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What the hell is Elysian Shadows?
Elysian Shadows is a multi-platform 2D roleplaying game (RPG) being independently developed by Chaos Rift Software.
Elysian Shadows has been heavily influenced by the great 2D RPGs of the 16-bit era of gaming. Our team grew up playing games such as Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Phantasy Star. We draw a great deal of inspiration from these titles and hope to pay them tribute with our own project.
Despite our deeply rooted old-school influences, our team hopes to create an entirely new experience for the genre. Just as 8-bit titles such as the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest series for NES evolved into their 16-bit SNES successors, we aim to create the next incarnation of the 2D RPG. The team strives to endow Elysian Shadows with modernized gameplay mechanics while still retaining the atmosphere and charm from its 16-bit predecessors.
Supported Platforms
Elysian Shadows currently runs on the following platforms:
- Windows
- OSX
- Linux
- Sega Dreamcast
- Sony PSP
- iPod Touch
- iPhone
- iPad
A Brief History
Elysian Shadows began as an extremely basic technical demo running on the Sega Dreamcast for Falco Girgis's Electrical Engineering 100 class back in September of 2007. Shortly after, Marcel Girgis began production on a simple tile-based level editor for the demo, and Peter Cartier joined the team developing scripts and tools to aide in its development.
Falco, Marcel, and Peter eventually began recording their late-night, caffeine-fueled development sessions to create a crude, unedited, and unprofessional video documentary that would eventually be uploaded to Youtube as "The Adventures in Game Development." Completely accidentally, these short video documentaries began to gain the team and project a considerable amount of publicity among hardcore programming enthusiasts and indie game developers on Youtube.
As time has progressed, many more developers have joined the project as artists, musicians, writers, and web developers. Because of this, Elysian Shadows has evolved into much more than a purely technical, programming-oriented project. The Adventures in Game Development series now showcases the entire spectrum of the game development process and appeals to a much wider audience.
The project presently has over 4.5k subscribers on Youtube, over 25 videos documenting the history of its development, a nearly complete development suite, and a team consisting of passionate developers with a wide array of talents who are hell-bent on seeing it completed.
Our Goal
The main driving force behind our project and team has always been the goal of creating a game that the world will play and enjoy. We aren't worried about fame, fortune, or fornication (although those would all be nice, so please tell your friends (and girlfriend) about the project). We are doing this for ourselves and for the people who have so generously supported us throughout the development process.
"Elysian Shadows has always been about getting off of our asses and pursuing something that we are all passionate about. We are unifying our collective programming, artistic, musical, and writing abilities along with our appreciation for video games, engineering, and the creative arts into a single project." --Falco Girgis
