Elysian Shadows

[Falco Girgis]

I'm not sure whether you've played Chrono Trigger or not, but when you move in the diagonal directions, the character continues to animate as though he's walking left or right.

Whether we could pull it off just for main characters or not depends on the amount of VRAM we have left, which may depend on our buddy Tvspelsfreak's DC R&D... He's developing a tool to analyze a set of textures and determine the best compression mechanism (hardware compression vs paletting) for the least amount of loss. We will have to see what we have left over here.

Either way, this will not effect analog-based movement at all. There is no way we would release ES with only D-Pad based movement, as this something that pisses everyone on our team off about 2D RPGs on modern platforms.

[Lord*Hypnos]

Just finally watched 23. A lot of cool stuff going on. I like that you're animating some of the tiles. I remember watching some footage of Albert Odyssey (Sega Saturn) once, and my mind was blown to see that they had added some grass animation to make it look like wind was blowing across the field. Will it be feasible to implement that on the DC port, too? I suppose that you don't actually know, but what do you think? Also, liking the fireball and solar eclipse effects that the other guy was working on ( not sure what his name is, actually)
EDIT: Also, the particle effects have a lot of potential, I think. sweet!

[naiaru]

Just finally watched 23. A lot of cool stuff going on. I like that you're animating some of the tiles. I remember watching some footage of Albert Odyssey (Sega Saturn) once, and my mind was blown to see that they had added some grass animation to make it look like wind was blowing across the field. Will it be feasible to implement that on the DC port, too? I suppose that you don't actually know, but what do you think? Also, liking the fireball and solar eclipse effects that the other guy was working on ( not sure what his name is, actually)
EDIT: Also, the particle effects have a lot of potential, I think. sweet!

Tyler?

Also, talking about Albert Odyssey, didn't they have shadows from overhead (offscreen) clouds as well when you walked around town? (I'm pretty sure Magic School Lunar did that too. EDIT:scratch that. I think they might've just had plain ol' clouds) I'd be interested too in what you guys are thinking of doing for environment effects and stuff in ES.

[Falco Girgis]

I like that you're animating some of the tiles. I remember watching some footage of Albert Odyssey (Sega Saturn) once, and my mind was blown to see that they had added some grass animation to make it look like wind was blowing across the field. Will it be feasible to implement that on the DC port, too?

Actually, yes, this is something we've already been planning on doing. We wanted to have rolling plains and prairies where gusts of wind blow long grasses in a wave pattern, rather than just static animation... At the moment, this is planned to be a cross-platform feature, and we don't foresee the DC having any issues if we do it correctly.

EDIT: Also, the particle effects have a lot of potential, I think. sweet!

Thanks. We have yet to really show them being used for anything realistic in-game, so just give us a chance to put them to good use instead of having exploding debug confetti shooting from Julien's head.

Tyler?

Yep, that's him.

Also, talking about Albert Odyssey, didn't they have shadows from overhead (offscreen) clouds as well when you walked around town? (I'm pretty sure Magic School Lunar did that too. EDIT:scratch that. I think they might've just had plain ol' clouds) I'd be interested too in what you guys are thinking of doing for environment effects and stuff in ES.

We are honestly planning on at least attempting everything we're doing on PC... I certainly doubt we will be able to pull off everything at decent framerates, but we really have yet to implement anything as far as the environment goes that is outside the realm of possibility on the Dreamcast... I would expect it to be closer to the iOS and Droid builds than the full-fledged PC build.

We definitely plan on having day/night cycles on the DC, and at least some level of static shadows going on. Overhead "clouds" would not be particularly demanding on the DC. The true dynamic "sun" we implemented in 3D space is also not outside the realm of possibility, as the DC can bumpmap, and it can light objects per-vertex...

Lighting is going to come down to figuring out exactly how taxing bumpmapping is on the DC's hardware, and seeing exactly how many dynamic lights we can have affecting geometry in a tightly-unrolled, SH4 assembly-optimized lighting renderer... Just getting the lights going on DC would be a pretty easy feat, but they will probably perform shittily. Getting them optimized and performing well will be quite an engineering R&D feat that will certainly take time.

edit: Don't know if you guys are following us on Twitter, G+, or Facebook, but we currently have large discussion threads going regarding what kinds of rewards people are hoping to see in our Kickstarter this summer. Your input is absolutely welcome!

[Lord*Hypnos]

shadows from overhead (offscreen) clouds as well when you walked around town?

Aw man, that'd be cool. Those Saturn 2D RPGs are so visually impressive! Same with a lot of the, especially late, especially Square and Enix RPGs on the SNES (Enix did Secret of Mana and SoM2, right?), but they didn't have the capacity to put in quite as many animations as in Saturn RPGs.

@Falco: Good to know you're going to likely have tile animations in the DC version. And good luck doing assembly optimizations. That's some pretty impressive knowledge, right there.

[Lord*Hypnos]

Falco, please make sure that you put ABXY support into ES. Just thought I should say that.

[Falco Girgis]

IT'S UPDATE TIME AGAIN! Huge update this time! New AiGD Chapter and a brand new website!

We're back! After taking some time listening to our fans, we decided to make a much more gameplay and storyline-centric chapter, with never-before-released information regarding ES.

Along with this chapter, we have completely revamped and rebranded our website to emphasize our new direction on the project moving towards the Kickstarter... We highly encourage everyone to check it out, as it also has game information that has never been released previously:
http://elysianshadows.com

Please let us know what kinds of goals and rewards you would like to see on our Kickstarter this summer. We can't thank you enough for helping to spread the word of our project. Don't forget to follow us on social media sites!
http://facebook.com/elysianshadows
http://twitter.com/elysian_shadows
http://https://plus.google.com/+Elysianshadows

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K56mndHzpQc[/youtube]

Here are a few screenshots straight from the new website:

[naiaru]

Jesus, one hour, you guys were busy. So when you you guys were talking about items having different mass, you guys mentioned how there might be something like you might not be strong enough to move an object when you first encounter it but if you come back after leveling up you might be strong enough to, and I think Tyler said something to the effect of you might have only magic type characters in your party so you can't take a shortcut you could if you had stronger type characters in your party. How is a party going to work in an Action-RPG? Are they computer-controlled, do you switch between characters, is it multiplayer?

[Falco Girgis]

Haha, there ain't no rest for the wicked, my friend! Don't forget to check out the new site either!

And your question regarding controlling multiple party members in combat is a really good question... You will have full control over the party leader, and the other two will be computer-controlled (most likely with some form of configurable AI). You will be able to switch the party leader with the click of a button, so managing a party and leveraging the unique strengths of each character will be fast and fluid.

...as for multiplayer, this is something we have never publicly announced or even answered, but I will go ahead and spill the beans for you... While we are focusing on a single-player experience, our engine and our game are being created to support the possibility of multiplayer... and we are planning this as a Kickstarter stretch goal.

[mazonemayu]

How is a party going to work in an Action-RPG?

have you ever played Silver?