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.
