Hey all,

It has been a long while with the holiday break, but we are back to rock out some more development for ES and have some awesome stuff to show you guys!

AiGD: Legends and Lore

This month we went a little bit experimental with our Adventures in Game Development series. We decided to show off the other side to making a game, the lore of the game. We also showed off some level design and music in the classic AiGD style. We hope you enjoy!

The Dev Notebooks

So since we initially announced the dev notebooks a few months back we have a lot of people asking about them. Well we have had some troubles with getting the notebooks digitized without harming the original BUT we now have a plan and should have them to you by next month! Thank you for your interest in the notebooks!

The Monster Design Contest

So the team has picked it's top 6 designs for you to vote on! We have a video below talking about all the designs and what we thought of them. Go check it out and vote for your favorite!

Music

Jeremy was hard at work with the soundtrack to the game. So much so that he has finished up the songs for the first 1/5 of the game! He ever started working on some night-time versions of songs. Here is a list of his work:

• Crystal Ruins (boss)
• The Join Party theme
• Foloi (night)
• Loren (night)
• Kendrick's theme
• The Museum theme

The Crystal Ruins, Foloi Forest and The Crystal Myth

This month the primary focus for Patryk was getting a layer of polish ready for Brandon to implement into the levels he has been crafting. Since Jeremy has gotten so much done in terms of music he decided to join Brandon and get a two pronged attack on these levels. In terms of levels we have gotten we worked heavily on the Foloi forest and Crystal Ruins and are just missing a few pieces before they are completed. Patryk also gave a makeover to the Crystal Ruins' boss, The Crystal Myth. Here is a look at some of the levels and the boss:

 

 

ESTk and EVMU!

Falco has been working hard on making the ESTk easier to use for Jeremy and Brandon and fixing bugs we have uncovered. That has consumed a lot of his time toward the game but will ultimately make for an easier and more efficient workflow.

Falco has also made strides this month to have the EVMU replicate the original even more accurately. Here is a list of things he has done to improve upon it:

• - Implemented STF and LDF undocumented, hidden CPU opcodes for reading/writing to flash
• - added ability to load BIOS separately so that you can run EVMU with BIOS only, Game ROM only and BIOS + Game ROM
• - 100% compatibility with Japanese BIOS (US BIOS has only been ripped by 1 person and has never been released)
• - file manager mode support
• - clock mode support
• - flag for preserving aspect ratio
• - pixel perfect screen zoom
• - support for .LCD animations created with VMU Animator
• - Start, Stop, advance frame, rewind frame controls during playback
• - Redid serial communications back-end for clock-cycle level communications emulation - TCP VMU/VMU link is a WIP
• - Implemented communications over serial/COM port for communicating between a real VMU device and EVMU emulated device (still WIP)
• - emulated pixel "ghosting" effect of LCD refresh rate (used by some games to emulate grayscale and more colors)
• - added support for loading .VMU raw VMU flash file dumps
• - added screen saver for when VMU goes to sleep (Elysian Shadows logo, of course)
• - fixed a few very minor, obscure bugs with existing opcodes that were exposed through running the BIO

That's all we have for this month. Thank you guys for your support and patience.

We will see you all next month!

-The ES Team