Elysian Shadows

[everynewday84]

Uh, actually it changes your entire insult. It makes you look misinformed. Apparently you weren't misinformed, though. You're just a douche.

actually, I neither insulted you nor was a douche. Rather, I made a stab at the fact that there arent many people playing dreamcast at this point. Interpret it as you may.
And, credit card or no, what you did was a douchebags move. As children will hear suggestive things if they call a phone sex number, credit card or not. It's not funny. It's classless.

[noiseredux]

I'm actually super excited for this project.

[Falco Girgis]

Apologies for the lack of updates, I have been suffering from severe obstructive sleep apnea that has kept me tired and miserable for the last month or so...

Anyway, I'm getting back on my feet, and I finished a pretty gigantic feature for ESTk (it's more like a standalone tool, technically) in our development suite. It's called "Sheet Manager," and it allows artists and level designers to dynamically populate tile sheets from existing graphics (rather than having to meticulously construct a grid of graphics by hand in Photoshop).



You can read the full article here:
http://elysianshadows.com/dev/project/b ... nager-v1-2

It was definitely a slight detour from the game itself, but I needed an entry point back into it after enduring a month or two without sleep, and this is something our artists have been begging me for for months...

[Falco Girgis]

We just released an internal document used for pixel artist recruitment. The document has been circulated to give prospective artists a look at the artistic direction of ES and an introduction to our development suite. I doubt there are too many aspiring pixel artists here, but just in case:






The rest of the Primer and the full article can be found here:
http://elysianshadows.com/dev/project/b ... now-public

[mazonemayu]

I just love it; thats sooo my style of graphics

[Jenkins]

Very nice! Keep up the good work!

[VasiliyRS]

The documentation looks great! I hope more people will join the project.

[Falco Girgis]

New blog update. We're in kind of a transitional phase currently with the project. Our Toolkit, ESTk, is basically done. Development is switching back towards the Engine. From this point forward, new features will be added to our engine then exposed to the Toolkit to allow for content creation.

I have written a blog entry about my progress with our rigid body physics engine for ES. We have long planned for physics to be a part of combat and gameplay. We face a few challenges here that are kind of unique to ES:

1) Physics engine has to handle TILES along with entities. Most physics engines (Box2D) consider everything a standalone entity. While you can create each tile as a standalone collision primitive like this, it's extremely inefficient for tiled games

2) Ours needs to be very lightweight. This is especially true for the Dreamcast. The Dreamcast build in particular is using the SIMD assembly instructions on the SH4 for very fast linear algebra, and we are doing lots of little optimizations to keep this thing from eating the processor.

Very simple sandbox area I've been testing in:


Working towards exposing the "collider" tile attribute to the Toolkit for level designers:


The full blog post is here:
http://elysianshadows.com/dev/project/b ... box-part-1

[mazonemayu]

thx for the update Falco, looking good

[Falco Girgis]

Sorry, I keep forgetting to update this thread... Anyway, the project has still been chugging along. We have made some great progress on the software and art front. We actually just hired a full-time pixel artist. Still working towards that Kickstarter that you guys were laughing at.

One of the biggest new features I added was the depth buffer to simulate 3-dimensional depth in the world of Elysian Shadows. This combined with our layering mechanism (and soon to be shadow/lighting system) should give us the ability to create extremely detailed and versatile environments. Right now the Dreamcast seems okay with the new renderer. Might have to start doing some optimizations in the future once we get more transparencies and lots of depth in our scenes...

This is a screenshot of ESTk (Toolkit) and ESGamma (Engine) sharing the depth buffering algorithm. Level designers can modify the "depth" attribute of tiles on each layer, which changes render priority and z-plane in-game:


Our concept-artist has been hammering out some of the game's locations and main characters (including people that will be joining your party):




Without giving too much away, here are some of the terrain and structures from the first town of Elysian Shadows:



Full blog articles and discussion topics are on our site:
http://elysianshadows.com