Elysian Shadows

Hey Guys

I used to hang around with you guys a few years ago, maybe under the name Powergloved Andy. Anyway, I just had a faint thought of you guys, so I decided to look you up. It's been since 2008, and ES is still not done. What's the deal.

Not a troll post, or a flaming post. Just wondering what the deal is. Cheers.

Lots of drama in the team, I guess.

Somehow I wish that they'll never be done with ES, because I want to follow the project for, like, forever.
But I hope that they'll come up with a new project once it has been finished.

What I'm curious about is why this forum has been so dead lately.

Not that I owe any of you an explanation for a free project that we all do simply out of passion in our free time, and I particularly hate posts like this, but it has nothing to do with "team drama." People have come and gone from this project pretty consistently since its inception. This is nothing new, and it has certainly never caused a large hiccup in the project. We have always had a core team of motivated people who would bleed to see ES finished. As I often say, if everyone else quit tomorrow, I would keep going. I would draw my own shitty pixel art or just use rectangles and write my own shitty music.

What has caused this project to take so long is life. During our "golden years" on Youtube, I was a sophomore in college taking classes that I could ace with my eyes closed. I had three day weekends, never opened a book, never did homework, and usually worked on ES during class. I have since finished my degree, bought a house, and started my career. I am now obligated to work 8 hours a day like a respectable American.

Despite the fact that many of us have had life eat up quite a bit of our time, we still find the time to dedicate to the project.

The only other major "hiccup" has been our flaky ass artists. We have, to this day, never had an artist finish so much as a complete tilesheet for us, even after being on the team for literally years. The engine, toolkit, and libGyro are getting so far beyond art that it's ridiculous at this point.

We have, however, cooked up a new strategy for how we will be handling art. We haven't been overly public about the new direction of Elysian Shadows, but if you have a look around the blogs on the site, you can clearly see that we're beginning to favor a far more open development model. This is just the beginning...

I think that's easy to understand if you are familiar with full-time job workers' spare time (and that comes completely from personal experience).

Why thank you. It's just too bad that most of our viewers aren't familiar with the spare time of a full-time employee.

Such is the price of being moderately successful to a group of unemployed nerds on Youtube.

At least this post came now, and not some months ago when I was still part of that group...

My dear friend, PandaCookies,

I’d like to preface my reply with an excerpt from your post:

PandaCookies wrote: I used to hang around with you guys a few years ago...

Because of the fact that you’ve been absent from our Youtube channel, forums and online community for so long I feel that your question is somewhat irrelevant. If you had taken the time to watch our latest three episodes and spent some time truly checking up on us you’d know what our status is and what has been going on with our team members as well as project.

I think Falco did a really good job explaining what you’ve been missing. To re-iterate some key points:

The project is more than just a simple game. Its become much larger than anyone involved ever dreamed it to be. Work will always continue even if it falls to Falco or myself to carry all the weight on our shoulders alone.

The project, although important to us, is still a hobby at its essence. Since it’s conception we’ve grown up, graduated high school, got jobs and even graduated college… we’ve now got careers, bills and other life issues that tend to interfere with the time that we’d normally have dedicated to development. This is not to say that the project is delayed, as we’ve made gigantic strides in the past 6 months alone, but realistically the time line for certain milestones have shifted.

Because we’ve had team members come and go this means that the time spent integrating new members, bringing them up to date and managing their work flow also subtracts from our own work. That’s one thing that Jarrod was good at above the rest of us. He had experience with his fraternity in managing people and honestly he was much more extroverted and experienced in doing such vs Falco or myself than I’d care to admit – however this doesn’t mean that we can’t make it happen without him.

This also applies to artists in general., while its been a pleasure to work with every single one of them, without us being able to reliably pay for their work (until now) its been a struggle to keep them involved. Even with all of the assets we do have, we couldn’t present a polished demo. While the engine would be rock solid we’d have art from 4-5 different artists, styles and techinques that would clash as bad as a colorblind hippie’s closet. This isn’t our current artists’ fault and I do not mean to talk ill of any of them; However this is why we’ve had to come up with a new game plan (pun unintended) for how we’re going to handle that portion of ES.

TL;DR – We’re still here. We’re still working, hard. We’re not going anywhere and I promise once the project is complete every pixel, line of code and dialog box will be worth it’s weight in gold. The project will be complete when it is complete. After all of the time, blood, sweat and tears that we’ve poured into this project we’d be doing not only ES a dishonor but we’d be betraying ourselves and our loyal fans if we settled and released anything less than perfection.

This reminds me I should check if there are any new clips. I haven't been to the YouTube channel since episode 19. I think. Now that I see chapter 20 available, uploaded more than six months ago, I might have seen it after all. Let's see...

Skomakar'n wrote:This reminds me I should check if there are any new clips. I haven't been to the YouTube channel since episode 19. I think. Now that I see chapter 20 available, uploaded more than six months ago, I might have seen it after all. Let's see...

You have probably seen them all then.

We post updates very regularly on Facebook and update our blog fairly regularly on the main site. We have some big ideas for Youtube, but we would rather keep our heads low and finish some code before we reemerge back into the spotlight. Consider this the calm before the storm.

Falco Girgis wrote:but we would rather keep our heads low and finish some code before we reemerge back into the spotlight. Consider this the calm before the storm.

Yeah. One day we will be magnificent. We just need a few more lines... of code. so white, so clean.. everything is so good..

After all--what is life, but one white line?

Arce wrote:

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um... wut?

So where have you been, Marcel?

Denver, Colorado