Dear friends,
the whole team have been humbled and astonished over the past couple of weeks. We have seen a massive increase in our audience both on YouTube and our other social media outlets. Because of this we
can finally say our subscriber count is OVER 9000!!!111one
Thank you to everyone who has continued to support us over the years and those who are new. We appreciate each and everyone of you and can't tell you how much it means to us all. We have some great
things to show you on the build up to the Kickstarter this Summer and we are glad you choose to stick around on this journey with us.
We have recoreded three podcasts this week with Core Elements, TwoDashStash and The Week in Geek. These should all be available early this coming week and you should all go and listen because we may
talk about things you don't know ;)
Latest Articles
Elysian Shadows Team Invades the Core Elements Podcast
Falco and Tyler appeared to talk about Elysian Shadows including a potential launch window and how certain features of the game came about. They also discuss current gaming topics and how Wes (the host) is MMO'd out.
See Article
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We are setting the wheels in motion for our Kickstarter campaign. Track it here
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Team Updates
Falco Girgis
Lead Engine/Toolkit Developer
Honestly, my work has been almost exclusively gameplay-related this time... Which is kind of insane. For the first time ever, I'm actually using my own engine and tools instead of writing them. In between Tyler bitching at me for putting semicolons in Lua scripts and trying to help migrate the entire codebase over to the latest libGyro version (with Droid support!) I have made some pretty serious progress on core gameplay mechanics... After quite a bit of consideration and realizing we already have all of the 3D data to pull it off, I have added the ability to "jump" in Elysian Shadows (like in Mario RPG). I'm honestly super excited about this, as it truly does add a third dimension to our game and our world, and you can now climb ontop of stuff, jump on things, and use z space to your tactical advantage in combat... I also added a Kirby/MegamanX-style dpad double-tap dash that I think goes really well with the jumping ability. It feels very action-y and fluid instead of rigid and confined, as you would expect a 2D RPG to feel.
Aside from that, I developed a Lua-based asynchronous "cutscene" engine, which gives us incredible control over every aspect of the game (NPCs, cameras, dialog, lights, audio, etc) from Lua, while still keeping all CPU-intensive polling logic in the engine. I've used this framework to create several badass things that I will be showing off in AiGD25.
Tyler Rogers
Lead Gameplay Engineer
We've made astounding progress since our last newsletter! Falco and I both have been working in tandem the last few weeks in bringing Loren (both exterior and interiors), and Loren's forest (Foloi Forest)/town transition area to life. We've populated the fleshed out shops with vendor NPCs and items, created place-holder house interiors for every building/floor in Loren, tying them all together with warps and our new, fancy 3D transitions. Every character in Loren at the moment exhibits interactivity through basic but present dialog. Along with the town of Loren itself, we've also been focusing on fine-tuning some details for our combat system. Some audacious little slimes can be found wandering around the outskirts of town, waiting for unwary adventurers. These entities seek out the player after entering their aggression radius and will attack once within range. Julien has the ability to equip his sword and retaliate - causing damage text and blood particles to appear. If enough damage is dealt the slime will die, exploding to reveal quite a treasure trove of money items. Loot piñatas indeed!
Leandro Tokarevski
Pixel Artist
Since AiGD 24 I have officially joined the team as an artist, and have been working with Patryk on the Loren caves and ruins tilesheet, figuring out the ancient culture and architecture of the people that built them. Don't know how much I'm allowed to reveal, let's just say it's going to be awesome! I'm so glad to be on the team, and to be actively contributing in the creation of Elysian Shadows.
Connor Linning
Soundtrack Creator
I have mentioned before that I switched from FL Studio to Cubase and loved it... I did, but I have found Cubase to be super bugg. I even started working on a new ES song only to find that it would freeze every time I tried to open the project, as well as occasionally freeze trying to open my favourite VSTs that I know work properly!
I've switched to Cakewalk's Sonar X2. Sonar 4 was the first music program I ever used, about 12 years ago. At the time I didn't use midi or synthesizers much and only recorded raw live audio. When I was thinking of what to switch to after Cubase, Sonar popped into my head and I went for it. It works fantastically and feels like home. I find it even easier to use than FL for synthesizer stuff, and I can record live audio so much faster and effortlessly. Everything about it is intuitive and beautiful. I am in love. Sonar X2 is officially the Emma Watson of digital audio workstations.
The latest in the audio world of Elysian Shadows is the creation of background music for the Loren Museum, Loren Forest, and Loren Church (among a few other music demos), and sound effects that Falco and Tyler are currently putting into the game. We will be showing all of this off in Chapter 25 of Adventures in Game Development (which given what I've seen from the other team members, is going to be the best episode yet). And don't worry, the Golden Sun style flutes have returned! Harry Potter for the Gameboy Color, Donkey Kong Country, Golden Sun, and Chrono Trigger have been big influences for these new tracks.
My progress was lacking due to having to work so hard during this last semester at University, but I've come back with a vengeance and am caught up with the rest of the team. For the ES team, this summer is going to be a freakshow of crazy and inspired late night devving, and having been a fan of AiGD and ES before I joined, I am more excited now than I ever was before.
Daniel Tindall
Web Designer & Developer
Since the website launch I have jumped on the PR ship helping Falco increase our social presence. He has been doing a fantastic job with Facebook and Google+ which motivates me to work harder with Twitter.
I have released our first official press release which has seen us appear on a number of gaming news websites, most notably Gamasutra. Our social media has exploded with new members of our community; we have our foot in the door with the Android, Ouya and iOS communities and have seen massive support from the dedicated Dreamcast community. We have gained the interest of numerous big, established gaming news groups and the indie dev community which saw members of our team meet with members of the IGDA, get invited to SIEGE this fall, Falco has been invited to Croatia to give two lectures and we have appeared in three podcasts in the last week.
Overall we are starting to gain some serious momentum in the gaming news and social media worlds which allows us to show as many people as possible what we have planned for Elysian Shadows.
I have also been having a go at level design to take some weight off of the art team. It's slow process at the moment learning the software and how to use the tiles the artist create, but I feel confident with that now and I have purchased some books to really learn the art of level design. My first task will be the forest area outside of Loren and expanding it 8x it's current size. Yes, 8x! We plan on having some very large areas that the player can spend some time in exploring and finding little rewards for doing so.
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Breaking News
The Next Gen RPG For The Sega Dreamcast
artilce by twodashstash.com
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