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March 28, 2024, 08:22:28 am

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Use of ePSXe before 2.0 is highly discouraged. Mednafen, RetroArch, and Duckstation are recommended for playing/testing, pSX is recommended for debugging.


My love affair with WotL has ended... It's time for something new.

Started by Timbo, June 15, 2016, 08:52:49 pm

Jumza

I think that comes down to personal preference though. Story Patches vs Gameplay Patches (and the awesome ones that combine those elements) are just for different players.
  • Modding version: PSX
Nyzer: Alma teleports out of her own possessed body.
Raijinili: Remember that you're telling a modding community that the game they love could use some fixing.

Angel

Some people like to enjoy good food, others just shovel McDonald's down and say their hunger is gone.
  • Modding version: PSX
* Angel should quit being a lazy bitch
<@Elric> I agree to that as well

nyanyame nyanyajuu nyanyado no nyarabide nyakunyaku inyanyaku nyanyahan nyanyadai nyannyaku nyarabete nyaganyagame
At the end of the day, are we not all trapped inside lemons?

CONMAN

Hey Jack of All Trades, I thought I would give you my $0.02 on your potential project.

First off, are you doing this for yourself , or as something of a service to the fft community?  For starters, you need to be doing this for yourself- or YOU WILL NEVER FINISH.... I've been working on my own mod for 4-5 years! I'm doing it for me- and sharing it with the community that made it possible.  People could tell me it sucks all day- and I would still work on it.  I know this sounds selfish, but are you going to put 5-10 hours a week on something you aren't crazy about to make others happy?  How many projects have started and then completely been abandoned!  I don't mean just the hundred or so ideas that never get off the ground, but the dozen others that really had promise and then never got completed.

As for a new vanilla mod, I think virtually all desire for such has evaporated over the years.  Without looking, I feel like 10 or so have been completed... Like has already been stated, unless you are going to throw out something really innovative, it's not going to serve any one.

I absolutely used to love seeing new project ideas pop up- It's so much fun to imagine all the possibilities.  I really don't any more and it's all because the completion rate for any non-vanilla mod is like 1%.  I beg of you- don't start unless you think you can finish.
I believe we have an estimated time/work post/spreadsheet or something to let you know how involved this is.  I have never looked at it, but let me give you rough timeline of how my own mod project has progressed:

*about one year of just surfing this site- learning simple patcher, spriting, basic junk I slowly applied to my own patch.

*Decided to make my own story mod- reusing most my original patcher changes and made a basic 1 chapter beta with light attackout and battle conditional changes and relatively week eventing skills- (heavily mirroring vanilla) about 8 months to a year.

*Slowly got better with eventing, conditionals, and started to properly use the world map editor to finish chapter 2 (and fix various issues in chapter 1) about 1 to 1 and a half years.

*Learning about event compression, improving attackout, world map, eventing. creating 5 side quests and nearly finishing a (from scratch) 3rd chapter with full world map editing/conditional changes- close to a one and a half years

For a perspective I have a wife and 2 kids (not trying to create a free time competition) and have worked on this mod 5 to 10 hours a week(sometimes a lot sometimes not for weeks).  THIS IS MY NUMBER 1 HOBBY!  I expect to finish an entire game mod in about 2 years.

I don't know you want to do, but 1st do it for yourself, and 2nd decide how much you want to put into it before you start.

EDIT: For perspective, a good chunk of my time is also spriting and I'm a slow typer.  You could totally progress faster than I have-and over the years new tools keep speeding up the process.  I have long loved the idea of someone simply shooting for an original one chapter mod- I think it is roughly the perfect amount of work/payoff one could hope for.
  • Modding version: PSX

Timbo

Quote from: Xifanie on June 17, 2016, 10:19:27 am
I don't know, if it weren't for the story, I wouldn't give a damn about FFT. Look at Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, awesome game, SRPG as well, but the battle system is minimal and the battles are easy. Why would I care? The story is awesome and cute and emotional. So I really have to strongly disagree on the whole "gameplay comes before story".
This.
  • Modding version: PSX
  • Discord username: Timbo

Guru

Hey gotta start somewhere, but I do agree that eventing would add a lot of possibilities to your mod. I also think it's better to start somewhere and improve as you go. With the tools here it's basically just a list of commands when you break it down. Of course it's one of those things that's very easy to learn, and hard to master(or maybe impossible to master  ;)). There's a very easy to follow tutorial and a list of commands on the wiki(with very thorough descriptions). Only thing with the tutorial is it's done with the old instructions, but with the wiki content it's a very easy transition. I've done 3 small events myself, and multiple sessions of messing around and trying out different commands. I've done some attackout editing too(Raven did an awesome tutorial on this), and the way I see it, if I can do it, anybody can  :mrgreen:. Check out stones ripple or even the first scene of JOT5 to see how much eventing can really improve a game. I still love that scene with the archer shooting the gate lever in stones ripple, and was probably not hard to do at all.

Also, don't take criticism to heart. I still remember xif commenting on my first couple events lol. It was something along the lines of "Wow you did a very basic event" then followed some harsh criticism. I got just as much useful information from her criticism as I did from the advice I got from the Event Guru himself(Elric). She has a point and all the comments so far have just been random things that we think would be cool to see in a mod. Just from her comment and your response, we now have a better idea of what your aiming for, and you can now narrow down your questions to be more specific.

Quote from: Xifanie on June 17, 2016, 10:19:27 am
I don't know, if it weren't for the story, I wouldn't give a damn about FFT. Look at Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure, awesome game, SRPG as well, but the battle system is minimal and the battles are easy. Why would I care? The story is awesome and cute and emotional. So I really have to strongly disagree on the whole "gameplay comes before story".


Eh I have to agree and disagree with both these, I think a lot of it comes down to opinion. I personally prefer gameplay over story, but without a good story the game becomes very irritating, trying to rush past every single scene(This is how lightning returns was for me). I still played it multiple times, even though I hated the story because I enjoyed the unique gameplay.

Now the same can be said of a good story. I often play older games, which the gameplay is just easy and outdated now, because I love the stories. But then it's back in the box for a few years. I fell in love with FFT because of the story, but the reason I'm so bored with it now is there is no challenge anymore.

When it comes down to it the games I play multiple times are the ones that will provide me with a challenge. Call of duty zombies is still one of my favorite games. There is no story really and no matter how good you are you're gonna lose at some point. All you can do is try to get further than you did last time lol.

In the end it's gameplay over story for me too, but a truly awesome game combines both.