Final Fantasy Hacktics

Projects => New Project Ideas => Topic started by: kaleemmcintyre on July 13, 2019, 01:01:49 pm

Title: New and Confused
Post by: kaleemmcintyre on July 13, 2019, 01:01:49 pm
Hey all,

I'm a bit new around here and so I wanted to just come out with my idea and questions. If there's something that's already been answered please link me to it, as I've tried to navigate through the forum and have been completely overwhelmed by the level of information that's here. Not to mention befuddled by where all of it is located.

With that out of the way, here's my idea:

I wanted to make a semi-new game that moves away from Ramza's story and instead focuses on a new MC. The storyline I had in mind was that this new MC would go around protecting the regions from an influx of monsters brought about because of a curse that climaxes with the MC going and taking on the source of said curse to defend the land.

My questions start with -

1. Is this possible? Meaning, can the game be reworked to allow me to introduce a new character in a different starting location and then progress the story around his journey?

2. How are skills remade? I tried to play around with the program tools to delete old skills to make new ones (I'm more versed in RPG Maker where you can do this more easily) but couldn't? So I would really appreciate help with this.

3. I wanted to have new main characters (5 total with the rest being recruit-able monsters), so is it possible to remove the soldier shop from various towns?

4. As with above, because I want only 5 main characters, can I give them specific classes which only they can utilize? Or would it be better not to fool around with this too much? I.e. Th MC would have the squire class - which would give him access to knight and other heavy armor/weapon classes, but the other characters would be semi-locked to other specific classes.

My idea was -
Squire - Knight - Samurai - Holy Knight
Archer - Gunner - Ninja
Thief - Lancer - Dark Knight
Chemist - Black Mage - Red Mage -
White Mage - Oracle - Summoner

5. Can I add more new monsters into the game or is the game hard-locked to prevent new additions? And I don't mean making exchanges, I wanted to add werewolf, adamantoise, Iron Giants, and so on.

There are just some of the questions that I had. If someone can help me to figure things out I'd be appreciative.
Title: Re: New and Confused
Post by: Nyzer on July 13, 2019, 02:28:22 pm
QuoteMy questions start with -

1. Is this possible? Meaning, can the game be reworked to allow me to introduce a new character in a different starting location and then progress the story around his journey?


Yes (http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?board=66.0), it is (http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?board=62.0). To some degree, however, this may only be possible on the PSX version. I don't know if different locations/different paths are possible on PSP, but at the very least you could use different characters and a different story, they'd just have to follow the same world map progression.

Quote2. How are skills remade? I tried to play around with the program tools to delete old skills to make new ones (I'm more versed in RPG Maker where you can do this more easily) but couldn't? So I would really appreciate help with this.


I have no idea what you mean by saying you couldn't. You can just change (most of) the skills to do whatever you like. The only thing you can't just do in the Patcher is rename them, and you just need to mess around with the Resources to do that (in the Patcher) and Tactext (in the game itself).

Quote3. I wanted to have new main characters (5 total with the rest being recruit-able monsters), so is it possible to remove the soldier shop from various towns?


I think this requires some ASM hacks, which would have to be done on the PSX.

Quote4. As with above, because I want only 5 main characters, can I give them specific classes which only they can utilize? Or would it be better not to fool around with this too much? I.e. Th MC would have the squire class - which would give him access to knight and other heavy armor/weapon classes, but the other characters would be semi-locked to other specific classes.


This would also require some ASM hacks. There are ways to lock out generic jobs so that other characters can't naturally progress to them, such as making their access locked behind themselves, but there's one problem with this - JP spillover. For every 4 JP a unit earns, all other units on the field earn 1 JP for that job. So if the jobs you used to lock progression for each character were available in any way, on any character, you/your players could very definitely end up unlocking these other jobs unintentionally.

Special jobs, such as Agrias' Holy Knight, count as the unit's base job, and are given the same unlocking potential as the Squire on a generic. So you can't just use special jobs to gate off jobs between different characters, either.

Quote5. Can I add more new monsters into the game or is the game hard-locked to prevent new additions? And I don't mean making exchanges, I wanted to add werewolf, adamantoise, Iron Giants, and so on.


You'll run into sprite limits, but there's nothing stopping you from setting up new Jobs with Monster-type skillsets, specific sprites, and changing sprite palettes and skillsets to emulate different monster races within separate species. But they will not function all the same way the regular monsters do - breeding, Poach, and Beastmaster, for example, will not work the way they do with other monster jobs. And I'm not sure if the skillset will display the same way. I actually haven't messed around too much with this, so I'm not 100% on what can and cannot be done, but I am very sure that a decent amount of typical monster functionality is tied to the specific job slots those monsters have.

---

One last thing to say:

Making an entirely new story, jobs, characters etc. is a very difficult and time consuming prospect. Consider that it's been six years since Journey of the Five released Chapter 1 and we're still not ready to release Chapter 2 yet - admittedly, a lot of this is due to changing a good number of things about the mod, as opposed to just cranking out all the next story events and moving on, but on the other hand, this has been a project with a large number of people actively developing several different parts of it for some time. Call of Power is closer to what you're thinking, and it's had a lot of hiatuses, too.

As user-friendly as many of the tools are, making a new story from scratch for an FFT mod is still much more time-consuming than doing the same in RPG Maker.

I would honestly warn you away from trying to do this, because the odds are overwhelmingly high that you will not even come close to finishing it.

If you're really serious about trying to buckle down and make something, then I'd suggest to start with something much smaller, something that other projects might be able to pick up and use as well. For example, one big gap in the FFT storyline is, how did Ramza go from "disillusioned noble turning his back on his family name" to "apprentice to a legendary mercenary on a job guarding the princess"? Put together a standalone Chapter 1.5 using several existing characters and jobs, and introduce a single unique character/job. Chapter 1 only has ten story battles, and however many other non-battle events.

Going with a short story that only features ten battles before it's over is a really achievable goal, and even though you might think "oh well that's not that many", at this point you have no idea what kind of effort it takes to put together something functional. Especially if you want to make events that are as impressive as what can be seen in the Jot5 intro.

And there's nothing stopping you from rolling a lot of the story you'd planned into this concept. You wouldn't be able to go ahead with the multi-job progression for your chosen five characters, but you could - for example - have (at least some of) them be a mercenary group in Ivalice temporarily working with Gafgarion and Ramza before they move on (to their own story?). That one-year gap is a completely blank slate. You could do literally anything with it. At the end of it all, you'd be in a much better position to decide whether you wanted to go ahead and make a full new game out of the concept, or if you're satisfied with just having made a nice little expansion to FFT, but the level of dedication to that kind of mod is beyond what you'd really like to do.

Burnout and motivation are major problems on a free fan project you're not getting paid for. There have been a lot of times I've just not worked on Jot5 stuff because I've had a new game to play (or hell, an old one to replay), or because I've been busy with work. An event I've been working on for months has, at times, frustrated me to the point of just leaving it alone for a month or so because it's not doing what I want it to do - it's a rather complicated event, of a kind that has never been done before, and there's a lot of trial and error and scrapped ideas with it. One or two of my events in particular, I really want to show off and get general feedback on, but I can't really do so because of spoilers. If the base of this mod wasn't so amazingly strong, and if I didn't get as much freedom to come up with ideas as I do (which is amazing, considering I wasn't at all involved in the original concept or Chapter 1 in any way), I can almost guarantee I'd have walked away a long time ago.

You do not want to get in over your head. At least if you make a small FFT expansion, it becomes a concept others can include in their mods, or that you can tie into other mods, and so it doesn't end up as a big concept with months of work put into it before being archived forever.

Take a look at this topic (http://ffhacktics.com/smf/index.php?topic=6125.0), as well.