Connor Linning has Officially Resigned

by Falco Girgis January 17, 2015 21 comments

And we are honestly just as confused as you are. We were left with a cryptic message in our team Skype chat out of nowhere saying goodbye and offering to discuss licensing agreements for his music. We were never given any specific reason, and we saw the official statement on his site just two seconds later. You know everything we know.

It honestly saddens us that someone who we considered a brother of ours, a comrade in arms, would do such a thing completely out of the blue and leave us with no explanation. His remark about wanting to quit for six months puts this at about the time of our Kickstarter, when Tyler and I put our entire lives on the line, quit our jobs, and literally bled for the project. We would like to have thought that someone who claimed to be so interested in the project would have had the decency to let us know back then if he was considering resigning, before letting a Kickstarted project progress so far before abandoning it with no musician. We are a close-knit team of a brothers, so this has come as a fairly heavy blow to us all.

Things are even more confusing for us, as we absolutely loved him and did nothing but praise him and his music. Along with that, he was offered an extremely competitive percentage of all profits made from Elysian Shadows, disproportionately large for how little work he was doing on the project. We also gave him free reign to work on other projects and even on his own little game maker 2D RPG, even though we all knew it was a clear conflict of interests to us, our team, and to the company he was supposedly going to help build.

This team has been through a lot, and those of us who have stuck around for this long have done so through thick and thin, through people coming and leaving, through the ups and downs. Even though Connor was one of our own, this kind of thing has become standard procedure for us, and we're just as determined as ever to keep our heads low and keep trucking onward in the name of the dream we all share.

Many people have asked us if we will still be using Connor's tracks in Elysian Shadows. Connor had continually insisted that all of the Elysian Shadows tracks be released as "creative commons" after the game was completed, and despite the fact the rest of the team was not fond of this decision, we all agreed to it, because we wanted to make him happy and comfortable working with us. But after all of that, we feel nothing but betrayed for him to come back and want to discuss "licensing agreements." Then consider the fact that several press sources have told us he was using the connections we built with Elysian Shadows to promote his own indie game and agenda... I honestly think it's best to go our separate ways.

As of right now the Elysian Shadows team is accepting resumes for a replacement audio engineer or musician. This will be an ongoing process, and we would like to get the community involved with us to hear your opinions on who you deem the best fit to produce the soundtrack for Elysian Shadows. Yes, this sucks for us, but if anything, it has only made us even more determined to make this game a resounding success. With your help, we can recruit someone who can make this soundtrack a beautiful fusion of old and new to be remembered for generations to come.

Falco Girgis

Falco Girgis is the founder and lead software architect of the Elysian Shadows project. He was previously employed in the telecom industry before taking a chance on Kickstarter and quitting his job to live the dream. He is currently pursuing his masters in Computer Engineering with a focus on GPU architecture.

Travis Haselden

My advice: seek legal counsel. Your company and livelihood are directly impacted by the success of this project, a project which is directly affected by agreements made with those producing content for it. If he wants to quit, fine. But the withdrawal of the content he has made for the project is directly damaging.
teh_fixerer

This blog post is very immature and unprofessional—openly publishing business details, badmouthing, and such. Young people these days . . .
- Anon
  
  I see your point but.. the transparency and openness, for better or worse…that’s kind of their shtick. The details of their development process have been fairly transparent over the years from youtube.. the fans of which, myself included, probably constituted most of their contributor base. That transparency includes bagging on team members that leave for stupid reasons. Yes, the project got more serious over the past year, becoming their actual jobs. Connor shouldn’t have joined the project if he didn’t want leaving this project to tarnish his rep. These guys aren’t working for MonetizedFreeGames, corp. with annoying shareholders. We funded them, crass included, free to call out bullshit when they see it. It’s a good thing, and probably for the better. At this point, their reputation IS to be transparent. If we saw a glossy, ambiguous post about Connor leaving, fans would get more curious and personally, I’d question the secrecy/professionalism…
  
  Actually, when I saw this, I kind a got nervous the project was going to struggle for second, And shit, I liked Connor’s music. But then as pointed out in the post, this is far from the first time someone has left the team. Kind of reassuring. In the end it will be no big deal. I’m not sure what will happen with the current state of the OST, and what the game will end up with for an OST, but I bet they can find a similarly talented musician/composer. The project has even more impetus than when they got Connor.
- Guest
  
  Are you not also badmouthing when you say that someone is? So you are doing that which you are criticizing yourself. Interesting.
Thel

To be honest, and I don’t mean to be a pompous ass, I was not a huge fan of Connor’s music. I felt like he was relying too heavily on sampling other people’s music, and that might have caused some legal issues down the line. I’m sure I could hear Dead Space in one of his tracks. It was just a bit sketchy. Good ideas, but lacking a cohesive sound. I harbour no ill will towards the guy—I’m sure he was within his rights to leave the project, but he sure picked a fine moment. However, I’m sure you’ll attract many composers who fit the bill. I would even suggest doing what the early Final Fantasy games did by having one town theme, one dungeon theme, one world theme, one battle theme, and one boss theme—maybe the odd event theme. Quality over quantity. Otherwise, you might have to resort to library music.