reasons I refuse to acknowledge them as superior to the new is the way support conversations work. Not only is it unclear and unintuitive as to how support levels are increased, but it takes way too long for the support level to actually increase. Newer games also allowed for characters to support with many more other characters, giving them more opportunities for development. I want to take a page from the new games in terms of how supports are accessed by making the requirements for accessing them A) be more obvious, and B) take less time. Also, support conversations will take place at base instead of the battlefield because that makes more sense.
Since I doubt I’ll be able to implement a pair up feature in these games, increasing support levels will be done by having characters stand next to each other on the battlefield. The difference is that each time these characters battle together, a heart icon will pop up (as it does in the new games) to indicate the increase in support points. The amount of support points required will also be lowered so that it only takes about two battles to increase two characters’ support level one stage.
S rank supports will return, but I’ll only have characters be able to S rank one or two other characters based on story circumstances. Since I’m not putting children characters in this game, S rank supports will instead allow the two characters to be able to access each other’s skills in battle. Example: Two S ranked units stand next to each other. One is equipped with the Adept skill, giving that unit an extra attack. The unit that does not have Adept equipped will be able to activate the Adept skill regardless as long as they stand next to their S rank partner.

Battle saving and other small conveniences: Battle saving, which allows the player to save their progress in the middle of a chapter and reload back to that point at any time, gives the player a greater margin for error. Granted, since players will be using an emulator to play this, it might not be necessary, but I feel it’s something every Fire Emblem game should have. It can potentially prevent players from needing to reset the entire chapter if they made a mistake, and anything that prevents that is a good thing to have in my book.
There are also some other minor features that are convenient to have that other hackers have brought out. These include being able to see if enemies can move or not, checking the attack range of every enemy on the map, and seeing if an enemy has a weapon that is effective against a particular class. These are minor, but can make quite a bit of difference for players.

Equipable items: This has sort of been done before, but I’d like the give units the ability to equip certain kinds of armor and relics to give them additional skills. These would be given their own inventory ala Path of Radiance, to avoid clutter and make them easier to use.

You can probably see that this is an ambitious concept, which is a problem since I have little to no experience. I cannot stress enough that I need people to help me with making this. Script/story editors, sprite artists, hackers... ANYONE.

But that doesn't mean there aren't some things I can do and have done myself. Here's a small list of sprites I cobbled together for this project. And yes I know they are really obviously spliced together but I don't care.

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Here's Zean, the main hero of the story. A rugged, handsome fellow.

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Princess Mikaela, heir to the throne of the empire and second of the three lords.

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Horatio, one of the first people Zean encounters on his travels.

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And finally, Brida, a young Fighter girl who joins the mercenary troupe.

If you are even remotely interested, you can read the first draft of the script I've written here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ukIBQnvch-0zS5B5ioyR4QS3qSA0d8MQJ-nLQaJNmmg/edit

Thanks,

Bahamut

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The doc is private so I can't access it, unless that's the intention in which case lol at me

But this looks interesting, even if it's just a couple of sprites so far. While actual hacking is way out of my league, since my coding classes haven't started yet, I'm an okay - or at least mediocre - writer and if you ever get a chapter done I'd love to beta test, especially since I have plenty of free time (at least, now I do) so I should do things at a passable speed though who knows, I procrastinate a lot.

Also brida and Zeans sprites could go with some polish

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you post such an annoyed-sounding thread wondering why nobody is jumping at the chance to help you, then you proceed not to take any of the advice given in said thread

Take a look at when this thread was started. Now take a look at the date on the question. Then, read through the entire question thread.

While an update would be nice, I wont' blame TC if he hasn't sorted everything out yet.

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I can empathize with the desire to create a better storyline. However, you need to remember, Awakening and Fates had entire teams of paid professionals write their stories, and they still didn't turn out that great. I'm not saying that you can't write a good story, but I do believe that by working together with other writers, you can make a good story into a great one.

Edited by SullyMcGully
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Oh wow, did not expect people to suddenly start jumping on this thread. Not sure if I should be flattered or not.

At any rate, I'd just like to say: I've realized that this project, which was going to be a full-fledged game, is too big for me to start with. I'm planning on cutting my teeth on a few smaller comedy hacks as a starting project before doing work on this. So if people are somehow interested in what's here, thank you, but just know that it's going to be a while before I start doing work on this. A long while.

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