FFTA Long Night 0.64 release!

[dck]

Lots of feedback! I'll try to address things individually then explain a bit why some things work the way they do.

• Un deux is a weird skill in that the game just takes the basic attack, halves its damage and uses it twice per weapon without much intervention on what you can make it do. I'll look more into it but at a glance I can't tell at all why it ignores the skip reaction flag for Dam > MP while it works on everything else.


• Although for the most part the AI can use new skills, there's a decent bunch it can't and some like cultist's slipped through. A friend of mine ran into that same moogle as well so hopefully I can track down what's wrong without removing it from the AI skillset.


• Healing power branches from the core issue with magic users, which is that starting out their stats are not appropriate for what their skills require early on due to being forced to start at level 1. More on this later down the post.


• I remember finding out Prayer interacted like that with auto-life against some dragonheart dragon encounter . Not a conscious design choice though and it's not right to mislead the player into thinking something will work when it won't, at least by now it's been changed to dispel first (dispel can be resisted by immune monsters though).

Alright, so I figure it'd be a good idea to clear up what this hack's initially set out to do and how it relates to how it currently is.
I've always felt the base game is too bogged down by tedious tasks that didn't add much in the way of fun but did enable a great deal of benefits; such as walking aimlessly around the map as your units did deployment missions, stealing everything of value, grinding classes to unlock advanced ones or rechecking laws before fights and walking a few extra times if they happened to be inconvenient.

Another problem I had with vanilla is that its variety in skills is questionable, but could probably be good enough, if only many of them weren't rendered completely useless by others being straight upgrades. That, and the fact you have completely overkill damage from infinite sources that outclass skill usage outright.
There's nothing inherently wrong with OP, but I think the best type of OP is the one that can be used from both sides without the game becoming unplayable- which would be the case if you were to redo melee enemy units to be dual wielding chocobo armor clad monstrosities and gunners that ultima charge you from nine tiles away.

So with those two main things to overcome, you end up with a game that would benefit from having enemy scaling so new encounters are guaranteed to maintain a set threat level; this, I think, still keeps a sense of progression as the gear updates are very significant but lets random encounters stay engaging since the skillset is still somewhat viable even if their gear is no longer up to par.

Here is when technical limitations come in. Due to the implementation of the level scaling hack (necessary to not overlevel story missions and not to get level 25 enemies with a clan of 6 level 50s and a ton of level 1 recruits), it's no longer possible to specify a level on unit generation. This includes the starting party and given the way the stat restructuration works, makes them basically really bad at their specific jobs since they have no bonus from them.

To make matters worse, I found several ways to stop xp gain, yet couldn't find any way to multiply the gained exp at all. This is a pretty big deal, as playing the storyline without level bonuses to enemies meant the xp gain was so meager that finishing a test run up to Exodus left my Marche at maybe level 12.
This is of course unacceptable since the units only really begin working well with their roles at around 8+, so as a workaround a level bonus was applied to random encounters and sidequests- the extra levels do make them tougher, which I'm not against in non-mandatory missions, but in my experience don't really make that much of a difference compared to them normally outgearing you or having strong abilities for you to work around. However the main point of these (up to 3) extra levels enemies have is to kickstart the player's own xp gain and hasten the progress of his units so they begin to behave appropriately as soon as possible.

As you can imagine from the above, yeah the idea of doing away with levels altogether has been considered before .
It's a fine course of action, I think. The very good thing it does is letting units behave as intended from the get go, then it also enables all classes to best use their available skills from the first battle (debatable whether pro or con)- however from here on you have severe downsides like starting units being hardlocked to their starting roles with no chance of ever changing them, secondary skillset decision becoming a lot more fiddly since your starting class may not have stats for it, generally a large deal of loss when it comes to customization.

Not all is grim though, an idea I've been toying with for a bit is leaving experience gain alone and just reduce the level cap to far lower, perhaps 10. This way the initial level the starting party has makes a far greater impact and should stop units from being in that awkward zone I've seen testers struggle with in the early game. All while retaining a decent amount of build flexibility and still having a progression that leads to being stat-capped around the end of the current patch, even if one were not to do any sidequests at all.
Similarly, it would allow to take off the extra levels on enemies that are currently used to give the player more exp. These encounters are already plenty hard in some situations, such as Frosty Mage that you bring up yourself and "Gelato's cat", which is how some of the lads referred to the panther that was initially wiping them pretty hard.

Tying in with your concerns about encounters in general. I do set them up with the intention that they create scenarios in which players' choices are important and you can screw up bad enough that you throw the mission. I've lost a significant number of fights myself, and I don't think there's an issue with this so long as it isn't unfair in an unfun way. What I mean by this is that human players have a significant advantage by grace of not being a gba game AI, so they can deal with pretty stacked scenarios as long as they are given a fighting chance.

Now, I had the good luck to have a bunch of friends who raced each others on the main release and could see how they adapted to problems and how they dealt with stuff. Since they all shared tips with each others there were hastes and due/zea skillsets as far as the eye could see, but some things started directly walling that type of approach so eventually I could witness them splitting into their own thing each pretty much. Overall, I was quite happy with the result.
Some things were toned down (a lot*) since they were dumb and forcing stupid approaches like a team of 95 evasion onion knights; other than that, spacing to stay out of range and some debuffs like slow and berserk might be a bit too general solutions that work really well, but as far as I know none of them were using savestates during battles or otherwise gaming the hitchance RNG and could make it through most things. One of them even killed the roaming naiads which is something I wasn't completely sure was possible.

Of course, some of this is hard (adrammelech, tower ruins when first available) and some of it is unfair (naiads), but I don't really mind that as long the chance to fight back is there (which is very questionable when it comes to naiads)- and this is primarily why development has become stunted lately, because the main contributor to unfun wipes are monsters that get turn 1 moves they're not meant to get, and are capable of doing tremendous damage that doesn't leave the player with enough resources to fight back. There's a world of difference between being able to get hastes, shells and grace up before sprites start throwing clay imps around and titanias get a move, and just getting four of your unbuffed guys whacked by a holy before they move.

As you can see, walls of text are not an issue here , I rather enjoy talking about the game and spitballing can lead to some neat improvements. For example as consequence of giving the level 10 cap some more thought I realized I have artifacts already mapped, so I could easily give access to the ones that let you choose the type of recruit you want after battles. The artifact system is pretty much a dead mechanic at this point since the list was trimmed down and their battle effects altogether removed, so this could be a neat way to flesh it out and give it a real purpose.

*a lot means solar flare used to hit five units, gelato's cat used to have rend, totemas used to gain speed as they leveled up (so adrammelech could actually be faster than some units), fae used to be made to act first instead of only getting it on accident, etc etc. We've come a long way

[Mickey B]

Still working on this? Been about a year...

[dck]

Hi, unfortunately the project was dragged completely into a halt some time back due to real life in part, but mostly indecision on how to continue it:

Basically I can either ignore the issues with speed and leveling systems as they are and continue adding story content and sidequests or I can mostly gut the leveling system so there's no need for enemies wildly superior in terms of stats, which will be better but won't allow real finetuning of speed (and would be a bit messy looking since monsters would need speed equipment too); there's also killing leveling altogether which -would- make for rather elegant speed handling and no wild stat disparities in general, but would obviously kill crossclassing and customizing characters stat-wise. This sounds bad but bear in mind it would place a focus on the recruitment system with early artifacts to control it, which could make for interesting reasons for doing missions and progressing in general.

Without being able to iron out the random stat gains I'm fairly sure the last option is inevitable, a very minor level range would actually be catastrophic because most of the stats should be gained through levels if they would exist at all, and that would make randomly generated units that are one level higher almost unkillable powerhouses.

So yeah, lifestyle changes in the future might prevent me from finishing this whatsoever, so I've been retreading it a bit and thinking about giving it some closure, but for that I'd have to decide what base change to instate if any at all.

For what's worth I've had good ideas for the rest of the content in these two years anyway so I think if you liked what was here already, well, you'd probably like what's to come as well. Or not so much.
Adrammelech might not look that bad in the end.


PS: the new sorting of editing tools and mods on the forums looks great btw, thanks for that.

[Zeke_Aileron]

PS: the new sorting of editing tools and mods on the forums looks great btw, thanks for that.

You're welcome if this is referring to the new stickies i made.

[dck]

Since I've had this on the back of my mind for a bit now here's some skill changes I just whipped up:

Archer:

Blind Archery:Retains random damage element (normally a boost anyway) and now dispels and reflects the target (which makes it mostly impossible for him to get rebuffed).

Gunner:

Fireshot:Now a fixed range 4, 5 AoE fire attack. All shots keep same physical base and go to 24 mp.
Boltshot:Now fixed range 5, piercing lightning attack.
Iceshot:Now fixed range 3, 13 AoE ice attack.

Forest Ranger:

Boldness:Can now be cast on allies up to 4 tiles away.

Black monk's 3 0.5x damage skills are probably going to be thrown away or buffed significantly since they don't make much sense as they stand, and red mage is in an awkward spot and might well be remade from the ground up, although I do realize some people like the entire fullscreening thing.
It might be obvious but working on this doesn't really take a very high priority for me right now, however if you have any comments on skills you find useless or other stuff you think might be worth looking at feel free to mention or shoot me a pm.

[dck]

Annd my drive to work on LN has actually kept up so far! Ability design always was my biggest draw to this game, so I took some time relearning and fixing things for a bit. The first post is now updated with the changed or new skills marked in red, it's not that much but it's stuff that always bothered me because it wasn't as polished.

Also after finishing Ezel's skillset (two years late) I have the way paved to the rest of the unique characters, for which I have much clearer concepts. Next up is Llednar and from there one more mission content until Mateus, which I'm really looking forward to as well!

[dck]

And as biweekly update, the level cap, monster speed changes and general speeding up of the early game's power curve is underway. As two people noticed, yeah the first post is being edited almost daily since I actually use it as a resource when comparing certain skills. It's also generally more complete since it's a good reference point for balancing things.

Towards the end of the week I got sidetracked with the numbercrunching for monster speed brackets etc and started making more skills because that's a lot more fun, so now (a few) vampires can resurrect the entire map as zombies or charmed zombies depending on team. Also zombify temporarily KOs the unit because that's a more interesting mechanic than just charming your units right away.
Mind you, this resulted in the cultist's Ritual ability being turned into a mini-mass resurrect too, covering an invocation area around him and with the same charm properties for enemies. Ritual was always cute but impractical and not really niche either, so this should be a lot more useful.

Also, I bit a very old bullet and started actually triple checking how the AI uses certain skills. Some I can't or simply won't fix as they're not worth the time, but I'm actually having a lot of success even getting them to nail you with reckonings -every time- they hit critical hp, which is cool. In general most of the "fancy" skills are actually AI friendly by now.

Next progress update sometime soon (maybe)!

EDIT: Testing more and more of how the AI works in detail is really interesting, it's not particularly cowardly but it has no way to judge the value of options if they only affect the user, so if it sees a negative effect it gets spooked and discards the idea of using stuff like Block Pain no matter what. What's funny is this changes immediately the moment it gets hit by astra lmao.

EDIT2: Actual AI edits are beyond the scope of this hack, but understanding this more is making it really easy making small changes so the skills are properly recognized and used. It was always an annoyance for example that enemy cultists couldn't really use most of their skillset, but now they can turn and charm/petrify your units without any problem at all! \o/

[badabing93]

This mod is awesome.

I love what you did with the stats. Couldn't imagine a better job system either. The only change I would suggest here is boosting onion knight atk growth to 4.0, possibly at the expense of some bulk. His best use is robing and phys atk. Loss of an ability slot is quite an opportunity cost already. Didn't know this was unfinished so I took the time to squeeze in several levels as a fighter xD... black robe boosted backdraft is insane.

I think you could make it harder too... The player has so many tools at their disposal. Those counter draining vampires and naiads were on the right track. Maybe throw in some uber speedy guys like the snow fairy. The first babus fight left a little to be desired though. I suggest handing them more broken equips in general as the ai struggles to utilize skills.

Adramalech fight was one of my favorite moments of any game lol so props. Hope you finish this. Thanks
 

[dck]

Those are really sweet words to read. I recently had a friend replay what is available of LN and it was surprising how little I remembered about the encounters as he reccounted them. I completely forgot the changes to totemas, or in general the few endgame fights I fit in the available patch.

This project is something I'd like to see finished since it has clear goals in at least revamping the story and base endgame missions completely, and in truth a lot of the numbercrunching busywork and major roadblocks to having proper balance are either already done or have gotten solutions in all this time, mostly thanks to the tools Leonarth has been developing.

I can't promise I will be able to work on this reliably, but what I'll do is put some effort to recall the main things that are still to be adressed for the upcoming days/week, edit this post with them as they come and afterwards gauge how to retake development. Not like I have the development files at hand right now anyway, so it would help getting back in the mindset.

I'm glad you enjoyed it and thanks also to the people who sent encouraging PMs or reached out on disc, I don't think I replied to everything but support is well appreciated :).

___________________
List for mostly personal use and cross-referencing thoughts later. Not exactly a TO-DO, though things are in rough priority order:

• All units are gaining 1 more hp per level, which softens the early game.
• Re-scale monster speed, only specials or melee monsters outspeed robe users.
• Assign artifact effect to set up early quest rewards you can use to target recruitment.
• IRumours probably unusable as ingame tutorial.
• f i n a l l y  got a good idea for Mateus. Only took three years.
• Special units have the skills equipped when recruited defined somewhere. Need to find where.
• Halt Llednar and Doned until game is mostly done.
• Healboro, dogtags and others are handled by job&race customization engine hack.
• -
• -

___________________
Maybes:

• Redo Red Mage?
• Dream Strider probably too?
• Remember using similar slots if redoing skillsets not to break past formations

___________________
Changelog:

• -All robes now give a flat 25 power added on top of whatever they used to give previously.
• -All units now gain 1 extra hp per level.

Despite their endgame strength, low levels were too hard for magic users; at low level they are restricted by MP and moderate skill damage, which on top of their often questionable defenses makes them very hard to use. The extra power should heavily reward using your skills appropriately early on and MP management during those levels before job growths actually let the job develop fully.
The extra HP is there to both give very low hp jobs less of a disadvantage (no reason why zealot should have 3.5x times the HP of a shaman, regardless of mechanics), given that HP is a much stronger defensive layer than DEF or RES. Also this counterbalances unintended weapon damage stacking mechanics (might neeed further readjustments) and weakens endgame magic to offset part of the flat power buff.

[rrs_kai]

I have very recently finished your mod. Yes, finished. I bought that mission using a vanilla save. Sped through the game with a hacked character.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: You have some very nice abilities and animations.
-Ether Talon
-Spit rock
-Bangaa with Llednar's jump and more.
-The golems, their sprites, and portraits.
-The panthers can prowl.
-Pudding
-Black monk is great. Even better that Shara gets to be one.
To me, the Assassin is broken because she is the single class to get a melee and a ranged weapon: Katanas and Great bows.
-Jobs with no speed but armor type gives speed. Clever workaround to the fact that FFTA cannot display negative numbers (although it can calculate them).

Healboro doesn't actually work as intended and breaks animations on aiming at slopes. (delet)

Why not use Saint cross' animation? Holy's animation has a problem with positive numbers.If you mean Pudding then It's not your fault.

I honestly think that you should consider hacking FFTA2. The ability editing is very flexible and the animations have very little limitations. You'd make some great abilities.

Edit: I just tested Holy's animation, and it's bugged in MGBA, even on vanilla. VBA, the old one, is fine though. Tested Sanctus from your mod and it's working fine in VBA.

spoiler

I'd like to see a purple dragon and a green dragon. Even your Sanctus' description reads "Breath of a divine dragon".

[dck]

Yes, finished. I bought that mission using a vanilla save.

w h a t
I'm pretty sure you're the first person to do that and it's such a simple workaround I'm surprised it never occurred to anyone else before, haha.

Also I can't be 100% sure, but I'm fairly certain the uploaded version isn't accurate to the ability desc in the main post.
The changes in red were done and finished, but I thought it'd be misleading to upload a new version after so long that only had ability balancing changes and finished Ezel who can't even be recruited yet, so it never went online.

I recall some separate problems with Puddings (they would never attack in melee regardless of aggressiveness I think?), but Healboro is a different thing altogether:

spoiler

It's a fake class like the undead player races marked as ghosts or phantoms (idr which) you can find in some missions.
In this case it's a malboro quad-wielding heal staves that, I think, has double hit. I'm fairly sure I saw him healing his friends in battle during testing, but reports from players said that they attack player units as normal which defeats the whole point.

I just had an idea to fix them though, just spawn them as "allied" units lol. They can still be targeted and killed but they will naturally try to "engage" the enemies instead. Makes enemies probably waste lots of turns though. Might need counter and serve as chaotic neutral healer.

Thanks for the kind words regarding abilities and animations. By now it all feels quite distant but I remember spending lots of time making sure everything was functional and looked as good as I could make it. Panthers look so cool when prowling, damn.

I'd like to see a purple dragon and a green dragon. Even your Sanctus' description reads "Breath of a divine dragon".

Haha, it reads that way for a reason! I'm fairly sure I left room for a few new classes and I would like to make new dragons as well. I think the main reason I didn't was because their portrait would look atrocious and I always wanted to look more into importing fitting sprites from other gba trpgs.

I know there's lots of free space in the rom so "leaving enough room" is a questionable concern, but my technical knowledge is pretty much zero and most of the hack is made through cannibalizing "bad" content or using the space left in original structures for new classes etc.

Very nice to have this back and forth! I'll have access to the development files sometime this weekend and in all honesty it's pretty invigorating to see other people working on their own things too, hopefully will have something to contribute soon!

[rrs_kai]

Ezel who can't even be recruited yet

I've only finished the main story and I encountered two bugs:
-1- In Llednar's last fight, some ability crashed the game. I just out-sped him the next time.
-2- Li-Grim's Descent crashes the game probably because Totema's behavior was changed.

it's a malboro quad-wielding heal staves that, I think, has double hit.

I have not seen this.
Also, if you made 3 new monsters, why not include them in any of the story missions. I only went searching for the Naga and Pudding because they're mentioned in the OP.

I think the main reason I didn't was because their portrait would look atrocious

I very much liked the golem's shadow portraits. Howsoever you may have added them. If nothing, just leave the portrait blank, like those boxes and statues.

Very nice to have this back and forth! I'll have access to the development files sometime this weekend and in all honesty it's pretty invigorating to see other people working on their own things too, hopefully will have something to contribute soon!

[dck]

For a moment my brain fried and I thought you were getting crashes from encounters in the developed part of the game lol. Llednar should be complete in the version that never got uploaded and Li-Grim... Well, I never got even close to doing anything with Li-Grim but I've been 100% sure of what that fight will be like since I first started the mod. Not spoiling that but it's mean as hell.

The Healboro(s) I remember placing was in some forest's roaming clan and its help mission, iirc. In general I added most of the weirder or stronger than average things in help missions and roaming clans belonging to areas available only after fully unlocking the shop.
That's also the reason you can only notice a few unfairly strong units like the Medusa at that point. I wanted to have a normal-ish progression while the player learns abilities and fine tunes his team, and put the heat back on after the Exodus fight.

PS: Damn, thinking about it, I'm pretty sure current patch doesn't have the Black March ability on Vampires either. That patch needs to get updated and online sometime soon for sure.

[dck]

Hey rrs_kai, since you're the only person I know that could've had experience with recruiting Ezel the legit way, could you tell me if when he joined he had active abilities slotted in the reaction and support categories?

The idea was always to have Ezel and Babus both share their counter skills, so they both would have six total skills overall. I'm only now realizing Ezel spawns with the vanilla skill distribution and if that is defined in a formation I have no idea where it is. Looking into bcrobert's modules in case they mention something in the docs.

[rrs_kai]

The idea was always to have Ezel and Babus both share their counter skills, so they both would have six total skills overall.

smart

Ezel the legit way, could you tell me if when he joined he had active abilities slotted in the reaction and support categories?

Yes, he did. But he had only 4 skills, not 6. Oddly, two of those were the same combo.

spoiler: Ezel recruitment

You've made a purple flan. Could you tell me how to add/change monster palettes? I'm interested in Green/Purple Dragons and Blue/Red/Yellow Malboros.

[dck]

Right, Ezel having only two real skills in that version is normal since it's so old it predates me finishing his skillset. I used to place magick combo as a placeholder to keep track of works in progress.

This is a bit of a bigger issue than I thought since I actually have no idea how to change his gear and equipment when spawning. Didn't see any formation that matches what he wears when recruited through "Bored!", and what's worse is that changing his recruitment data doesn't seem to affect that at all.

If anyone has any more info on how to change mastered abilities on special unit recruitment, please mention.

Regarding the changed sprites I think you'll be pretty disappointed, the only thing I did with those new enemies was going manually into their class data and changing the palette past the 02 AiO limits at, these are my notes about it:

spoiler

Changed palette>

(521a7d > soldier entry) (521a88 > soldier palette)

05 undead
0d poison
0e berserk
ff stone

Those are the only functional ones, since they're all actually intended for use. Unfortunately there's no clean green effect ingame so you just get the gross poisoned green instead and weird glowing red from berserk as well.

It worked for the proof of concept thing I wanted to do with new classes, but if I wasn't so deep into a duct tape tower of class changes I'd just use Leonarth's solution for directly putting sprites into the game and assign those to a new class. Even as it is I might still try.

[rrs_kai]

(521a7d > soldier entry) (521a88 > soldier palette)

05 undead
0d poison
0e berserk
ff stone

Oh right, every job has those 4 palettes. The golems were a nice addition. Why not distribute them in other maps as well? Or do they already exist somewhere?

[dck]

Since you actually saw the post-Exodus content, you might have noticed weird formations like clans with tons of angel rings and multi-totema fights at the very endgame.

That's actually not my work but remnants of the original FFTAX- I don't particularly like how those fights are designed because they're very repetitive, but the long story short is that I intend to put most of the new content like new enemies etc in those kinds of fights towards the endgame. Golems are pretty cool so they'll definitely make the cut, they are also each their own class (which might have been stupid) so they are pretty customizable overall, even if they are locked in terms of looks.

[rrs_kai]

Since you actually saw the post-Exodus content, you might have noticed weird formations like clans with tons of angel rings and multi-totema fights at the very endgame.

It was 80% vanilla for the story. I've not played much with clans. I just went looking for the Pudding and Medusa. Good to hear the golems made the cut. Their portraits are great.
If you have space, consider some petrified monsters. The vanilla game has many name-only jobs. These names got me interested for monster variations. First time I played FFTA, I was quite disappointed that they were just names and not any unique monsters. Not even new colours.
Magewyrm and Worldwyrm.
Ochu, Neochu, Top Malboro, and Devilboro.

[dck]

Sure, that's also the reason I made a few fake classes like Phantasms and Healboros, it's pretty annoying to see something with a different name only for it to be just a normal monster. I can't expand on those a lot but I tried to make them stand out where they showed up. In the released mod most of this is in side missions and random fights.

Currently trying out Leonarth's job&race customizations to see how they play out with the myriad of changes I did in animation structures and man, I wish these tools had been available when I started out.
So many things that were hacked together repointing animations, when instead with this base would've been completely seamless.
Of course, it works beautifully but everyone gets these KO stars on them during cutscenes, and a lot of cutscene animations break as well, even for characters like Cid I've never worked with:

spoiler

Oddly enough this happens even if I comment out the four options that handle extra playable/special character animations, which I'd rather do not to lose all the manual finetuning that went into assigning cast animations for skills in general.

Another reason to look deeper into the engine hack is that it's the only viable solution I see for dogtags and it also would allow much more freedom for new monsters. I'm not sure I would staight port things from other games given the unique and simple style FFTA has, but it would open up for much better edits.

Furthermore, the way it handles jobs actually gives Ezel his skills. Unfortunately, that is because it automatically gives any job any skill that requires 0 AP, which breaks the "master 0AP skills upon touching item" interaction the mod is based on. Could always hit some level of compromise with that I imagine, but I need to figure out causes for the cutscene issues first.