Awful Emblem, Post-Release
So we made a romhack. Maybe you've heard of it, but probably not - we started twelve years ago, back when we all were in college and had hubris to spare, looking out at the landscape of FE hacks and went "Yeah, we can do this." And here we are now, a few days after release (at time of writing, anyway). Reception seems to be pretty good thus far, and we've done a couple hotfixes for small bugs, but for the most part, the work is done. Twelve long years of blood, sweat, and tears, and all we have to show for it is this tiny little GBA patch.
This is not to say that it hasn't been rewarding to see people enjoy our game, and I'd be lying if I said my ego wasn't waiting with bated breath to see what people think once they start wrapping up. Only one person has finished so far, and I don't expect to see many more for another week or so, given that it is a full-length game - but they will, and soon. There were a handful of maps that I designed, so I'm always curious to see what people thought about them, but this release (and really, the game in general at this point) isn't really about the GAME itself. Obviously I would be flattered if people enjoyed the act of playing it, but I am not a developer. FP and Crow handled all the actual "construction" aspects of the game, with some help from an FEU regular named Tequila. I'm not even really a writer, despite what the game credits me for; my role was much closer to some combination of director and editor, which I suppose is important when five of the wordiest motherfuckers come up with a combined 858 pages of script for the story and supports.
But I digress. For me, this release is entirely about our world, and the characters that we filled it with. The trials and tribulations that they go through, the friendships and bonds they forge along the way, and everything in-between. Doubly so, considering that I, specifically, was tasked with taking our scripts for the supports and turning them into formatted, in-game text. I was not alone in this endeavor by any means, but I don't think it's a stretch to say that I'm responsible for ~90% of what you see in the support viewer. This also means that I am, for lack of a better word, closest to these smaller moments. For me, the most gratifying thing is to hear someone talk about who their favorite characters are, who they decided to have pair up, and what they thought of those little adventures that happen in between the larger plot beats.
Most of the actual writing for Awful Emblem was done by committee - someone throws out an idea, someone else says "Yeah, hang on, I've got something for that", and slowly but surely a story comes together. The supports were a little more fragmented, in the sense that they were usually written by one or two people before being "edited" by the whole group, but they largely followed the same kind of process. And this is not to say that I didn't contribute to this; everyone had a set of characters for whom they had the "voice", and mine included a couple of the main characters, but I can't in good faith say that I did a lot of writing. What I did do was something closer to...I guess whatever the GBA equivalent of cinematography is. Here's the script, but I get to decide where they stand, how they move during the conversation, how the lines are broken up, and maybe change some words here and there to make them flow better or fit in a text box.
This was, to be clear, a mind-numbing, tedious job. The text engine in GBA FE is...precarious at the best of times, and even with a modified version of the text engine that allowed for THREE lines of text (at roughly 40 characters a piece) to be displayed at once, it is not a simple task to wrangle all these words into something the game will display. With 121 unique support pairs to get through, you eventually reach a point where the extra flourishes and care simply aren't worth the effort compared to simply doing a bare-bones encoding that makes it insertable at all - and even that was a major challenge! I have gone on the record saying that I'm essentially the reason that we never did an Act 2 demo (because I was so far behind in getting the supports encoded), and while I don't know if it's actually true, it IS true that by the time I had gotten the Act 2 supports done and started working on Act 3, we had maybe four or five maps left in the game to design. With the game part of the project that far ahead, why stop and try to polish the first half of it for release? Might as well just power through to the end and release it all at once, which is what we ended up doing.
In the final push before release, I sat down with the intention of going through the early game supports - the first ones that would have been encoded, before I really knew what I was doing - and let me tell you, they were dire. Some were so bad as to be functionally unusable and had to be completely written, though thankfully there weren't more than two or three in that kind of shape. A good chunk of them were at least passable, and didn't need anything more than a simple editing pass to even out some line lengths and remove some unnecessary 3-line text boxes, maybe add in some flourishes like movement or bobbing if it was called for. But the most insidious ones were the cases where the text itself was fine, but the encoding was so bad or so basic that attempting to fix it at all was almost a trap; it was easier to tear the whole thing up and simply re-encode it from scratch.
This was where the burnout really hit. The game was content-complete as of July, so there should have been plenty of time to get everything cleaned up. Maybe there would have been if I was disciplined enough to spend time working on it outside of our usual dev time on Fridays, but I appreciated having a dedicated "this is when we are going to work" time. At any rate, by mid-October I had hit the wall and I had no intention of finishing the remaining 20-odd supports on the docket. I expressed as much, and was given the all-clear to let it go. This lasted about a week before I quietly went back to it, in what is surely a very healthy reaction, but I did resolve to only do the Act 1 supports this time. That felt achievable, even with the specter of being told we were releasing at more or less any point in the immediate future.
And then six weeks later, we did. Twelve years of work, from prototypes, characters, and outlines to a fully featured game that we poured our collective hearts into. The initial feedback has been largely positive, and though we've had to push out a couple hotfix patches, the time we spent squashing bugs seems to have massively paid off. And yet, I feel...mostly empty inside? Like, what am I supposed to do now that it's done? Some of the other team members have had some chatter about scenarios they might want to explore in a hypothetical follow-up project, but I cannot imagine diving into another big thing right now. I wish I had their conviction, frankly - I kinda feel lost with no real objective to orient myself toward. And it's hard for me to take much ownership of the finished product - as much as I know it isn't true, none of what's there feels like it's mine. Without the efforts of FP and Crow, we would have nothing but a bunch of scripts and some bad, basic maps with no game holding them together.
Hell, I'm not even sure what the point of this post is anymore. Some sort of strange, post-release emotional dump where I allow my imposter syndrome to run rampant, despite having directly tamed it via actually releasing the project to something that resembles acclaim. I'm proud of what we accomplished, and I will defend both it and the choices we made until the end. I hope that you, hypothetical reader, will give it a shot if a GBA-style Fire Emblem sound appealing, and I hope that you find something in that story and world, just like we did. As for me, I don't know what comes next, but I hope (somewhat selfishly) that it's something I can feel like I had a more direct hand in - something more "mine" than "ours." This was fun, despite everything, and something I never could have done on my own, for sure. But I think it's time to tackle something smaller and personal.