Final Fantasy Hacktics

Ok so I didn't die and neither did my project. Had some setbacks but i'm still working on it.
So you might be wondering what is taking so long, well mostly technical stuff.
So updates
1. Changed weapons and armor all drastically. Not a lot of variety for weapons anymore but a lot more powerful and rare ones that can be obtained. I think it is obvious what I did there. Mostly tried to use famous weapon names and did have to make a Buster Sword since not fond of the whole materia blade thing in general.
2. Equipment increases stats but not health and dodging/blocking is the new way combat goes. Getting hit is devastating
3. Revamped every job and replaced some and created new ones, the non special jobs have no magic of any type to enforce gameplay wise how rare magic is.
4. No healing items because no.
5. Actually found a way to justify the deep dungeon in this and thinking about trying to make a second one somewhere else with another series of levels but that part I have not looked into too deeply.
6. Leveling up doesnt do a lot since base class stats are more important. So far I am liking it that way but im not married to system so it may change.

Keep up the good work, there is not nearly enough good boss sprites out there currently.

The black and gold dragon sprites dont have jobs set to them at least ones in patcher. they are pallet 5 and 6 I believe and the patcher only lists 3 dragon jobs.

Essentially there is a black dragon sprite in the game files that wont work when I try to use it for a character. I think because it doesn't have it's own portrait maybe? I still havent figured that part out.

Update! Having issues making the black dragon pallet swap that the sprite editor shows as already existing in the games files, it wont show up in game. Long story short that black dragon is needed so this is a bit of a setback as sprites are something I am not good with. (placeholder dragon sprite will be used in the meantime) The story is not quite finished and I want to ask your opinions here for some things.

1. Since Cloud will be a character would you like to see Tifa accompany him?
2. Would you like to see a romance develop between two characters in the game?
3. Would you like bosses or characters to be fought multiple times throughout the plot or do you want to have them dead after 1 fight?
4. Are there any characters from the original game whose roles you'd like expanded?
5. Want me to rush out an alpha or take my time and give you a much more detailed and ambitious project?

I'll take all of that into consideration and Toshiko, I'll try.

What is this project, and why should I care? you may be asking yourselves, well I will answer this.

First this is a complete overhaul of fft that tries to match a new less magical lore without monsters being common (with the exception of Chocobos and Dragons) with gameplay so if you are a stickler for every battle being challenging and like having access to hiring squires. Then sorry this is not for you. Not every fight is hard. Some will be a pain and others will be a breeze. Most equipment besides one of a kind ones will not have a drastic change in stats from the worst to best. That part I have already like 80% done. Just got to rename a few items and and change the descriptions.
So the plot will be different. I am cutting characters that were in the original. No more Rafa, Malak, Mustadio, Ramza, Reis, Beowulf, Steel Giant. New characters are everywhere in this game. Some you will get to know and others you wont since that's life for you.

Magic is less abundant however it is not absent. The main character is a mage type however it is more of a rare thing. No generics will be on your team. Only special units so you wont get to do much to alter the characters growth paths as it lore wise so it is closer to a regular rpg in that way. However you wont end up with all melee types, mage types or archer type it will be a little more of a balanced team. No random battles either since there are no monsters and bandits are not likely to attack a group of heavily armed people  every couple of days. Deep dungeon will be available for power leveling for you later on for those who really want to grind or just fight a lot of enemies on a map at once. Will make those battles sometimes have the max number of sprites I can fit without issue.

There is one thing I am considering but not sure of yet which is if I should make the level ups not change stats drastically so abilities would become the only advantage besides some rather minor stat variations to add a realistic cap to for instance how much damage a knight can inflict as you can only get so strong so magic is really what will give you an advantage. (inspired by DAO lore) The other option is to leave the level up stats as they were mostly besides the special classes being altered.
The holy stones will still be in it but will not steal the plot, no more resurrecting Ajora subplot.

And more! 

Sound like your thing? Awesome, I hope you'll love it. Not your thing? Well thats cool too as there are great completed projects on this site and at least one of them I bet will appeal to your tastes.

Q:So when can you expect me to post a patch?

A:Well I am being lazy with event editing for now as I suck at using easyvent still even though it is an amazing tool. But that is the biggest thing left to do really and so just to get an alpha ready faster I am not going to make them perfect right now. I am going to fit the story around my limited event editing abilities because
if I exceed my abilities i'd have to hope someone would want to do the events for my story and that would be a lot of work and well
I want to get a playable version done and then I can tinker constantly as needed to make it perfected. Soooooo I would guess by the end of the year knowing how I obsessively work on projects that generally end with me cutting down to like 4 hours of sleep a night to get more done. I know I could be using that time for irl stuff and should I? Probably but this is more fun for me. However it is football season so if the Vikings are playing then I wont be doing any work that day.

I do a lot of writing (most of it is uncredited but hey the paycheck is always nice and it is fun for me)
and in general being the problem solver for most people I know which is pretty taxing at times.

As for literature I can recommend the first Odd Thomas book (none of the Sequels)
Dragons of Autumn Twilight was pretty good too. (Raistlin is like the best character in sword and sorcery fiction)
Oh and the I hear from a few friends that The Sword of Truth series is good but I haven't gotten around to reading it.

I am glad to hear that

Yeah I will do mostly my lazy editing but this time I wont be too lazy to edit Ramza and a few other characters out of the game entirely this time (before I kept Ramza as the main character as I was just being lazy at the time and just wanted to get it done so I could play it as time constrictions then were a major factor)

Xifanie, Well I have some experience with eventing I just am not good at it. Everything else I ever wanted to change (with the exception of extending the vram limitation for more unique sprites on the field at once) wasnt too difficult as the tools provided on this site go a very long way towards cutting down on my work load. I would not be able to do half of it without the tools you all provide.

Oh did the link and it says I could be finished by December.

Oh I clicked on your Lion War link in your signature and yeah it looks pretty cool.
And if thats your goal then great and I wish you nothing but the best in your endeavors, you and Team Jot5. I always made my mods for myself but then would later release them to the public if I saw a lot of people asking for a mod similar to what one of mine did. Then again people do things for different reasons. I hope you are proud of all the work you have [put into modding as you should be proud.

Elric, how sneaky of you. I think we will get along just fine

Well it is easy, but just messing with sprites is for some reason just the only part I don't really enjoy at all. Essentially with the tools provided on this site I get to make my own FFT game so I am getting to live out my childhood dream plus I got like nothing but free time until well..long story but I don't have to work for like 2 months at least hoping to stretch that out more though. And well to be honest I don't mind criticism as I'm doing this for me so as long as I am happy with the completed project then I won't care what anyone else thinks. Actually in general I hope all modders feel this way as I think anyone who puts that much work into a hobby should be proud of what they accomplished.

Elric, Really? I got my first account on the nexus sites banned for accidentally including part of another mod which just changed the formula for health in Oblivion. (Then again I have had a lot of bad experiences on that site in general)

Nyzer, if by "tedious" you mean "fun" then I agree. The only work I don't like doing is having to replace formation sprites or trying to make new ones/edit old ones. (I have no talent as a spriter at all)

Well thank you both I am used to doing mods for Bethesda games where if I even use like one line of code from someone elses work I have to ask permission if I want to use it in a public release. I like the more relaxed rules here.
Again thank you Xifanie, I spent a sadly long time on google unable to find wiki's like that. 

Well if there is interest in a complete retelling of FFT with many characters added in and removed (like Mustadio) and I don't have to worry about permissions for sprites then I could probably post a beta of my newest work pretty quickly. My biggest problem is figuring out which animations are ones that cause graphical bugs when a new sprite is doing them (such as Ramza's bowing to Ovelia in the first event) so I can just remove those actions to avoid that bug as to some it might not be a big deal but it irks me.

It's not like I haven't finished a fft project before just unsure as to if I needed permissions for using sprites I downloaded off the site and all in my mod so I never made it a public release.

But I agree I should do the events first as those are by far the most time consuming things which is why my first mod was lazily done event wise, I just swapped out the sprites and changed the dialogue. It was lazy of me.

Well Luikyan is talented. I am replacing all monsters in my version and removing random battles so basically any sprite I dont plan to use is getting overwritten anyway with a new one. Only issue I have run into with modding lately is event editing as thats the only thing I dont have a lot of experience with. I wish they were full sprite sheets but hey even though they aren't they are still really cool.

I dont know who made the new ones there but I would love sprite sheets of them so I can add some new bosses into my copy of fft.

Lmao he totally looks like a weird fleshy mosquito. I was thinking they maybe changed it and Celia and Lede were supposed to be the gemini Lucavi. I don't know quite how it would work but it seems to fit a little better.

Eternal, well that makes more sense but also FFXII I always got the impression was not actually in the same world but a different but similar one as there are a lot of differences between the two games that contradict each other mostly with the names of the zodiac lucavi.

Elric, (Edward Elric perhaps?) Well I don't know how to contact them and I thought maybe there was an explanation that I was just missing. So I figured if an explanation is out there why not ask people who are clearly huge fans?

Well that is confusing. I mean why not stick to what they did with the other ones sprites we see like the Leo, Aries and Capricorn?