Final Fantasy Hacktics

Final Fantasy Tactics Advanced Battle is my april fools projects for this year.
I did it over the course of the last 3 days so it's a pretty rushed product but I think it offers a pretty fresh experience.


The glorious titlescreen.

In FFTAB, as the titlescreen suggests, you catch monsters and make them battle for you, which is certainly something I always wanted to do as a kid.

The changes are pretty simple, there is a new item replacing the Cureall called Capture Orb, simply use it on a weakened monster to add it to your clan!


Your monsters can go on dispatch missions, fight in battles and do whatever a spider (or whatever monster type they happen to be) can!

Check out a list of changes here:

Or simply download the patch here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/09606swwds8xgj0/FFTA_AdvancedBattle.ups?dl=0

Please be sure to always buy some Capture Orbs or you won't be able to catch monsters for your clan!
But remember to save some money so you can accept the missions or you will get stuck.

I wanted to prevent characters from joining the clan in the vanilla way, I did what I could with the time I had.
It is possible that there is still ways to obtain clan members, I didn't have much time to test characters like Eldena.
Random recruitments and special characters like Ritz should be impossible to obtain.
It's up to you if you want to add them to your clan if you get them, but I recommend you ignore them.

Monsters can talk. I'm aware. I thought about fixing it but I think it's pretty funny.
I actually changed which monsters get which dialogue, so Dragons and Lamias get Bangaa text.
Also, catching a monster that can't be caught in vanilla will result in a "- Get" message and no item being obtained, since they have no soul.
Catching a monster will now never grant a soul, and the soul taken message is skipped.

One final thing, even though you get Souls and unlock the monsters for Morphers I would recommend not using them.
If you somehow managed to get a Nu Mou and tried to morph you would notice all monsters in the Bank have 0 stats.

(I don't know if this is the best place to post this but it seemed close enough to me)

Snek GBA is a game I made a while back, on August 2018, originally I worked on it for about a week and a half.
Recently I went back to it to add music and sound effects, I now consider it complete and I wanted to share it:



As you can see the game is very basic, you select a speed, control the snake to make her eat eggs and eventually you either bump into something and lose or reach the max size and win, in which case you unlock a new titlescreen, there's also a pause button and that's about it. The game will save your highest score, as well as your speed setting and your titlescreen selection if you do unlock it.

Evertyhing runs perfectly well in the actual hardware which is very important to me.

You can check a full list of credits here: https://github.com/LeonarthCG/Snek-GBA/blob/master/README.md

Or get the actual game here: https://github.com/LeonarthCG/Snek-GBA/releases

All the source for the game is available in the repo so you can go look at my terrible code if you really want to.

I was thinking about good ways to get people to try the new stuff, specifically to try abilities on races they don't belong to, to see if we can find any missing animations, then I had the idea to make a randomizer to make the whole process fun:


It doesn't have a lot of options yet but I hope you guys will enjoy it!

Things I'm looking to implement in the future are some randomization options for monsters (monsters bring a lot of trouble with the randomizer for several reasons) and random jobs for enemies.
Enemies, or at least select enemy units, would probably have to keep their looks (so you would fight an archer that looks like a soldier or whatever) because of special animations for cutscenes, there's also the whole deal of equipment and learnt abilities so, yeah, not an easy thing by any means, don't expect it soon.
I know random enemies is probably going to be the most requested feature but please understand that it's a very complex thing to make.

Get it here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1fBRsmWvBbWk1_3FKkdXNOXQSsJHRyYPc/view?usp=sharing

The download includes a base patch (you HAVE to use the patch OR have a ROM that has the updated job and race customization hack).
There's also a readme, and the randomizer itself has a lot of tooltips so I hope people won't be confused.

Please leave any suggestions/comments you have on this thread.

Download: https://github.com/LeonarthCG/FFTA_Engine_Hacks

New Update!
I've done a lot of progress, I made graphics and animations for all jobs of all races and a couple of special characters so that they can use all abilities (for example, Marche could use Jump or Montblanc could use Parley). Any previously playable job should now have animations for all weapons and all generic job animations (I have not checked if there are animations unique to special jobs).
The characters that got these are: Marche, Montblanc, Ritz, Shara, Babus, Ezel, Cid, Llednar and the judges you get to fight. And of course all the playable generics.
Just like the weapon animations, the animations for the abilities were done with a script.
Please let me know if you notice anything that doesn't look right.

Here are some samples of the new animation stuff:


However, finding which abilities use which character animations takes a lot of time, this is what I said I would need help with.
I have added support for all the abilities I found, but there may still be some missing, if when using this you notice any of those, let me know.
Additionally, if you could help complete this list of which abilities use which animations it would be of great help:
Talking: Advice, Wyrmtamer, Parley.
Fast swing: Saint Cross, Tremor, Lancet, Far Fist
Spin: Whirlwind, Mow Down, Wild Swing, Swallowtail.
Charged punch? Kinda weird imo: Revive, Exorcise, Holy Sign.

I know the descriptions of those animations isn't great so please refer to the originals if you want to see what they look like.

Here's the changelog:

• Abilities that cost 0 AP/JP should now be unlocked by default, even if using 1bit abilities.
• Added the complete animation template. This allows for new animations to be made by just editing an image.
     The template works for both regular and water animations.
     Animations made with the template come with animations for all weapons and for abilities from all playables jobs.
     There is one exception to this: I did not make animations for being morphed while in the water.
     Unless there's enough demand for that I would suggest to use the Morphing Moprhers Morph hack instead.
     I also didn't make flying animations for everyone but it's not like any playable has those in vanilla.
     If someone takes the effort to make sprites for those, I'll add them in.
• Added animations for all weapons for all playable jobs, Marche, Ritz, Shara, Babus, Ezel, Cid, Llednar and enemy Judges.
• Added animations for all abilities from all playable jobs for all playable jobs, Marche, Ritz, Shara, Babus, Ezel, Cid, Llednar and enemy Judges.
• Jobs will now correctly be displayed as mastered (the little star) when using 1bit abilities.
• Instead of showing all jobs on the ability list, only jobs the unit can change into will be shown.
     Jobs that the unit somehow has an ability for will be shown even if the unit can't change into them.
• Similarly, only the current job and jobs the unit has abilities for will be shown when equipping a second action command.
• The Item option will not appear for monsters, and it will appear greyed out for the Alchemist. I think this is clearer.
     Of course which jobs get or don't get Item can be changed in the job and race customization hack data.
• Changed how abilities are displayed when checking what abilities an item teaches.
     It's now just generally less hardcoded.
     You can set any abilities and any jobs and all of them will be displayed correctly.
     However, just like in vanilla, there is only one icon displaying what type of ability is being taught.
• Units can now be made to spawn with a Combo ability.
     The byte used is the last one in the unit entry, this is the last Unknown Values in AIO's formation editor.

   
Here's a comparison of the old vs new window for the abilities an item teaches:

It might look worse at first, but unlike vanilla this can update the ability name and cost instead of just changing icons.
This means you can potentially have 9 completely different abilities being taught by an item, and all of them will be displaed.
You can also customize it with empty entries or move the old entries around to make it look like it did in vanilla.
For example, instead of the vanilla:
Fire Fire Fire Thunder Thunder Thunder Blizzard Blizzard Blizzard for the Rod, you could get it to look the same as vanilla with:
Fire Thunder Blizzard Fire Thunder Blizzard Fire Thunder Blizzard. If that makes sense. It's hard to explain.

Currently there's an issue when scrolling through items in the equip menu, if you encounter that just press R to hide and display the window again. It's being looked at so expect a fix for the next update.


If you have requests about more job/race things you would want to see be customizable, please let me know.
I already have a few things planned though, expect a custom animation template in the future.

Most importantly, if you have doubts about how to use this, check the readme, but don't be shy to ask either here or via PM, I don't think I did a great job with the readme anyway.

As part of my job/ability assignation rework thing (which is honestly growing into a much bigger thing than I imagined) I'm messing with vanilla animations, trying to reduce the tile count so we can have more units at once.
So far I managed to get human sized units down to 14 from 16, I aim to go for 12, but that's not what I'm here for:

I grew tired of exporting and reassembling the animations by hand so this morning I wrote a script to do just that for me.

I attached a zip that includes all the sprites I could rip, there were some issues with weapons, I guess there's something different about them.
The sheets are separated into 64x64 cells, they have no outlines though so if you want to see that you'll have to use some program like Usenti or Aseprite to set a grid.
Only one palette is included in the images but I also included a second .rar that has an image with all 3 palettes, the special ones (such as Totema palettes) are missing though.

Right now there isn't a huge ammount you can do with these, other than edit them, but I plan to release a way to insert them in the future too, similar to how I inserted the hunter gria.

You'll notice that water animations are on their own sheets, that's because those are actually different animations with their own IDs, you can change those by changing the second value under "Unknown Values" in the Sprites/Unknown tab of the Job Editor in AIO.

If you notice anything wrong with the sheets (other than they all using the blue palette) please let me know.

This is a small patch I made, I decided to make a new topic for it instead of throwing it with my other stuff so people can see it more easily.

The patch is very simple in what it does, it makes all maps act like Jagds, there are two versions, one with judges and one without them, having no judges means no laws and no JP but it has nothing to do with permanent death so you can choose whatever you like the most.

There is another change, ending any battle in a loss is a Game Over, ending any battle with Marche dead is also a Game Over, on top of that, ending a battle while Montblanc is dead before the first Jagd is reached also results in a Game Over (Montblanc can die after/during the first Jagd, just not before it).



There is a third patch that only removes judges.

These patches do not use any freespace at the end of the rom, they instead replace unused events, this means they should be compatible with any FFTA mod that exists so far, the patching program might complain about the files not matching but that shouldn't be an issue, just disable/ignore the notification (tested with Grim Grimoire and NUPS).

Please, post any problems you find or any feedback you have in this thread.

Hello, everyone.
I have been romhacking for quite a while now, but I just recently took interest in hacking FFTA, about two or three weeks ago.
FFTA was a game I played a ton as a kid so I have affection for it, I was susprised to find out there isn't much for it in the way of tools, though the AIO editor is pretty cool.

I have been poking at the game with an edited version of Event Assembler that a friend from the Fire Emblem hacking community put together and the old trusty debugger that totally never crashes for no reason: making adding text easy, documenting event opcodes and making EA raws for them to make event editing a breeze, taking notes on tables and structures...

Today I finished making a script to turn Tiled .tmx files into insertable maps.
(the bush going over the characters took me a while to get right, in fact it took 4 of the 5 days...)

I don't think any of the tools are ready to be shared yet, but I figured I would share a video here:


And here you can check what the maps are like in Tiled:


I still haven't found a good solution for making height maps so for now I make them by hand, if you guys have any ideas please let me know.