Niji no Senshi ~ Warriors of the Rainbow
Engine: Lex Talionis
Date: June 2024 – June 2025
Niji no Senshi ~ Warriors of the Rainbow was a fan-game passion project of mine that combined two of my favorite franchises — Love Live! and Fire Emblem. Built in Lex Talionis, the same engine as Crypt of the Forgotten, I used the skills I learned from that project to start a large scale campaign with a full twenty-nine chapters (about the length of an average Fire Emblem title). Since the project was almost entirely spearheaded entirely by me, I also was in charge of the art, programming, and narrative aspects. However, naturally, I want to focus on the level design.
As a larger scale project that spanned across multiple chapters, the level design was much different than designing a single, standalone chapter. Now, I had to put an emphasis on drip-feeding the player power (new units, weapons and items, etc.), and balancing around item management and players potneitally not having certain tools at any part of the game. And since the game had a concrete narrative, being able to tie the map design into that narrative let expand the types of map objectives I could use, creating more fun maps. My personal favorites were Ch. 4 and Ch. 7, which both focused around rescuing NPC allies that were in danger, or the planned Ch. 9, which saw the player escaping from a stronger army after losing a large, last-stand type battle.
Unfortunately, I had to step away from the project for a multitude of reasons — burnout, other responsibilities, and just the scale of the project in general. Still, I learned a lot from the experience. For one, it reminded me of my limits as a solo developer. While design, programming, and narrative came easily to me, aspects of the process like art and music took a lot out of me, and were large roadblocks during development. Futhermore, it taught me a lot about the community surrounding a game, and finding a good playerbase. I drummed up support for the game on my social media, but quickly ran into the issue of actually distributing it. I originally chose Lex Talinos because the alternative of ROM hacking has… some legal issues when it comes to easy of distribution. But Lex Talionis also had similar problems regarding the necessary technology literacy to run the build, which made even outsourcing playtesting a bit of a chore, which was a large part of why I decided to stop development. Still, the game was a good experience, and I don’t regret giving it a shot. And who knows, maybe the project will see the light of day again. I’d like it to, at least.