Elysian Shadows

I figured it's about time I post here. My name's David (and I'm Canadian, eh ) and I came here after watching the Adventures in Game Development and Elysian Shadows Revolution videos for awhile. The first videos I watched were Falco's "Game Development: Where to Begin" videos. At the time, I had been learning Python and a little C++ for about half a year and was just switching my focus to C#. I was intending on making a game in XNA for a Microsoft Creators Club competition with a friend of mine (who was doing spriting, backgrounds, etc and understood the underlying concepts of programming enough to talk to about some design issues). We had about three months, so not surprisingly we didn't totally finish it - though it was one of the most intensive periods of learning I've gone through and I'm glad that we pursued it because I feel like I grew a lot from it (and it's led me in the direction I'm currently heading).

Due to different goals between myself and my friend, he decided to focus on work and I went back to learning the fundamentals of C#. I never really went as deep into the language as I intended since another friend of mine, who'd starting programming a couple years back with the purpose of making a game (started in C and went to C#), recommended jumping straight into XNA with what I knew and trying it out from there. It probably wasn't bad advice since time was limited and it gave me a good reference for "connecting the dots" when I went back to it later. Afterwards, I figured that going back and really becoming familiar with the language was a good place to take my next step since it was becoming obvious that I wouldn't make much further progress without that knowledge. Though I realized that I enjoyed it prior to working on that game, I realized how much I like programming through that experience. I knew how much I enjoyed math prior to this experience (I'd been doing a math course by correspondence this whole time out of interest), and I really enjoyed the ability to "bring into reality" in some tangible way the ideas and concepts that I have floating around in my head.

Currently, I'm working on another project in XNA. My friend and I had been working on a tower defense game since a) it was relatively simple in concept, and b) we had played a couple tower defense games that we thought were fun pick up and play games. I decided that what we were working on seemed unoriginal and required more for additional art assets than I cared for, so I went to working on something else. Right now, for the sake of brevity (this post is already getting a bit long for an introduction) I'll just say it involves trebuchets and that the idea kind of spawned after I started coming up with a basic physics model for a trebuchet while on a ski trip and decided I want to come up with a visual model for it on the screen.

Other than that I'm looking at going back to university this fall for Comp Sci/Math. I'd previously done Kinesiology for a year and half, but I lost interest for a few reasons - I also wasn't in a good headspace at the time so I wasn't working very hard at it and didn't know what direction I wanted to move in.

It's nice to meet all of you and I hope that I can contribute something positive to these boards Also, thanks to the Elysian Shadows team for making the videos and this site a reality as well as a forum that people, such as myself, can peruse and engage with.

I know I've seen you around before, but thanks for sharing! It's great to find out more about your background, and especially heartening to hear people's stories of pursuing their passion for game development.

Unfortunately, I don't actually know what "Kinesiology" is. :P

Would that be like...Medical schooling for joints and stuff? Whatever the case, I'm sorry to hear about your sunk time and lost of interest. I wish you the best of luck in both your programming endeavors, and your academic career. I hope CompSci/Math will do a better job at holding interest, haha!

Again, great to meet you and thanks for finally making this post. I look forward to hearing more about your projects.

It's basically a more sciencey phys ed degree that focuses on things like physiology, biomechanics, biochemistry, etc. It was interesting to a point and I don't regret doing it, but I realized that I wasn't heading down the path I wanted to. Basically, it could be a good lead in for things like sports medicine, physiotherapy, biomechanics assessments for orthotics, ergonomics, coaching, etc. I'm more of a hands off conceptual guy though - I like to build and design things. Maybe the ergonomics and biomechanics routes would have fit, or getting into research (though I'm not really a lab guy and that's what much of the active research entailed), but it didn't feel right at the time.

Who knows, there's aspects of it that could totally come full circle and be things I look at again (eg. biomechanical modeling really requires more of a math/engineering background than the program provided focus in anyway). I found physiology interesting in its own regard, though more on a personal level than for something I'd want to commit myself to.

Hi I'm zero.

I never wanted a computer but my dad bought one even though i begged him for a console.

now i'm learning to do games development and I'm learning fast but I still don't know any 3d or much c++. I will try to work on my own instead of bugging you guys here i know you are busy guys and dont wan be bugged by me

i am thinking of using vs2008 and gimp.

seems like i should do allegro or sdl.

i have bits of games so far in but my first complete game project will probably be asteroids unless people tell me its a dum idea

Welcome Zero, don't hesitate to ask questions on the boards.

my first game cherry was asteroids. do it well

hello world

I'm new to ES and having watched the youtube backlog my interest is piqued by this "rag tag" bunch as the recent interview described you.

My programming experience is quite significant and yet I'm always learning. I don't really know much about modern video game stacks or console development but starting when I was 8 years old, I did a lot of amateur game coding in the 80s on 8 bit and 16 bit personal computers (vic 20, c64 Amiga). Then I used BASIC, Assembler and C.

I got a CS degree and did a lot of travelling, partying and music before focusing on a software engineering career. In the past I have worked in boring big companies and crazy dot com startups and universities. I've run my own business and worked for the man. My current job is pretty much my ideal job with lots of interesting work in a cool environment and it's well paid. I work for a software vendor making developer tools, mainly web-based and mainly in java. I have specialisations and interests in programming languages, security, ai / alife and api design.

There are lots of things I'm interested in learning but graphics, audio and video games have always been a passion.

I guess I'm here because I like to feed that passion.

The available time I have to work on my many side projects is pretty small but I do have an active game project (still in stealth mode) and several small research pursuits.

If I've seen you on irc it was as "gthnarto" which is an alias. In real life most people call me Christo.

christo wrote:hello world

I'm new to ES and having watched the youtube backlog my interest is piqued by this "rag tag" bunch as the recent interview described you.

My programming experience is quite significant and yet I'm always learning. I don't really know much about modern video game stacks or console development but starting when I was 8 years old, I did a lot of amateur game coding in the 80s on 8 bit and 16 bit personal computers (vic 20, c64 Amiga). Then I used BASIC, Assembler and C.

I got a CS degree and did a lot of travelling, partying and music before focusing on a software engineering career. In the past I have worked in boring big companies and crazy dot com startups and universities. I've run my own business and worked for the man. My current job is pretty much my ideal job with lots of interesting work in a cool environment and it's well paid. I work for a software vendor making developer tools, mainly web-based and mainly in java. I have specialisations and interests in programming languages, security, ai / alife and api design.

There are lots of things I'm interested in learning but graphics, audio and video games have always been a passion.

I guess I'm here because I like to feed that passion.

The available time I have to work on my many side projects is pretty small but I do have an active game project (still in stealth mode) and several small research pursuits.

If I've seen you on irc it was as "gthnarto" which is an alias. In real life most people call me Christo.

Nice to meet you, man. Good to see you're on the boards, because I talked to you the other day on IRC.

Whats up all, Ed here, just joined the forums. I am really enjoying seeing the process of your project and am impressed by the amount of mt dew you consume. now here comes the life story... am currently 23 and graduated last May with a bs in EE which led me to a hardware/software test engineering position for some weird company, and have been gaining interest in game development probably just to procrastinate through the day. I did a fair share of programming in college and after a couple programming internships, I swore to myself that programming was at the top of my list of things I hate. The internship assignments had no creativity within the programming and basically consisted of "we need this, do that." Now I have been getting my head back into the whole programming thing because of its potential to help me with automated testing and provide an edge in my industry (power systems). What better way to gain experience in something than to relate it to a hobby you already have, gaming! It always has been of interest of mine and now that I am out of all the classes that I hated attending, I miss the whole learning aspect. Basically I am here to hear ideas for development and art design. Am currently working on a platform rip of splinter cell and trying to soak up as much info as possible for me, which is probably not much. FYI I am a console gamer, 360 mainly (yes, halo multiplayer fanboy). But my favorite games are all mortal kombats, resident evils, c&c yuri, and more recently splinter cell.

Most of my interest is in art design. I am convinced that most 3rd graders can probably draw better than I can ( probably better grammar as well), and any experience to help that is a positive one.

Anyways, I'm sure you will see a post or two from me at some point, and when you say to yourself "did he really just ask/say that?" you can at least be assured that I am retarded and not 12. peace out.

EdBoon wrote:now that I am out of all the classes that I hated attending, I miss the whole learning aspect.

I hear ya. Welcome to the forums

Hello World,
I'm a I'm still just a beginner when it comes to programming, Eric, aka eatcomics, started me on that. I've been using computers for as long as I remember, I got a broken lappy at 2, and have had one ever since. I've used Linux for several years now, started on Ubuntu, moved to Fedora, after I didn't like that I switched back to Ubuntu for awhile until I started on Gentoo. Now I'm running primary Ubuntu, with Gentoo in a separate partition. I'm not really sure what else to say... Its rather awkward, I don't really like explaining my personal life without knowing people first.

You could mention you write... :D

Oh, yeah.
I write technology reviews and articles for small news organizations on the internet, like Associated Content. I'm also an author, I started with Fan Fiction, but have my own projects as well.

Hey all,

Really glad I found the site and project. I'm a 3rd year Computer Science student at UC Davis, been programming since I was twelve. I started making games early on in high school and have made a number of small projects since but nothing on the size that ES seems to be. Look forward to seeing where ES goes from here and wanted to let you know that it has inspired me to get some of my friends to think about starting something similar, though maybe not quite as ambitious (stick to PC, maybe?).

One last idea I had was maybe adding support for the Nintendo DS to libGyro once it is released.

schwarb wrote:One last idea I had was maybe adding support for the Nintendo DS to libGyro once it is released.

Sorry, but that's not gonna happen. LibGyro makes heavy use of floating point, which is something that the DS can't do nearly fast enough (neither the DS or GBA have an FPU, so it would all have to be calculated in software. For that reason alone, anything using libGyro on DS/GBA would run like shit, not to mention the fact that most rendering is done by hardware itself in a batch-rendering style. That would probably mess up how libGyro works.

As you can see, sometimes you can't have something that is truly platform-independent, because there will always be a platform that is too limited for it to really be useful.