At Winter 2020's C3 I presented a Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones hack that I've been working on with my friends since 2013, and released a demo of the first 8 chapters. Well, we've been quietly working since then, and while the hack is not done yet, Awful Emblem is getting really close to completion.
We've been at this project for almost 12 years now, on and off. From 2013-2016 we were working with a different game engine, using FE7 Blazing Sword as the base. From 2016-2018 we stopped work from loss of motivation. In 2018 I picked it back up, converted the hack over to Fire Emblem Sacred Stones, and reassembled the team. We threw out much of the original project's plot and maps, remixed what we had, and started over from the ground up. Six years and nearly 40 chapters later, we're still meeting for a couple of hours a week. Myself and another team member have been building the gameplay while others get all the pages and pages of text we've written ready to be inserted into the game. And then some weeks we just chill out and talk about whatever we feel like while one or two of us works quietly in the background. It's a good system, though it certainly prolongs the production process.
We are probably 85% finished with the game. Out of the 40 or so playable chapters, I only have one more map to create: the Final chapter. That's not to say every single chapter is finished though. Many are still in partially completed states and lots of the second half of the game still needs thorough testing. We've been devoting our time and resources to making the hack "gameplay complete", and then after that we'll work backwards to polish and test.
I do not have a new demo for you today. Honestly I'm not even sure if we'll do another demo when we're so close to the finish line. We'll obviously need outside testing, but it might not be worth the time to put a proper demo together before full release. We'll see. Ideally release will come in 2025, since I don't think there's any way we'll be done by the end of the year.
I know this project has extremely little overlap with this community, but I'm proud of what we've been working on and this has been my main romhacking project for a long time now, so it's only fair that I get a chance to show it off every few years.
Thanks for reading, thanks even more if this project interests you! I'll end with a list of credits to our team, and then screenshots and maps below that. Have a great C3!
Core Awful Emblem team: FPzero, Artix, nine-gear crow, PoorlyWrittenNovel, Teyla, ddinkins, Blastinus
Special Thanks to: Tequila, vilkacis, Ryushikaze, Something Awful LP Community, Fire Emblem Universe Community
Screenshots and Gifs:
-A handful of screenshots from later parts of the game
-A couple of gifs showing off battle animationsA selection of Maps:
-A snowy border fortress between two nations
-A magically-fortified city built around a desert oasis
-A village caught in the crossfire of three factions
-An underground tomb where the stench of reanimated corpses lingers in the air.
Best of luck with the final stretch!
