Hey everyone,

We currently reached a point where some mechanics will need to be tested on different pieces of hardware to see how the game reacts to different structures so I can tend to those issues early in development. This will be explained further down the article. I’ll start with some technical aspects I dealt with this week, then move on to something more open ended on your part.

Menu Update

It doesn’t look like much, but there’s a lot of separate components that’s been into this menu recently, including a quick font swap, so let’s dig right in!

Weapon Ranks

I built the weapon rank system (which was the bigger part of this week’s workload). You get weapon rank every round of combat (Even if you double/triple attack, you still get weapon experience once, to balance faster enemies and tankier ones). The amount varies per individual weapon and can also be modified by a unit’s personal skill. As of now, this is the current weapon rank scale.

E – 1

D – 31

C – 71

B – 121

A – 181 (Tier 2 Only)

S – 251 (Tier 3 Only)

You can also see in the weapon part of the inventory that the Hammer (which is a C-Rank weapon) cannot be equipped since Bjorn only has D-rank in Axes in this test.

Unit Tier/Banner

You can also see the blue banner with the V shape in there. That’s where the player will see the Class Tier of the unit. I realized that this wasn’t shown in any Fire Emblem game. The player just had to remember the entire class tree and understand the archetypes (The Jeigan/Oifaye archetypes come to mind) in order to dodge exp hogging by early Tier 2 units. Also since my class tree has a lot of possible final classes and some share names with their Fire Emblem counterparts, I decided to show this when you hover units on the battlefield to help with blind first playthroughs.

Bugfixes

I fixed a bunch of small irritating bugs along the way, including the following bugs.

Smaller resolutions had issues with the menu’s slide animation. Since I slid the menu upwards with a static value, it went too high on smaller resolutions and barely moved on higher resolutions. I swapped this with a percentage value based on the screen size and it works wonders.

When you selected “Attack” in the menu after moving a unit, then cancelled your choice, the target select menu disappeared, but the action menu never showed up afterwards, leading to a situation where your only choice was to close the game and restart.

These issues are gladly fixed!

Small Class Changes

After a small debate, I decided to swap the Myrmidon and Wanderer in the class tree. I felt the Myrmidon/Mercenary had a rivalry as being the two possible foot swordsmen and putting one ahead of the other felt off. Also, both are the result of a Wanderer who has found his purpose, one in the way of the blade, the other in the pleasure of gold.

Community/Testing

Some of you may know that I’ve been working on a light hearted Fire Emblem hack called Geriatric Emblem. I created a dedicated subreddit to my projects called /r/blindcoco to discuss unit balancing and test scenarios. So far we’re only a few out there and the subreddit is private since I’ll also discuss Wicked Night : Holy Knights on there. However, if you’d be willing to either participate in the general discussions regarding those two projects and/or test these products when I am in need of people on different OS/hardware specifications.

So if you’re interested in participating in this small community, either comment down here, on the Reddit thread or contact me by PM on Reddit at /u/blindcoco.

Character Teaser

As per usual, here is the character teaser!

Last week, I teased Roshin, the Myrmidon.

This week, Sahara.