In Development PokéEmblem: A Trip Through Time

Kildario · Aug 11, 2023

I realized I forgot to switch the overworld minimap from the default Magvel. I've fixed this internally but it's such a minor change that I'll wait on something more substantial before updating the game files. Also any feedback on game balance in particular would be greatly appreciated, especially on the later maps. I am but one person and did not have tons of time for playtesting/balancing. Thanks! :)

By the way, if anyone likes this game and wants to help make assets for it for post-jam updates (specifically battle animations, though I've got a list) I would be forever grateful!

AenaonDogsky · Aug 18, 2023

I've just started playing, and I've gotta say I am very surprised to hear there is an open source sRPG engine that can make FE clones. And that you went ahead and made a game with it! I always wanted to implement a tactics-style system with events in RMXP (there used to be a few proof of concept examples in the long past). I wasn't expecting anyone to make a GBA FE pokemon game, and thus far I'm very impressed by what I'm seeing. I find the concept very interesting, along with weapons being named after pokemon moves, items etc

A small detail to mention for the prologue chapter - you have to consider that a lot of players won't have any prior GBA fire emblem experience (or none at all with the series, though the recent entries are decently popular). Even though you mention stuff like terrain advantage, ranged attacks and item usage, how to utilize this by the player isn't shown very clearly if they don't have beforehand knowledge. ( I know Marc gives explanations after a certain number of turns, but these would be better shown than said)

Ideally, you'd want this to be shown in-game (a character moving to trade the vulnerary/energy powder to another character with low hp, who then proceeds to heal themselves). Same with the fact that the enemies, particularly the boss, will move towards and against the weakest unit.

Likewise, people wouldn't know there is an actual dialogue history button, skippable scenes, or the multitude of options provided under "extras".
So I feel like you could introduce this a bit more smoothly for new players.

There's also some minor bugs like description of options only showing an internal descr_ placeholder string. (also is levelup popup supposed to mention the mons name rather than the player? If so ignore this, it's the mons levelling up I assume). I also believe the teddiursa next to the ursaring does not pursue you as soon as ursaring does (it might be its placement). Lastly I think there's no music playing after exiting a house/vendor, and before the turn continues, and portrait talking animation continues to play if you skip item obtain cutscene inside interiors, beyond the item got popup. And, you start off with 0 gold, making the second level's shops mundane, other than for terrain purposes.

I'll make sure to leave a detailed review once I'm through with the game. Great job so far!

EDIT: You also need to show Grasswhistle's effects in a manner that can be translated well to the player. As it is, if you dont know how to check enemy equipment, you'll be left wondering why your units cant move. Since this is a medium-to-advanced effect, I'd have expected at least it being shown that it exists, and how it works, and definitely not this early

Kildario · Aug 18, 2023

AenaonDogsky said:
I've just started playing, and I've gotta say I am very surprised to hear there is an open source sRPG engine that can make FE clones. And that you went ahead and made a game with it! I always wanted to implement a tactics-style system with events in RMXP (there used to be a few proof of concept examples in the long past). I wasn't expecting anyone to make a GBA FE pokemon game, and thus far I'm very impressed by what I'm seeing. I find the concept very interesting, along with weapons being named after pokemon moves, items etc

Hey thanks! I appreciate the feedback! Glad to hear you're enjoying it so far. This is actually one of a couple of engines I found for making Fire Emblem-esque games; I eventually settled on LT Maker in particular because it's relatively easy to setup (helps with jams since, y'know, time limit lol.)

AenaonDogsky said:
A small detail to mention for the prologue chapter - you have to consider that a lot of players won't have any prior GBA fire emblem experience (or none at all with the series, though the recent entries are decently popular). Even though you mention stuff like terrain advantage, ranged attacks and item usage, how to utilize this by the player isn't shown very clearly if they don't have beforehand knowledge. ( I know Marc gives explanations after a certain number of turns, but these would be better shown than said)

Ideally, you'd want this to be shown in-game (a character moving to trade the vulnerary/energy powder to another character with low hp, who then proceeds to heal themselves). Same with the fact that the enemies, particularly the boss, will move towards and against the weakest unit.

Likewise, people wouldn't know there is an actual dialogue history button, skippable scenes, or the multitude of options provided under "extras".
So I feel like you could introduce this a bit more smoothly for new players.

Yeah, the tutorial messages were some of the first things I programmed in so they're likely due for a revisit. I'm not sure I'll implement them quite on the level you're describing but I'll see if there's a better order/means of implementation and making sure the most important aspects of the tactical battle system have some kind of an introduction.

AenaonDogsky said:
There's also some minor bugs like description of options only showing an internal descr_ placeholder string. (also is levelup popup supposed to mention the mons name rather than the player? If so ignore this, it's the mons levelling up I assume). I also believe the teddiursa next to the ursaring does not pursue you as soon as ursaring does (it might be its placement). Lastly I think there's no music playing after exiting a house/vendor, and before the turn continues, and portrait talking animation continues to play if you skip item obtain cutscene inside interiors, beyond the item got popup. And, you start off with 0 gold, making the second level's shops mundane, other than for terrain purposes.

Thanks for this! I'll see to fixing these if I can. The missing descriptions unfortunately I've been hunting down and adding as I find them; there are some strings initialized by the engine but without values so they just print the string name, but I don't think I've seen any documentation stating which, specifically, need declarations from me. Again, I've been adding them as I find them (but clearly didn't get them all!) so if you remember to write down the string name and/or where you found it, it'd help immensely with giving them proper descriptions.

Re: music: I think that's just the delay when the music tracks are loaded/unloaded by the engine. If you exit a house and wait a bit, the music should start back up again. There is a pause without music, yes, I've tried to fix that internally but haven't 100% worked out the delay quirk.

AenaonDogsky said:
EDIT: You also need to show Grasswhistle's effects in a manner that can be translated well to the player. As it is, if you dont know how to check enemy equipment, you'll be left wondering why your units cant move. Since this is a medium-to-advanced effect, I'd have expected at least it being shown that it exists, and how it works, and definitely not this early

This is largely an issue with disabling combat animations. Ideally there would be a full animation with the zoom-in effect and the actual unit sprites, with the enemy summoning music notes and your unit getting status particle effect'd, with the word "Grasswhistle" on screen long enough that it--assuming the player is familiar with Pokemon, which I feel is a fair assumption given the site I've shared this on--should clue the player in that they just got put to sleep.

Without the combat anims, it should still play the FE "status effect" sound and flash your unit green so you know you got hit by something, but yeah it's admittedly sparse. There's likely a way to have units pulse or turn a color for the duration of a status effect; I'll see to enabling that for (most) of the temp effects so the player would (hopefully) at least know "hey, there's something wrong with this unit!"

As for the last bit there ("definitely not this early") - (Older) Fire Emblem typically does not have a lot of status effects and uses them sparingly. Sleep, Berserk, and Silence are usually relegated to a few high-level enemies in a few end-game maps, if that. On the contrary, Pokemon has a TON of status effects of all kinds (sleep, confusion, +def, -acc, substitute, etc etc) and you might encounter them quite early (Weedle in Viridian Woods?) so one of the key differences between this vs "normal" Fire Emblem was I wanted to play around with status more than Fire Emblem typically does. Possibly sleep was a bad choice for that map since it has the fog too, but early status was entirely intentional.

AenaonDogsky · Aug 19, 2023

Kildario said:
Without the combat anims, it should still play the FE "status effect" sound and flash your unit green so you know you got hit by something, but yeah it's admittedly sparse. There's likely a way to have units pulse or turn a color for the duration of a status effect; I'll see to enabling that for (most) of the temp effects so the player would (hopefully) at least know "hey, there's something wrong with this unit!"

As for the last bit there ("definitely not this early") - (Older) Fire Emblem typically does not have a lot of status effects and uses them sparingly. Sleep, Berserk, and Silence are usually relegated to a few high-level enemies in a few end-game maps, if that. On the contrary, Pokemon has a TON of status effects of all kinds (sleep, confusion, +def, -acc, substitute, etc etc) and you might encounter them quite early (Weedle in Viridian Woods?) so one of the key differences between this vs "normal" Fire Emblem was I wanted to play around with status more than Fire Emblem typically does. Possibly sleep was a bad choice for that map since it has the fog too, but early status was entirely intentional.

Hm, then another way would be to flash the selection cursor at the (fogged) position of the enemy player, show a small popup with text of the actual move being used, and then show the unit affected with a flashing colored light.

That said, while I understand where you are coming from, there is a lot of other factors enveloping this particular effect as early as chapter 2.

1. The fog
2. The extreme range of the move (this not only makes the effect not directly shown to the first-time player, but there is no didactic leadup to an advanced move)
3. The lack of proper visual feedback and indiciation
4. The fact that there is no commentary by the characters on it

Generally, as developers experienced in certain games or genres, we tend to find "easier" levels a bit inadequate (on an instinctive level), but that is not the best way to carry out this kind of design.

As it pertains to status effects early on, that's fine, but not this kind of status effect under the above circumstances. Perhaps a burn or poison effect, in a more visible manner - after all, this is an introduction to status effects.

Kildario · Aug 19, 2023

Small update! 0.1.1 changes:

overworld minimap now shows correct continent
several statuses (sleep, stun, burned, poisoned, etc) now cause units affected by those status to flicker a relevant color
certain statuses (sleep, berzerk) are now lost if the unit engages in battle
adjusted duration of a few status effects
changed some dialogue in the ch1 and ch2 houses
changed ai of a few units in ch2 and ch3; notably, the sleep archer should now be stationary, making her a bit more predictable to play around
on new games, the player should now start with ~2000G

AenaonDogsky · Aug 25, 2023

Hi, am now in chapter 4, but I figured I'd leave a few things pertaining to 2, and 3, as well as some bugs I believe I found.

First of all, the difficulty overall until chapter 4 at least, is very high. Putting myself in the shoes of a first-time player, it would seem close to impossible, particularly in ch3.
Here are the main reasons:

Wingull numbers and respawns are too many, making the harassment difficult to avoid, and they usually get to have a x2 hit rate
The vast majority of enemies have much longer walkable distances compared to the party (compare to usage of bandits that have lower movement points in traditional FE first few maps). This makes maneuvering more difficult for most of the party, that have pretty low mp
Mankey bandits are exceedingly hard due to their x4 attacking rate, which puts the numerical inferiority of the player's party and an even greater risk. Add to the fact that the main character is a normal-type
Enemies have access to very strong weapons for early-game
Most people will not know about house access being necessary to gain new units. On top of that, those unlockable characters are essential to survive ch3. The average player will probably learn that the hard way. I believe it's not good design to have more than 1 character unlockable that way, this early. (unless you unlock them by finishing the chapter anyway, which I can't confirm)
Vast majority of enemies have increased attacking range, both in general for the early-game, and compared to the party.
Overall number of enemies is quite high for the early chapters

The above combined, means:

- The vast majority of players, whom you should consider either not familiar with FE, or not familiar with GBA FE, will be overwhelmed due to the combination of

1) lack of gradual exposure to mechanics
2) presumption of beforehand knowledge of intermediate-to-advanced tactics
3) inherent enemy advantages
4) early-game unit additions needing to be unlocked manually
5) lack of early-game chances to grind
6) positioning of certain items and other secrets in difficult to access places this early on
7) The range, movement, numbers, and strength of the early enemies are vastly disproportionate to the capabilities of the party, and to the personal experience of the player at the early stages.

I believe the biggest offender of the above is chapter 3, where you are 1) limited by the map's space itself, 2) attacked from FOUR sides, 3) keep getting attacked over and over by excessive waves of enemies, 4) harassed by long range, high movement range, and slower high-attack units concurrently, 5) having no space to maneuver or turtle. Every single time I had finished a wave, from one direction, new enemies would spawn from 1 to 3 directions! In the end, I managed to defeat all waves of enemies with everyone unscathed, leaving the pirate leader alone, but this would have been impossible had I not been familiar with the series' tactics to a level beyond the very few first chapters, and meticulous micro.

Here is a list of the bugs I think I found:

text seems to skip a few lines on its own, during dialogue
if you attempt to skip world map text, the last soundbit sounds VERY loud
no "status" to select in world map
some item descriptions are being cut when viewed during normal gameplay
"You want I could show you around"? Ken, beginning of ch3
the chest on the right side of the ship does not contain anything in chapter 4
Wingull on the right-hand side seem to move and retreat in the same turn in ch4

AenaonDogsky · Aug 28, 2023

Moving on to Chapter 5, I believe the same difficulty issues present themselves, this time a bit more exacerbated.

There's far too many civilians to rescue (and I am not even sure if there's a reward for saving them all, though I did save them all)
Likewise with previous chapters, how to rescue them is presupposed to be a mechanic already known to the player
Only very few units have the constitution to rescue civilians. It might be a bug, but same constitution units cannot rescue other units (so a 4con unit cannot rescue another 4 unit).
Now there's 3 sides from where enemies keep coming, and the Wingul in specific, spawn on tiles that are too close to the civilians for the player to prepare. The constant waves and positioning make it so that the player needs to move fast towards either side, but that is extremely hard because the hit rate of the Wingul is so low, you need multiple units to fend one off before you get to protect the civilians
The x2 hits of the Wingul means civilians instantly lose
Every time I managed to painstakingly clear one side, yet another side spawned even more Wingul, and the cherry on the cake being the south side ambush too.

This was by far the most "Kaizo" chapter. (Looking at ch6 it might not be the last). The combination of 1) Player not having the time to turtle civilians behind units, 2) Player not being able to rescue them all at the same time (due to only a few units having the necessary constitution to do so), 3) Player not being able to cover multiple sides aggressively, because the Wingul have insane range, movement points, hit rate, and can hit x2, 4) Civilians getting borked with 1 hit, made for an extreme difficulty.

This made me have almost all of my units on the move constantly, toying with movement range and rescuing/dropping civilians and hypervigilant micro. I will admit it got on my nerves at points (thankfully I cheesed the save backups by renaming Suspend to a normal savefile. It'd have been impossible otherwise).

I assume you haven't had any testers give it a go, and playing on debug yourself might have presented you with a very different picture of what is possible for both the average player, and the more seasoned player alike. Unless you were actively aiming for a Kaizo game, I believe this is far too much for the vast majority of players.

TechSkylander1518 · Aug 29, 2023

AI in Ch 5 seems to be broken - enemies will stop moving after a bit, except for a few human enemies when the player approaches, and this can lead to a softlock, since some Pokemon are behind mountains. I tried to slog through with just Alix, and got down to one last Stojouner, but I think I'm completely out now - Alix's attacks have all broken, even the one I took from Henrietta, Ken and Sarah couldn't put a dent in it, and Stephane can't pass through the mountains to use his attack, and Alix can't carry him over. Granted, I'm a bit short on units - lost Mark, Gena, and Gabriel earlier in the match, and I only just discovered the visit mechanic, so I never got Marta, Antonin, or Asad - but I was able to handle the rest of the match okay, and if the game was balanced with recruiting the other units in mind, I think the visit mechanic should be explained to the player. (And from a story perspective, it seems weird that I've defeated all the invading knights, but can't continue on until I venture into the wild to take care of some Pokemon that aren't even doing anything...)

AenaonDogsky · Aug 31, 2023

In Chapter 6, you are again surrounded, and there is also a Visit trap. The Pirates in conjuction with Wingul make it very hard to do anything else other than go full attack-mode on the Fire-Type leader. Thankfully, this means the chapter can end much faster, but there was one big problem - Zap Cannon.

I have already mentioned how high the evasion rate of enemies, in particular Wingul, is. And how high their hit percentage also is. There seems to be a Pokemon logic in some of the moves having naturally lower accuracy, however, while you have reduced the hit rate of moves like Slam, being an upgrade to Tackle, the same does not apply to enemies. Zap Cannon is supposed to canonically be a very, very low accuracy attack, yet the Zap Cannon user in the map can hit all of my units, even overlevelled ones. I had to go the level's file and give the Zap Cannon guy Tackle instead, and I cleared the map no problem.

It also seems like generally the enemy has a much higher evasion rate, while the player's party has too low accuracy.

AenaonDogsky · Aug 31, 2023

Now, Chapter 7, and some other notes:

The earthquake users are disproportionally strong
The number of Wingul, their strength, evasion, hit times, and combination of Flying and Water attacks make movement really hard. I just gave them all Tackle so I could have a chance to proceed.
Maractus are also quite stronger than expected, I had to encircle them with overlevelled units after dispatching their accompanying units
The number of Stonejourner when attempting to go near the center bogs down at least 2 units a time.
Samir cannot be hurt by anything - he dodges everything. If you are expecting status effects making him unable to move etc as the only solution, then you will softlock many players. In the end I defeated them with pure very low accuracy RNG, after positioning Alix to outrange him, and an overlevelled Stephane in the Palm Tree to hit around 1/7 of the time. After many grueling turns, he finally went down.

Samir is a big problem because:
1) Units that can hit him, cannot damage him (Asad)
2) Units that can hit him over his level, do very little damage only with specific attacks (Alix's Gust)
3) Units that can damage him, cannot hit him (Kais)
4) He has high defense and impossible evasion
5) His defense and evason is boosted by the Castle
6) He autoheals every turn because of the Castle

I dont think the wind picking up is a message that should be shown everytime the event happens, first few times maybe

Bugs:

Stonjourner doesn't take super effective damage from grass (this must have been indirectly mentioned in Tech's post above)
Kais idle unit sprite Y offeset is wrong (hiding units behind him)
Flying-Type attacks dont seem to affect maractus
poison damage does not show during the map turns.
If a weapon rank increase happens at the same time as a weapon breaking, and levelling up, the rank increase pop-up wont show up

General Feedback:

I dont think its good to leave certain inaccessible lower rank items in map-specific shops. The low-rank, varied items should be accessible from the global market, and the higher rank stronger items on the shops
It seems like some type matchups dont matter much, Growlithe does huge damage to my fire units. Alix's Razor leaf does big damage to Growlithe... It seems that levels mater much more than type matchups
The game should provide, at multiple points, accuracy boosting and other helpful moves for the party, many good effects from the poke games you can take. A Dancer would also be a good addition given the fact that you are overwhelmed at every step in almost all Chapters.

Now onto the 8th and penultimate Chapter.

AenaonDogsky · Sep 5, 2023

Hi, there is a gamebreaking bug in chapter 8, I can't seize the castle gate with Ken. I doubt it's intended because there is one more chapter in the files, and you mentioned that the game's first act is complete.

Kildario · Sep 23, 2023

For anyone who might be following this: now that game jam results are in, I'm going to consider this project abandoned, at least for the time being, so I've removed the download link. It was admittedly somewhat unfinished when I submitted it and I had assumed I'd have the time and energy to patch/fix/complete it after the submission deadline, but that clearly didn't happen ahah.

I kind of like the idea of Pokemon in Fire Emblem so I may revisit this idea in the future, but perhaps with a different implementation. Thanks!

AenaonDogsky · Sep 23, 2023

Kildario said:
For anyone who might be following this: now that game jam results are in, I'm going to consider this project abandoned, at least for the time being, so I've removed the download link. It was admittedly somewhat unfinished when I submitted it and I had assumed I'd have the time and energy to patch/fix/complete it after the submission deadline, but that clearly didn't happen ahah.

I kind of like the idea of Pokemon in Fire Emblem so I may revisit this idea in the future, but perhaps with a different implementation. Thanks!

A bit bummed to hear that. Looking back to my bugreporting and feedback posts, they seem to be on the negative side (although my intention was to make sure I got as many and had as much detail as possible, so I can see why it'd look like that). I hope this didn't factor in on the hiatus

.
I was waiting for a way to play the last chapter before I'd give a review, so considering there won't be a fix for chapter 8's seize win condition, I'll do it now.

The base idea of combining the elemental system of Pokemon with FE's weapon system has great promise. The overall execution was good, but lacked gradual variety and impact in terms of the type chart. Ideally, you'd want types to have significant role to play, and status effects to assist with situations were the types aren't enough. The latter is much more difficult to balance, admittedly.

Map design was quite strong and good in itself - there were some issues with tactical placement of units - but those were related mostly to the difficulty and number of enemy units. Accessibility of various items at many points should have been prioritized (not the least because its a Pokemon staple, but because you need an assortment of ways to get over multiple obstacles). Character variety was good, but you didn't have enough of it until late, and many characters were missable.

The story about MC getting back to his world was set up well. I believe the only weakness was that the characters were taking it a bit "light/casual" for the situation they were in, and some lines felt more like the characters showing off in a theatrical manner, rather than talking in a more natural way. I did like the veiled woman's character a lot (forgot her name). This is easy to improve on the more you do it. Music selection from the GBA FEs was good. (Nothing tops SS for me).

The game's strengths were the overall map design and tiling, and character variety. The weaker parts were enemy balancing, and progression. I believe you can easily build upon the legacy of your earlier work, and make something great. You already have all the pieces in place, and the base is robust. Good luck!

In Development PokéEmblem: A Trip Through Time

Kildario

Novice

AenaonDogsky

Arbiter of Doggos

Kildario

Novice

AenaonDogsky

Arbiter of Doggos

Kildario

Novice

AenaonDogsky

Arbiter of Doggos

AenaonDogsky

Arbiter of Doggos

TechSkylander1518

Wiki Dweeb

AenaonDogsky

Arbiter of Doggos

AenaonDogsky

Arbiter of Doggos

AenaonDogsky

Arbiter of Doggos

Kildario

Novice

AenaonDogsky

Arbiter of Doggos