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Hacker's Hangout [Q22] half baked ideas


ghast
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Yeah, good writing is a far better choice than swearing in pretty much any case.

Imagine in DBZ if when Krillin died three writers tackled Goku's response.

1. "Goddamnit Frieza, you son of a fucking bitch! I'll kill you!"

2. "Curse you Frieza, you darn bad guy! I'll make sure you pay!"

3. "Frieza, you monster! He was my best friend! I'll put an end to your reign of terror, once and for all!"

#3 seems to be the best choice here. #1 sounds not only out of character, but it's just a bunch of anger that doesn't accomplish much character wise, it sets no goals for the hero, etc. And #2 feels like a watered down version of #1, like a kid trying to fake-curse in front of mommy and daddy.

Cursing nearly always becomes a substitute for good writing. Especially in fangames. I still respect the writers right to use it though, and will simply not play it if they choose to use it.

Edited by Klokinator
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I remember having this discussion with Alfred Kamon back when I was proofreading Midnight Sun. I personally don't swear, will substitute with similar but "safe" words (e.g. frikking heck), or at worst will use a made up catchall swear word just as characters on Red Dwarf use "Smeg" or characters in Infinite Space use "Grus" (seen me type "brot"? That's the one I use.)

As far as FE hacking goes, I'd say to steer clear of it in the vast majority of cases, as it usually just results in the character sounding childish or otherwise immature. That said, there are two instances where I basically let swear words through my profanity barrier in Midnight Sun; the first where Rya, normally the most uptight and serious character in the hack gets absolutely drunk off her rear end (there being nothing to drink but alcohol), and I deemed a single "f*ck" was so out of character that it would ram home just how sozzled she was...

Cristoph (more than a bit drunk as well): You're drunk, ahahah!!
God, see, she's drunk! Ahahah!
Rya: Shuddap you ignorant religious zealot!
I'm the Princess, show some respect
or get the fuck out of here!

...And the other where Schwarz spots a wanted poster with his face on it, and reacts appropriately. (With a "Sh*t! Run, RUN!")

Every other instance, I vetoed and suggested editing it out. In general, it's best in my opinion to avoid swearing, but in specific situations (when you want someone to appear out of character as above, or if a character has been caught so off guard that a short curse is the only natural response), then you may be able to get away with it.

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[Question #8] "What's the most common plot line you see in most hacks?"

For me it's when common early game bandits have a way more relevant plot significance/ are made way more dangerous than they should be.

Most commonly its some like "these bandits managed to threaten a kingdom" or something along those lines.

/ I would also say clearing out early game bandits are the most common thing I see too. because fire emblem

Edited by Ghatsu!
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Umm I think it would be something along the lines of:

- Lord/Mercenary/Protagonist, go deal with these bandits

- Bandits dealt with

- Oh no Bandits were being controlled by someone who's even worse!

- That guy/girl is dealt with

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"TO WINGS BROTHERS"

Or anything Mist has ever said, god her voice is annoying. But there's a lot badly memorable ones to pick from

but my legit favorite one is Boyd's battle cries, they sound realistic and bad ass.

Edited by Ghatsu!
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So FE always has bandit chapters and really your units get to level 10 at a way slower pace than in hacks. In fact, after chapter 4 in bloodlines, Bram is already at level 10.

Do you have trouble balancing your game around the fact that in hacks, units level up much quicker? Or is it justified by having an earlier end to early game/ your game doesn't last as long?

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I have actually found that one of the reasons in vanilla FE your characters level up so fast is because you tend to focus on a select few from the beginning. I've balanced it by ensuring I keep the early chapters short and sweet. I actually find that my units level up painfully slowly in hacks...

Keegs, are you sure you just haven't fixed up the Eliwood mode EXP rates? :P

Edited by Agro
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I have actually found that one of the reasons in vanilla FE your characters level up so fast is because you tend to focus on a select few from the beginning. I've balanced it by ensuring I keep the early chapters short and sweet. I actually find that my units level up painfully slowly in hacks...

Keegs, are you sure you just haven't fixed up the Eliwood mode EXP rates? :P

I'm pretty sure I did... Chapter 3/4 have a lot of enemies though hahaha.

you think in vanilla they level up so fast? I find they do a really slow as fuck job leveling up

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Well depends on how you play I guess. If you try to divide up stats between all your units then, yes you'll probably level up slowly. But if you try to focus on just a handful then you can get those units to level 20 really fast.

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I say leveling depends on 3 things:

1. Quantity and quality of enemies.

2. The units you are given.

3. Your playstyle/favoritism of units.

When it comes to enemies, it depens on how many there are and what kinds of units. 20 brigands vs 5 Heroes make a real difference. The units you are given also tie into this the same way. You may have so many units at once, and you don't know what to do with all of them, so you let them take them all on and let their level-ups duke it out. Then there's the quality of the units. Terrible growth rates may stunt EXP gains, whereas good growth rates may turn your unit into an EXP vacuum, like Marcus. Then the units themselves have different EXP gains. Prepromotes tend to recieve less XP than others. Whereas units like GBA Manaketes absorb far more XP than your average unpromote. Finally, there's how you play. I tend to Leroy Jenkins it, busting through enemies and gaining XP. Others may play more tactically, balancing out their training.

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The way I handled leveling up in my hack is:

1. Remove the mod coefficient.

2. Make enemies always be pretty low level and make up for the stats using unique character slots for them

3. Removed the promoted unit bonus

4. Make it so that certain classes give less exp than normal.

5. Encourage the player to complete chapters faster.

I think the result has been pretty effective so far.

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context for this question: I was complaining on Skype about FE7 artificially keeping the player in earlygame, the most boring part of the game, by having a different exp formula for Lyn Mode and starting the player back at square one by giving them an entirely new party after eleven chapters of gameplay. From my experience, it usually doesn't take fifteen-or-so chapters to start getting units who are viable for promotion when I play through mods. I think that this faster progression is good— in earlygame, classes are almost always limited to fare that's pretty samey across the board (e.g. cavaliers and brigands) before more interesting classes that are more likely to be altered in mods (e.g. magical classes that aren't anima mages and promoted classes getting different weapons), and you're often stuck using iron weapons instead of more unique ones (killеrs, reavers, effective weapons, etc).

My suggestions to make earlygame more interesting: multiple tiers of the interesting stuff. If the big bad wyverns/griffons/spiders/etc can't show up until much later for plot reasons, give the player multiple types of pegasus or horse unit to mess around with. If you don't have cavaliers or armor knights because you start with a non-nobility group made up of common villagers, make non-knightly versions of those classes, maybe focused more on skl/spd instead of str/def. Or if you do have a noble lord as your main character and can't give them a mercenary companion because there's no reason a prince would hire a cutthroat sell-sword? Add a more noble swordfighter to fill the gap. Take those super-interesting and unique weapons that you have planned for midgame, make weaker versions of them (maybe even an entire iron/steel/silver hierarchy for them), and plop 'em into ch1— it could change the entire chapter's gameplay.

And if your units are leveling up too fast/slow after fixing the Eliwood Mode experience thing, you can always change the exp bonus for defeating an enemy by a little bit. Even 5 more or less exp per enemy makes a visible difference soon enough.

How do I do this hahaha

change the class relative power to something below 3— all player units of that class will get more exp while you will get less for defeating enemies of that class. [glares at brigands]

Edited by Alusq
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with FE4 and my project having so few chapters, making great steps in progression per chapter is necessary, but I think it makes it more fun that way, keeps you sharp

in any vanilla FE there are those dull-ass chapters that you just hate playing, less chapters keeps that to a minimum (looking at you FE4 chapter 7) and with how I plan to run things with my own game, the escalation is gonna get crazy

one thing that I have to stress is to make different environments and setups; 5 chapters in a row fighting brigands in the mountains or knights in a castle REALLY gets old, but when you change up the layouts frequently in progressive chapters, it can add to the experience (the tellius saga was somewhat good about this)

to be more specific, enemy and player placement and what you have to do to complete the chapter -- the overall running around, grabbing items and beating the boss -- should be smooth as silk, without dull, low periods of say, 10 turns wasted just moving people around an unnecessarily gigantic map (I've seen this often in beginning projects I think) and even I cut the FE4 prologue's map size into a quarter of what it was

I appear to be ramblling now, but levelling up doesn't bother me so much as the boring of most early playthroughs, which I find to be more of an issue

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I had a future-FE sort of idea before, but I never went anywhere with it because of having to replace literally everything in the game that's medievally-geared (battle anims, UI, tilesets, portraits and map sprites having modern-day clothing, which is harder to sprite than medieval folk in FE style for obvious reasons, etc). Interestingly enough ([glares at Megaten × FE]), it also had a music-is-your-weapon theme with many characters on the player and enemy sides being various musicians who use instruments in place of staffs, magic, and dancer rings (the idea was that most to all of the magic in the world got used up in the olden days, so people turned to music and found out that its psychological effect was more powerful when amplified, leading to breakneck technological advancement in pursuit of having the grooviest jams).

[spoiler=boring]The main lord was a down-on-his-luck person who thought he was turning to a life of hard crіme when he signed up for a crіme syndicate, but in the prologue you find that he's ended up as a security guard for a pop singer and has no idea why the syndicate is so interested in protecting what appears to be a singer of dime-a-dozen music. Naturally, things go wrong and the show is crashed by way too many modern-day bandits, so protagonist takes his trusty knife and baton (gun control exists in this hypothetical world, and guns are generally a rare/powerful but shoddily-made weapon in-world) and embarks on a quest to find da truth by the pop singer's side, aided by old friends and roadies. This being FE, it leads to the discovery that the pop singer (and maybe also the protagonist) is descended from royalty and the syndicate was protecting her from some other organisation because they believed that she had the potential to bring back the world-destroying magic of the olden days. Also, dragons would be part of the plot because imagine fighting dragons with rockets and laser swords oh man... to say nothing of manaketes existing in a modern-to-future setting.

... And... now that I've typed that out, I realise that I just more or less described FE7. Poop.

I also had a one-chapter mod idea that takes place in the modern day, where it turns out that Eliwood is actually a Chicago businessman named Elliot who wakes up from sleeping all day at the office, during which he deliriously dreamed the events of FE7. Elliot's snitch co-worker Eric (Erik) tattles on him to Nigel (Nergal), the evil CEO of the company, and Elliot must enlist the aid of his co-workers Hectór (Hector) and Lydia (Lyndis) to escape from Nigel and the rest of the cubicle-slaves (each one a modernised FE character) after each one of them is offered a promotion for taking down the slacker Elliot (slacking is punishable by DEАTH). I never went through with the idea because of the aforementioned tileset/animation/portrait/etc thing, and also because it was just one of those ideas that I had before I could actually make FE mods and is floating in limbo now.

Another reason for my not going through with that idea is that there were some gameplay things I wanted to do that I didn't think were possible back then. This included guns that deal fixed, defense-piercing damage that do not gain power from the strength stat, a weapon system that was not based on triangles (it would be more like Light Close-range/Heavy Close-range/Light Long-range/Heavy Long-range/Other), resistance being replaced with some sort of "musicalness" stat (to determine the hit rate/power of/resistance to things that replace staffs) and tileset replacements that I didn't have the know-how to do (I would be more confident now than I was then, but converting medieval villages and castles into modern-day towns, music venues, and office spaces is still a tall order).

And this goes without mentioning battle animations, which would likely all have to be re-made for modern day units in many different weapon types. I thought about just not having battle animations, but... that would be a bummer for everyone involved if the entire game had no battle anims. On the plus side, if anyone was insane enough to undertake this Herculean task, it would be an opportunity to use a completely different (potentially easier to crank out in batches) spriting style for all of the animations/portraits.

Edit: I didn't actually answer the question. My answer is "if you make it, they will come", and by they I mean myself.

Edited by Alusq
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