About Elysian Shadows

Goal
Our primary goal is to create a commercial quality RPG that people will have fun playing. We want the warm and fuzzy feeling of personal satisfaction that comes from having people enjoy something that we have poured our hearts and souls into.

This is more than just something we do in our spare time. This is unifying our collective technical, programming, artistic, musical, and writing skills along with our appreciation for video games into a single project. Ultimately, that is what Elysian Shadows is all about.

Gameplay
Elysian Shadows has been heavily influenced by RPGs from our childhood. Our team grew up playing games like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Phantasy Star. We look to these titles for inspiration on our own project.

While these games have had a huge impact on our direction, we are also striving to create an entirely new 2D RPG experience. Just as games like the original Final Fantasies and Dragon Quests for NES evolved into their SNES successors, we would like to create the next incarnation of the 2D RPG genre.

Our aim is not to create an "old-school" RPG. We want our project to have a modernized feel while still retaining that old-school influence and charm. The goal is to deliver something new and exciting but also familiar and nostalgic.

The Adventures in Game Development
Back in September of 2007, during the earliest days of the project, Marcel and Peter joined the party. Up until this point, it had been just me (Falco) working on a simple Dreamcast engine that allowed a player to "walk" around and crudely interact with his environment.

With the addition of Marcel and Peter (the three pieces of the Triforce combined), the goal had become to create a Dreamcast game. It was around this time that we began having routine "dev weekends". These were entire weekends where the team would get together in the attic of my parents' house and do nothing but drink way too much caffeine, stay up all night, and write code.

I began keeping a video "journal" of some of the sessions. These videos were originally intended to be a personal log for the team. Shortly after, somebody recommended that I upload these logs to Youtube. We decided that it might be kind of fun, and uploaded a series of videos ("The Adventures in Game Development Chapters 1-3") to our channel.

For some reason, these three extremely unprofessional, crude, and unedited videos caught on. People began subscribing to our channel, and word was spread about the tiny little indie team making "That one Dreamcast RPG". It was then decided that these "dev weekends" would be recorded and uploaded to Youtube as a behind-the-scenes look at the game development process.

Fast forward to about a year later. We have over a dozen Chapters of our "Adventures in Game Development" series and over 800 subscribers. We owe the popularity, publicity, and even the future success of this project to the Youtubian community that has supported us since our earliest days.

Technology
The engine powering Elysian Shadows has been written from the ground up. We would like to keep the engine completely separate from the actual "game". This will not only make our own development easier, but will also provide a way to reuse the engine for future projects.

The engine was originally written in straight C for the Sega Dreamcast. Thanks to the growing popularity of our Youtube videos, it was later decided that we should consider creating a PC build alongside the Dreamcast version.

As it stands, the engine is written in C/++ (bits of the first Dreamcast incarnation are still written in C, but we've switched to C++ since Alex has joined the party). The Dreamcast build uses the KallistiOS library for most of its hardware manipulation and some custom written assembly rendering functions thanks to Tvspelsfreak (Anton Norgren). The PC build is using SDL and OpenGL. It is currently only being tested/developed on PCs, but Mac and Linux builds would not be out of the question due to the platform independent nature of the engine.

Because of its simple syntax, powerful embedding capabilities, and lightweight nature, we have turned to Lua for all of our in-game scripting needs.

Our level editor was written in BlitzPlus. While its main purpose is to create environments for Elysian Shadows, it is also independent of the game and could potentially be used by any application that can read and process its output data.

Both the PC and Dreamcast build should be identical. We aren't removing anything from the Dreamcast version, but we are being conscious of our hardware limitations as development progresses.