SEVA

I mean, there is an ounce of seriousness in the sense that I genuinely don't think referring to games ambiguously like this is ideal, but not beyond that.

I don't care if you use it or not, I was just saying not to use it in a confusing manner, like in a topic title where it could very well be referring to my game. No hard feelings, anyway, I'm not as angry as I made myself appear. I just wanted to try my hand at an angry rant for once, I'm not a very irritable person usually.

Alright, so, this topic has come to my attention, and I'm not going to ignore it this time. Why on earth would you still referring to it as Micro Emblem in your topic title? Now mind you, I have no problem with using nicknames for games, BUT you're doing it the entirely the wrong way. For example, there is 'Horse Emblem', referring to FE4, which is the correct use of a nickname - it was sort of spawned by the community, and is fairly widely used - yet everyone who uses it is well aware that the game is called FE:GotHW (or its Japanese title) - the nickname is used purely for humorous effect. You, on the other hand, seem to have just arbitrarily decided that 'Micro Emblem' is just a better title for FEH in general and renamed it to that. No humour, no wit, just "yep, it's called something else now". Of course, you can only rename it in your head, as evidenced by the fact I've never seen or heard of anyone else calling FEH 'Micro Emblem' besides you. You are entitled to believe that would be a better title, (and I would be inclined to disagree,) but forcing a name change like that just doesn't work. Now that alone would be enough to tick me off somewhat, though not too much, not worthy of a rant. Unfortunately, as you might have noticed, I happen to be the creator of Micro Emblem. That's right, there is already a thing which is actually called Micro Emblem. Now, Micro Emblem is only a very small-scale fangame, so you'd be forgiven for not knowing about it................... except you have demonstrated that you are aware of it - and in the first post where you started using the nickname, no less. And despite that, you use your nickname in topic titles. See, nicknames are almost always used in some kind of context which fairly unambiguously identifies what it's referring to. There's no such context here, this isn't the FEH forum, this is FFTF. And we're on a Fire Emblem fan site, I know for a fact there are some people here who are aware of Micro Emblem's existence. So you could very well be talking about my game. Or some game that the reader doesn't know about, like, uh, my game. I know I've been caught off guard by it. Twice. As I said, I'm not against nicknames. But you seem to be displaying an unhealthy attitude - actively and knowingly inducing confusion for the sake of forcing a nickname you came up with (or, heck, maybe you copied it from me, for all I know) to replace a game's actual, official name for no apparent reason, when you can see it won't catch on. How would you like if I started referring to you as Blanc all of a sudden? In summary, please don't call FEH 'Micro Emblem' at least in topic titles. Okay, Blanc? Great.

To me, both extremes for this question seem... well, extreme. I say it depends on the game. Theoretically, yes, if a game could acommodate any resolution equally well, it would probably look better the higher the resolution. However, as you can imagine, higher resolutions get progressively harder to display, both in terms of designing the assets for them, and in terms of demands for memory and processing. I also strongly agree with the 'hiding imperfections' thing. Thus, I would say that, if a game was designed for a specific maximum resolution, it will probably look worse the further the resolution goes below or above that. However, that's just me, I know there are people who range the entire spectrum in terms of how much they prefer to see pixels over polygons, or vice-versa. tl;dr: For me, very yes. For a lot (most?) of people, no. It'd be interesting to see a poll of this, actually.

There are many sides to this question. I'll do my best to address them, since I do this kind of thing myself. Firstly, for beginners in game development, the obvious answer is that for fangames, you have a bunch of resources there for you to use already. God knows that assets, graphics especially, are a huge chokepoint in game development, so having some to work with them already when starting out is a huge help. In the case of rom hacks, which we do a lot of here, this even includes the game engine being available. Now, sure, there are some public-domain game assets available, but those carry with them a distinct feeling of... amateur-ness, I suppose. They also tend to be rather generic - that is, pretty uninteresting, unlike the assets from your favourite game. Those do tend to come from decidedly non-amateur sources, after all. Also, they have a danger of being overused. So do fangame assets, but there you at least have a sort-of-defense of "you've seen these in the original game already anyway, you shouldn't be complaining about that." Those are all relatively weak defenses, but they stack up with the ones below. Secondly, there is the issue of distribution. It affects everyone, but mostly starts to get noticed by intermediate-level fangame developers, who are fine with producing their own assets even for fangames. Once you've made your game, how do you get people to play it? This is a large issue affecting the entire game industry, from indie devs to large companies. Chances are, if you put enough effort into your game, there will be a market for it somewhere, but how do you reach that market? And then, how do you convince said market that they're your market? Well, if your game is a fangame, good news! You already know what the market for your game is, and where to find it. How? Because it's just the same market as the original work your fangame is based on! So all you have to do is find a big fan forum, such as this one, and inform the people there about your game. The hard work of collecting the fanbase has already been done for you by the original developers - and chances are, done better than you could ever hope to do it by yourself. (Heck, there's a website+forum specifically for Mario fangames, if that tells you anything.) Brand recognition plays into it too - good luck getting people to play some random-ass amateur game over a game from a series they're already familiar with and enjoy. Now, you might say that all this still applies to a game which is very similar, but technically doesn't infringe on the IP. Well, kind of. But also, that's what people call a clone. Or worse, a ripoff. There's a kind of negative stigma associated with that, precisely because you're using someone else's marketing effort for your own benefit. So yes, in a way this is the 'pride' thing you mentioned - by making your game an outright fangame, that's essentially saying "yes, yes I did use someone else's market, who cares, that's not what I'm here for." (By the way, if you make your game unique enough to not be considered a clone, you can't really use an existing fanbase to advertise it anymore, you risk being looked down on. You're basically one of those ads on the side of a webpage at that point.) And that leads me into my next point - what are you here for? While the other points were mostly practical, this one is less so. I believe that even experienced developers can make fangames, because of their personal connection with the series. Fangames are made for fans, by fans. The purest reason to make fangames is because that is the best way to make the people whose company you enjoy - the people in the same fan community as yourself - happy. You know all that hype which the community knocks up whenever a new game in the series is announced? I don't think you can ever get that with some random new IP you've never seen before. Have you ever thought, 'man, it would be really cool if the series went and did [x]?' Well, yes it would, and if it's unlikely the actual developers will make that happen, you can make it happen yourself! Put differently, both fangame devs and other fans usually want either more of the same, or more of the same but with a twist - and not the kind of twist that would allow you to declare it a different IP. (This applies in a big way to fan remakes, as you might imagine.) Often quite the opposite, actually. Therefore, everything the dev does to make it a different IP will be necessarily forced, and, you know, people don't like doing forced things. /wallOfText tl;dr You probably understand the motivation behind making a similar game, and a fangame is both the most natural and most convenient way of doing that by far. Sadly it happens to be the least legally safe one, too.

This is a neat chart that Klokinator, Letha and myself just put together. It shows all heroes currently available, indicating which ones have skills/weapons effective against any attribute or colour - pretty much, who is a 'hard counter' against who. This information was already available, but now you have it in this more easily digestible form. Purple indicates that this hero is the only one to fill a particular niche. The chart is available here via Fire Emblem Universe.

I'm aware of that. That's why I decided I should share this, just to add this specific case to the list. Haven't seen it mentioned anywhere before. Right now there's nothing to suggest I wasn't the first person who noticed this one, or at least cared enough to tell anyone.

Not that this is a major thing, but I gotta share this somewhere. I was just listening to some nice old-school prog rock, when I stumbled upon this gem: Nice music, right? Now, listen to the section starting at about 5:05. Sound familiar? (Reminder that this track is from a 1976 album.) Solution:

I kept getting this on an actual phone. I think it's just their servers handling the traffic poorly, or something like that. Keep retrying, you should get it eventually.

Alright, now there's a full playthrough of the current version of this game, which can be found here. If for whatever reason you're interested in the game but don't want to play it, you can watch this. Be aware that it contains some strong opinions and me playing terribly.

With the third stream over, this series has concluded. The following playlist is an archive of the entire thing: Archive I may stream something else in the future, but I have no concrete plans right now.

Reminder that the stream starts in 1 hour!

The date of the 3rd stream has been decided! It will be on Friday 27th, at the usual time. (Check the first post.) As Onmi pointed out, that's actually a different day in some time zones, so be wary of that. There is every reason to believe this will be my final stream of this game, though it may mean this stream could be even longer than the previous two. Be prepared for that.

Alright, part 2 archive is up on Youtube now! We got to the end of chapter 6 this time. Next week I'll stream again, and in the third stream we will hopefully finish what there is in this version.