Ryrumeli

My family loves me enough for 3 generations already, so need for more love. :3 Jokes aside, I am focused in my hack, ASMing for a consise and huge project like mine is a nightmare enough for now. XD When it is done the notes which will be milked off it will enable one to do that and stuff like making custom battle menu buttons like "Attack" and "Dance", and animations and a 4 stat sheet screen and assign skills to units, so I don't think I am not doing something good enough for the development of Hacking, very specifically FE8. But yeah, for now making public ASM patches which work for all people and do small things like that aren't in my current plans. Hence why I only offer hacks to projects like yours and only in the future lately. XD And while I half agree with you Zahl, the possibility of making two dancers into a super movement dancer is more than just that. You could transport a weapon or item from a whole side of a battlefield to the other in a single turn. Cross enemy lines with two units and visit any village regardless of how remote with two dancers dancing to eachother. Not giving them growths would make them even weaker than what Ninian and Tethys were. And not that I don't like them(I always use dancers), but weakening a class many people call "Passable" just to have more than one of them in a single project isn't something that nice. Plus, while opportunities to abuse the "Infinite Move Dancers" glitch aren't really common, it is just something easy enough to dodge with a simple enough hack like the FEGirls one so.

Not too hard to change that. Seriously. If this patch is advanced enough, give me a call and I could provide a simple patch which nulls that. Anything to help a fellow FE8 hacker. :)

Oh lovely! It does look like it has a bit of that old-nintendo-level-design feeling. Not either super hard like hackers usually like to put or super easy when things doesn't seem to be on control, things seem to be balanced and mostly fun so far. Worthy to be compared with Miyamoto's work. :) Thanks for letting us know of another great hack Celice. :)

Exactly my point here. Hence the risk of thinking all here, Warriors would become machines without some number balancing. (And to be fair, it is perfectly do-able in FE7. Were I a FE7 hacker I would have done it for FE7 and not FE8 so. XD)

Out of experience I say for me that excluding abuse potential of 3-3 range(Which already exists in the actual IS game), the weakest bosses are the moving ones. Because those you can trap in a position which is advantageous for you, and based on the range trigger their AI with a unit which you use to Tank, and restrain their movement with your units. You can force them to be in a position which gives advantage for you, and keep on moving your troops to keep said advantage in a relatively simple fashion. The only moving boss which does pose as a threat from a certain point in the game on is one which can 1-hit-ko one of your units, perhaps a unit with an attack so great a unit such as a magician or a healer or a bowman could die in a single hit. Because anything else could and should be healed with a staff, and then you will have a whole turn to trap the boss in an advantageous position for you. Bosses which move out of thrones and gates in fact open the possibility of you using the bonuses which were to be theirs, which isn't THAT helpful most of the time, but just shows how they lose any upperhand they might have due to terrain advantages just so they can fall in your traps. Also, something very uncommon but which could be troublesome in the spectrum of moving bosses would be a say, Paladin which moves so much he could easily run to virtually any point in your army for his attack. So even when regrouping after his move maybe your units wouldn't be able to always put themselves in a preferable spot, and hiding units would be chaotic. But excluding those, almost always the AI puts itself in a dangerous position for a relatively decent attack, so I think moving bosses have a great potential of falling into traps you devise. And making all of them move just because you have 2-3 bows isn't exactly a wise trade-off either. Because of a single design change having to change all bosses' battle patterns and diminish boss variation sounds awful. I am more pro either making bowmen stronger and bows better weapons, like Lumi skillfully pointed as a great balance FE12 proposed, or keeping them weak as they are now and giving them that extra range, since bowmen aren't known for hitting with much damage, even if they do abuse 2-3 range, their damage would be so mediocre with most bows I think a player would have little motivation to actually abuse the boss. Bowmen here of course indicating Archers and Snipers, not other bow-using classes. Increasing the attributes of bows AND the range sounds to me like a bit of an exaggeration. The wish of making a class which most people can easily say drew the shortest straw is something, I know I spent a lot of time thinking about it myself, but we can't change the game dynamics too much just for it.

While I honestly agree with you that giving all bows with no exclusion at all 2-3 range is pretty game changing to say the least, keep in mind there is already the figure of the long bow in the game, so if we want we CAN already use a 2-3 range bow at will in our game. So this sort of Boss-abusing potential existed all along, considering the Long Bow is, while weakened if compared to other bows, still a pretty decent bow to be used to abuse the bosses without such an amazing defensive capacity. Of course, with 2-3 range bows I suspect there will be no power boost to bows to boot, maybe even a weakening of bows could take place. So the potential of the range 3-3 being abused isn't too grand unless either bowmen aren't really strong(Like currently happens, excluding our beloved promoted Warriors which in turn compensate with poorer aim). What is the good of an attack which can hit a boss in his range's weakspot if the basic regeneration a throne gives already cleans it off completely? A waste of weapon uses I tell you. It will only be an issue of course if there is a power boost for bowmen. If all bows are 2-3, and all bowmen get numeric boosts, and thus it is really easy to get a 2-3 weapon with good numbers in a good unit, and replace it, then the possibility of "main boss owning machines" does exist for bowmen. Oh, and as for character, I will be honest in saying the main character has to be likeable, starting out badass or not isn't exactly the greatest need. He needs to be surely slightly badass, as in outstanding in some way, but the evolution of a character is pretty interesting. FEs tend to have protagonists which don't really evolve much over time, or what I could call "Ephraim complex", so I do like to see, even if slight, a hint of a growth in a protagonist, the situation changing the man, and the built up experiences which the gamer shared with the characters touching them deeply.

Yup, he could just say replace a letter such as say "J" with a ^, and whenever he wrote "J" in FEditor the screen would show a "^". Since the text data in FE only matches the format our PCs use due to the simplistic fact they too used a ASCII table to define the value of each letter. Obviously I wouldn't recommend actually replacing "J", but there ought to be a spare letter you could use. I believe FE8 at least had letters like à, á, and other accented letters, which could be in turn replaced by a symbol like "^" with very little loss. And don't be ashamed of showing screenshots, regardless of the position in the evolution of your hack. :) We are all hackers, and/or we understand the difficulty that is hacking an FE rom, so be sure I am honest when I say that we will understand all the pain you went trough to learn and do what you did already. And you should be proud of it already. And having any issues, we will all be more than happy to either provide you help to the specifics of your doubts, or point you to a topic or tutorial we believe answers with a good depth your question at hand. So no need not to feel comfortable with showing something, this is pretty much like a medieval guild of craft, we are but friends linked due to a skill and interest in common. ;)

Good that you guys worked on that, because based on the version I did play of DoF it was an omnipresent issue, to a point I seriously don't blame his anger to the least. XD Also, to be brief I will just comment on 2. To make a lord which would have a "Mode Shift" button to exchange from foot unit to flying unit actually wouldn't be that hard, honestly. Based on how the game works coding-wise, it could be way easier than many things I saw being done in FEs with ASM. Let's make a deal, when your hack advances a good deal I will be more than happy to share with you my menu hacking notes; While the offsets in them work specifically for FE8, the general format and structure are the same ones as FE7, so these notes should enable you to make such a "skill" for your lord with relative ease. :) I don't know the specifics of that specific hack, but if your hack advances a good deal I will be more than happy to contribute to someone so worried to the game design aspect of your hack, to a point of asking the community their opinions, and basing your decisions on them. ;)

It is indeed very common that hacks don't get near the level of quality of the actual games, and that is indeed a shame. And it is for a good reason, while professional games have people thinking 24/7 how to please the most publics as possible, a hacker or a hobbyist game designer have alike the fact that game design isn't their main focus in life, their main occupation. Also, unlike the game designers by profession, the unsuccess of the game isn't such an issue as well, there is nothing wrong then in just making a game which would appeal exclusively to yourself and people from your social cycle if you don't "lose" anything in case the game isn't appealing to all publics. This is also the main issue a game designer has to face when he or she is at the start of a professional career in the field; Know that if they make the game something only them would play it is bound to not be successful, so they need to think in terms of providing something their target audience would enjoy to achieve success. I think that in order to make a game keep the feeling of the original, we need to think less with our personal bias, and keep on working on the project with the same target audience for our hacks as the original game; This is a way of avoiding the complex of "Making a game from me, for me" in my eyes. But I agree, this is in no way a fault, accomplishing a hack alone is commendable, so you are more than free to just make the game enjoyable for yourself, period. But a bit of selflessness here would make your game stand out in a sea of hacks and fangames which fail to please the same public as the original game did.

I think you mentioned something important in your initial post, Colfer. You talked on Gorilla Gadek's case that you didn't feel like using some units, out of feeling they had no competitive advantages; To make a balanced team you should work on making it so there is at least a reason for deciding to remove a character you have used so far, and place a new incoming unit in your army. You just gotta think on that for every case if you ask me. I personally do not believe in useless units, I feel that if a unit took work to be made(It requires a mugshot, attributes, beta testing of growths, a backstory, a personality, supports, palettes...) at the very least it should be useful. Deciding on which unit to take to the battlefield should be a decision of the player, not of the game designer, so making units that are virtually useless is pretty much deciding what a rational player would be using at that instant, which I feel retracts from the Fire Emblem effect. Also, regarding which classes to give early on; The traditions of FE are pretty interesting if you ask me, I actually really like it when hacks make reference to the traditions. Such as making a duo of "Christmas Cavaliers" like Deranger mentioned. Even if the duo comes not at the same time, or a bit late like in FE8's example. To make things interesting all I think is that you shouldn't give to the player at the start many classes with very similar characteristics. Like giving say 3-4 mounted units, or just unmounted units. Diversity is the key if you ask me, units with different proposals makes the things interesting for the one making the decision, that is the player. I feel there should be a hint of how different classes can be from eachother already early on, with at least one example of long range, short range, different weapons, and all in the first chapters. And then a bit later start to provide the player units which work similar to others he owned already but with some sort of difference, so the player can pick which among them he will use. There is no specific formula to make it good or not, but picturing a game in which you get 6 cavaliers and paladins very early on isn't very fun to say the least. Also, one thing that I do think is important, magic is something all FEs saved for a little on in the future; The average of the first chapter in most hacks of the presence of a magic-using unit is way earlier than the average of the actual games.(A handful of those hacks in fact have the magic-casting unit in chapter 1 already) I feel that thinking on the player one should give it some time for him to get used to a system, to introduce the other. Of course, this is more important for commercial games than it is to hacks which are made for a community which has already played FE games and thus is used with the system, but I think that is one detail of the feel of FE games moist hacks fail to catch early on. Much like with attributes, there should be a natural progression of gameplay elements. And as armies progressively get bigger and bigger, they also seem more resourceful to the fact they use more different gameplay elements for the player to take heed on. As for the weapon triangle balance, I feel it will come naturally with you not abusing any class; My personal stand is to defend the player's right of choice, so I would say about 1-2 characters of unpromoted classes for each class is a good measure. Then a promoted version of some key classes, whichever you feel is important and that allows you to play with character concepts. An example is Pent in FE7; For a Sage to have a good staff level one needs to start to using exclusively staves as soon as you promote, however he starts out as a decent staff-user, so you get to give him a competitive edge with other magic-units by playing with the concept in a way units which promoted couldn't easily. Oh, and having more Swordsmen, then Spearfighters, and having a minimum of Axefighters actually match the more modern notion of the strength of the 3 weapons being relative; Even then in the first 7-8 chapters I feel you should already have at least 2 axe-using units, so you can pick on using either, or none, or both. Many hacks have the mortal flaw of not having many axe-fighters, and while I can't really blame them for that, gives the player's army an unneeded weakpoint you might end up abusing even without knowing it. Making the player pick his army's weakpoint and not the game designer is a more modern view on game design indeed. :) Also, for promoted units, I do recommend saving some slots for pre-promoted units for plot-related units. I feel players really like to use units they know affect the plot in some way, that have a visible importance. And I feel the spots for pre-promotes have the potential of bringing to the army more veteran-looking and wiser units than recruiting say "the daughter of the mayor of a village that hunts every now or then and thus know how to use a bow". Even if these characters aren't that bright in numbers, just allowing the player to use these already gives your game a different feeling, so I feel at least 1 or 2 spots for pre-promotes should come for units with such a profile. The lord being on a Pegasi would be an issue if you ask me, due to the amount of weaknesses flying units have; Giving your lord character weaknesses which are hard to control such as bows and ballistae is more of a vector for flustration than a key element; However, I see nothing wrong with Horses, even though the lord gets a weakness to mount-slaying weapons, at least he gets a great move to boot. The only issue I see with actual flying is the exposed Achilles-heel of bows and wind magic(If any) and ballistae, which tend to hit you when you least expect. While there aren't that many horse-slaying weapons for it to become such a worry. But again different concepts for lords are very welcome, so I agree with Deranger in that it would be cool to see that being done. :) As for length of starting chapters, I feel that something such as Lyn mode's prologue should be avoided; I think that 1 player unit vs 2 enemy units is not even a start to warm one up. I like something which gives you more units and a bit of a very controlled challenge, although a headstart such as FE6's would be a bit tough already, it is somewhat diverse.(Then again they have an excuse, they have a tutorial map). Maybe Lyn 2 would be a better example for the length of such a chapter? Keep in mind that as long as you try to keep difficulty on check, and that you make it interesting to use any sort of strategy and unit, you have plenty of space to maneuver. You can play with concepts and create different enemy waves with different characteristics, and the more you play the more unique it will feel. So above all, try to have fun in the game design part of your game, that it will show off in your finished product, for your target audience. And above all, keep on having fun with hacking~! :D

Again, things such as originality aren't exclusive of certain "Illuminated" beings. There isn't someone which is naturally original, and someone who simply isn't. It isn't something defined by birth or the like. The claim that someone either is original or not is like saying someone is either born able to perform surgeries or not; Or to paint or not. We all indeed are born with a disposition towards a certain field, some people are born with a talent for arts. Some people are born with technical tallent, which I do believe most among us FE hackers fit as. We all have different tallents, but that doesn't mean we are thus stuck with a single field for the rest of our lives. Originality is such a skill, it surely can be exercised, like any other human skill. It is more a matter of stance, and a capacity of using what you know to achieve what was never done. Honestly, the guide is there to simply help to open up one's mind. There is no template for originality nor creativity, but it can be developed by the sum of effort and overall deep thinking. It comes from being able to think bases and limits, and rethink them. Understanding what is important and what really isn't. The guide claims to be a group of exercises and questions sorted out to help someone to think in a deeper fashion when it isn't a part of the current nature of someone. And based on what I read I think that those are a great starting point for the ones in look of aid for this. Also there are tools like mental maps and techniques like brainstormings can be applied to help creativity as well, so it isn't just a skill of "Elevated", "Unique", "Born to lead" human beings. Of an Elite. The more one do it, the more one work for it, the more it will grow to said person. As Einstein said about work, “Work is 1% inspiration plus 99% transpiration”. Creativity also comes from that. Claiming originality isn't something which can be developed trough a set of exercises and diligence is honestly in my eyes a fallacy against human potential. And this guide is a starting point, the more one understands that questions allow the creation of better things, the more likely one can think like that. And if the wording of the title is what really bothers you, don't mind it then. The wording of the title is but a classic "Dreamseller" tittle, which I agree, is what marketing created to sell self-help books. Books like "Be rich if you think rich" use titles to sell the dream for those looking for easy money, which is unfortunate. But that is one thing, this title's goal is not ripping off, but to generate impact in those that do want to do create a world of their own, are willing to read and work, and , and thus it is a valid effort. "A tutorial to help to open up one's mind and to structure ideas for Original Plots/Worlds" it would be less impactful(And a bit scary as well). And you will have to agree with me that this is a tool for the creation of Original Plots/Worlds. I honestly feel this is just a conflict of personal opinions, but I have seen people in my childhood which I never believed were able to have that "Spark" of inspiration have it in an unexpected moment. And said inspiration being amazing, even life changing. There aren't people born creative and others limited, some people organize their heads in a way, the others in another. But anyone can learn how to organize ideas and become creative, anyone can develop their minds to become more creative if so they desire. And this guide is easily a starting point for it, based on what I have read so far. Only a starting point yes, but still one. So quoting your original post... ...to all people which want to develop their creativities, be it with the use of this guide or not. Read, research, live your lives and enjoy everything to the fullest, and you will see more and more "sparks" of inspiration appearing for you in your daily lives. :)

Well, you could check the topic itself for the answer. :) It is in a topic very close to this one, with a very suggestive name.

You can write a tutorial that helps people to think of things they never did before, the originality will come from the answers and approaches each individual will give. The tutorial doesn't give answers, it gives questions you might have to answer, which in turn is what those who are natural for world building already ask themselves from the very start. Pretty much, the tutorial helps one wonder about somethings most to all never worried about in the creation of custom worlds, like for example details of culture, and reasons why things like world-specific buildings and elements are the way they are. The answer each individual gives to those questions is what makes it original. As surprising as it sounds, one can teach another one how to be unique and innovative, all it takes is to teach said person to ask the right questions, instead of giving answers like most of us consider "teaching" to be. For some reason, since school was supposed to teach questioning more than it does say geography, but that isn't what happens. If someone can't think with that level of depth about a subject naturally, there is nothing wrong in having the aid of a tutorial that helps. I mean, even big companies pay thousands for consultants that in the end only help them ask the right questions as well. And in that sense that one tutorial is better than 95% of our hacking tutorials, that teach a technique but not how to think on it. Keep in mind that it isn't the answers that move the world; It is the questions. Those that are innovative and daring are those that know what questions to ask, and how to turn them into reality. With a tutorial based on pre-fabricated answers indeed you wouldn't be able to aid innovation. With a tutorial that makes questions and gives exercises which tickle your brain and just make you think you can. And if you would call your projects innovative I think you too are moved by questions. Much like I do to mine, innovation comes from answering the same questions others have to answer with different approaches, and from then moving to different accomplishments and uses of a same technique. Also, Astelaine, I loved what you wrote; I love specifically the part which links the looks of sprites with the world at hand; If you pay attention, but deep attention to say, the armors of the cavaliers of a same game, you will see there is a different culture which guides each set of armors to be slightly different to the other. Sprites are a visual story telling aid, so they should too reflect the culture of the world, and follow a certain logic. Overall great words there, this topic is as useful to creative writing as it is to hackers. :)

Well, I will say it in a simplistic way which works with any patching format, be it .IPS, .UPS, .JFP, xDelta and stuff. You need a clean version of the file you want to create a patch of, say a original unmodified version of the FE rom you are hacking, and the modified version, the one you effectively changed. That is because as you most likely know a patch is but a list of differences in between a original file and a modified one, so this is why you have to feed the program both of those. Select the option create patch, or generate patch, or anything similar, instead of apply patch. Once the program of your choice requests you to provide the original, unmodified, clean, or any term it picks, version of the rom, do so. When it asks you to provide the changed, modified, hacked, edited or any similar terms, also do so. When it asks which name you want to save your patch as, define a name and a path like you would to any file. When it writes in your screen "Process successful!" or anything like that, jump off your seat and celebrate like a boss. :3 This is as generalist as possible, every other program might have it's own way of working with the input/output part, but most patchers are so simple that won't be an issue. Plus the ultimate tutorial does handle the specifics of some of the most used formats, so I don't think it will be any issue at all, for any doubts check the ultimate tutorial. :)

Well, which game are you hacking? Which conditions are you in? Clean rom, hacked rom? Could you attempt to explain with the most detail as possible which situation you are facing? Maybe creating a guide for us to recreate the issue you're facing step-by-step? I am sorry if I have to ask more, but the more data we have the better we can offer assistance; As it is now, unfortunately we wouldn't be able to provide you much of it. :(