Welcome to FE Moldark, a website dedicated to documenting the complete recreation of the Fire Emblem game. This includes an application to design the chapters, writing the actual platform to run the game, creating the graphics, and writing my own storyline for the game.

I’ve played the Path of Radiance, Shadow Dragon, Sacred Stones and other games countless times throughout my childhood, so when I had the thought that I could write my own game, I knew I had to at least try. Throughout this process I’ve tried to include everything that I loved about the Fire Emblem games, which has added up to a lot of features that require a fair amount of work. Everything from opening doors, chests with loot, villages you can visit, armories and vendors, neutral units, six possible win conditions, recruitable units, coding how the enemy will attack, a preparation phase where you can select and edit units before battle, dialogue between chapters, trading, using and equipping items, and more. This goes down to the smallest details as well - warp staffs that have animations, weapons will break, deaths of friendly units will include a final message - you get the picture.

Now, I know there are Rom hacks out there, but that isn’t what I was going for. I’m trying to completely build the game up from scratch, not using any pre-exisitng code or platform. There is more to say about about the tool I built for that, but that can all be found under the “Creating Chapters” heading.

This project began around 2016, and has been worked on periodically since. FE Moldark was originally intended to be played solely on my Windows machine with a USB joystick, but I’ve drastically changed that idea. I decided to design my own game console and with that choose the hardware that will interact with the software. This means choosing what Pi board to use, which screen, buttons, and speakers to use, how to introduce volume control, and more. You can read about that whole process under the “Game Console” heading.

Since I am moving this project from Windows to Linux I’ve also come to realize that, as much as I like v2.7, Python 3.x needs to be the standard moving forward simply because installing libraries and older versions of Pygame is a pain, so I’ve had to rewrite parts of this as well. All tools, libraries and everything else that I’ve written for this amounts to well over 20,000 lines of code at this point, so I’ve begun reformatting a lot.

On a fundamental level the tilemap is already set up in a grid and the map is loaded into multiple arrays to display on the screen and to control / limit player movement. That would be the core of what the games works off of, the rest of this site will go into more details about how the rest of it comes together. Some pages might be lacking information and this is simply because I am reworking a lot of file formats, especially as it pertains to units and dialogue in between chapters.

Feel free to browse around - I have already made and am working on multiple pages to showcase the various functions and features of the game, as well as some snippets of code where I break down what they do and how they work.

Enjoy.