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Topic: A New Dreamcast RPG?

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amcdc79
rank 10
Posted:
Mon Apr 14, 2014 11:29 pm
quote : #1
profile : pm
Posts: 127
What is Elysian Shadows?

Elysian Shadows is an indie 2D RPG being developed for Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, Ouya and Sega Dreamcast. We fuse aspects of 16-bit classical RPGs such as Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and Final Fantasy, with a highly stylized, modern vision by using dynamic lighting, physics, and audio engines along with swapping between 2D and 3D perspectives. Our goal is to create a "next-gen" 2D RPG in terms of gameplay, graphics, and audio while still remaining true to the games that inspired us to become developers.

With Elysian Shadows, we want to push the boundaries of pixel art by creating diverse, lush environments for players to explore with beautifully lit scenes and advanced rendering effects that could not have been possible on older hardware. Our goal is to create a gigantic, open world with a Zelda-style emphasis on exploration and environmental interaction while still retaining the rich storyline and combat mechanics of a full-fledged RPG. Combat is fast, fluid, and action-oriented, sporting particle effects, rigid-body physics, and advanced AI, while simultaneously offering tactical and strategic depth through character customization, unlockable abilities and techniques, and an advanced class system.

Story
Elysian Shadows takes place in a world caught in constant conflict between magic and technology. The gift of magic is bestowed upon loyal followers of The Creator, while the nonreligious sects of society are forced to rely upon technological advances in their daily lives. Upon uncovering a mysterious artifact deep within one of the ancient ruins scattered throughout the land, Julien and friends find themselves thrust into the middle of this mounting conflict, and they must now solve the mystery of the ancient civilizations to prevent the destruction of their own.

Follow!
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/elysianshadows
Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/user/GyroVorbis
Website: http://elysianshadows.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/elysian_shadows

Thank you for your time and support! We hope that you will follow the project!

Interesting concept, here's hoping that it does see the light of day. Smile
 
lordnikon
rank 87
Posted:
Mon Apr 14, 2014 11:42 pm
quote : #2
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Posts: 5902
Type: NTSC-U/C
Awesome! I am liking the promotion of the tools they use to develop the game. I would be interested in how they are making it, etc. Especially for the Dreamcast. I wonder if they would do any video blogs about the active development process.
  _________________
I'm already numero uno on Dark Helmet's hit list...
amcdc79
rank 10
Posted:
Tue Apr 15, 2014 11:47 am
quote : #3
profile : pm
Posts: 127
A little more info,

Here's a little bit more information on the game itself. The game features a combat system that happens in real time and makes heavy use of the games physics engine. You can pick up and throw pieces of the environment (rocks, branches, barrels, and even weapons lying on the ground) around you if for some reason you run out of MP or there's an object that is more effective against the particular enemy you are fighting. In the newest video, they talk about a spell they are working on designing that will draw metallic items to you like a powerful magnet and launch them at opponents around you.

Characters will have traditional "levels" like with most RPGs, where they get stronger and learn character-specific spells. Then they can also play as certain "classes" which allows them to specialize in things like attack magic, healing magic, melee, etc, and teaches them moves specific to their class. In addition, they are also going to have secret moves and magic that could be learned by equipping various items and scrolls.

Another goal the team has is to avoid boring NPCs that just throw out one liners. They have implemented a 24 hour clock system (which you can choose to speed up or slow down) with every NPC having their own schedule.

As far as development goes, the crew has gone through many iterations of its development tools before it reached the point where it is today. They have used the QT Framework (http://qt-project.org/) to build a powerful and easy to use editor that every member of the team is able to use to test and create content. LibGyro, the platform independent framework backing the engine was built from the ground up to be portable, so there are very few limits on where they can run the engine. Falco (Gyrovorbis) has wrote a lot of the code for the physics engine and graphics routines on the Dreamcast from scratch using SH4 assembly.

GyroVorbis posted...

There's actually a growing market for this kind of thing... Have you heard of Pier Solar HD? They're a highly successful remake of a Genesis Indie RPG classic also targeting the Dreamcast:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/573261866/pier-solar-hd-an-rpg-for-xbox360-pc-mac-linux-and

Also make no mistake... Elysian Shadows is also for Windows, Linux, OSX, Android, OUYA, and iOS as well as Dreamcast.



(amcdc79 posted)You are right, there is a market for New Dreamcast games, as other Developers have done quite well with their DC versions selling out the first run.

Thank you for filling us in regarding your game, I personally am happy to support a well made indie Dreamcast game, and have done so in the past.

If I may ask a few questions;
How long have you been working on this one?
How far along in the development process do you feel you are? (1/3 or 1/2 ?)
Is the team big enough to complete it quickly?
Do you have a Date for completion?

I'm sure others have questions as well, but if I may say, I wish you the best on your endeavor to bring out a New Game on the Dreamcast, as well as the other Platforms.

(Their reply)
Hey, buddy! We appreciate the support!

How long have you been working on this one?


Damn, that's a loaded question for us... Our Adventures in Game Development series make it look as though ES has been in development for up to 5 years, which is not quite fair to say.


When we started, we were know more than kids with a dream. I barely knew how to code C and was fresh out of highschool when we started the videos... It has been a journey of self discovery for me, and I have always held a job and attended university along with working on ES. Also consider the fact we developed our own custom multiplatform Engine and Toolkit, so that's why the development time seems so skewed for us.

As far as modern-day ES, as people know it, I would say Engine and Toolkit have been in development for 2 years, while the game itself has been in development for 6 months.

How far along in the development process do you feel you are? (1/3 or 1/2 ?)

I know it may not look that way to a nontechnical eye, but we are actually quite far along in the development of ES... Probably over halfway... You have to understand the insane amount of R&D that has gone into an engine like ours with dynamic lighting, physics, particles, 3D audio, etc... At this point all of that is done, and it's scripting and asset creation mostly.

Is the team big enough to complete it quickly?

Kinda, haha. We've recruited a few new people in the last few months, and we've really been killing it... But that's where the Kickstarter comes into play. I work full-time as a software engineer, I'm a part-time computer engineering graduate student, and I stay up all weekend abusing substances and pushing myself physically working on ES and recording our videos... I'm also paying our team of three artists out of my own pocket, which is raping me... Funding would be a godsend for me and this project, and with our team and expertise, we could easily and quickly complete ES working full-time.

Do you have a Date for completion?

With funding, we are all estimating ES would take about a year to fully complete for every platform.

I'm sure others have questions as well, but if I may say, I wish you the best on your endeavor to bring out a New Game on the Dreamcast, as well as the other Platforms.

Thanks so much, man. It's refreshing to find support for indies in communities like this!
 
GyroVorbis
rank 2
Posted:
Wed Apr 16, 2014 11:18 am
quote : #4
profile : pm
Posts: 8
Hello, Dreamcast-Online!

I'm the lead developer of the Elysian Shadows project! I'm happy you guys have stumbled upon us!

lordnikon wrote:
Awesome! I am liking the promotion of the tools they use to develop the game. I would be interested in how they are making it, etc. Especially for the Dreamcast. I wonder if they would do any video blogs about the active development process.
Not sure if you guys knew, but we have a pretty famous video documentary series on our development process, which often features the Dreamcast-side of things. Check us out here!
http://youtube.com/gyrovorbis

And here is our latest development video, "Adventures in Game Development Chapter 24."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K56mndHzpQc

Here's a few of the latest screenshots from the PC versions:




Our team very much appreciates the support of this community... Please let us know if you have any Dreamcast-specific thoughts or questions, we love to get technical, and are very interactive with our community as far as keeping them involved in our development process!
  _________________
http://elysianshadows.com
Elysian Shadows is an indie 2D RPG seeking to fuse elements of the oldschool 2D RPG classics with modern gameplay, dynamic lighting, physics, and music.
lordnikon
rank 87
Posted:
Wed Apr 16, 2014 12:48 pm
quote : #5
profile : pm
Posts: 5902
Type: NTSC-U/C
Hey GyroVorbis, welcome to the site Wink

I shall check out the video documentary this evening as soon as I get home from work. I am sure I will have lots to say after scoping these out.

I am loving the foliage on the trees. It is a unique look and adds a lot of depth and texture.

EDIT: I added my reply thinking "Man that name GyroVorbis sounds familiar, I could have sworn a user here was registered with that name. Checked your profile and you have been here a while Smile So I should say, welcome back!)
  _________________
I'm already numero uno on Dark Helmet's hit list...
GyroVorbis
rank 2
Posted:
Fri Apr 18, 2014 7:33 am
quote : #6
profile : pm
Posts: 8
LOL! You're right, man. I even remember you!

I signed up for this site WAY back in the day, when I got my BBA for my Dreamast and started playing Phantasy Star Online and Quake III Arena... This was long before I was really a Dreamcast devver or the Elysian Shadows project was born... But yeah, that's how I first found you guys. Laughing

You get a chance to check out "Adventures in Game Development," yet? What did you think? Pardon our language, btw. We get super into the development, and we can't help it.
  _________________
http://elysianshadows.com
Elysian Shadows is an indie 2D RPG seeking to fuse elements of the oldschool 2D RPG classics with modern gameplay, dynamic lighting, physics, and music.
lordnikon
rank 87
Posted:
Fri Apr 18, 2014 10:23 pm
quote : #7
profile : pm
Posts: 5902
Type: NTSC-U/C
Being passionate about what you are working on is what matters. So if that involves colorful language, then I am all for it Wink. You should hear me when I get started about the bash scripts I am writing with regards to Archiving (escaping chars for regex replace in toolchains is a nightmare). I am actually a Front End Developer/Designer career wise, and I am a new media artist, so I can relate to everything you guys are working on at the moment. I am happy to give feedback on various aspects of the game given my technical/creative background and my historical knowledge of games.

I started watching Adventures in Dev Chapter 24. I viewed around 15 minutes thus far, so bare with me as I catch up on all of the documentation on your dev experiences amidst working on my own projects.

It looks like you guys are working on some interesting tech. Are you operating in a full 2D engine? or 3D with 2D sprites?

Also, are you taking into consideration proper pixel mapping for 320 x 240 (240p) rendering on consoles that would support it, like the Dreamcast? Or is this a 480i and up experience?

The dynamic lighting stuff you guys are working with seems like a great idea, but just make sure you don't overdo it. In-fact, I would supress the feature moreso than let it go wild in your game. Lightbloom in 3D games was a huge problem for some people when companies were first experimenting with it. Just the right amount of accent to the environment will make it special, but adding too much of it could be a turn off for some people. Maybe its a feature in the options menu that can be toggled.
  _________________
I'm already numero uno on Dark Helmet's hit list...
GyroVorbis
rank 2
Posted:
Tue Apr 22, 2014 11:03 am
quote : #8
profile : pm
Posts: 8
lordnikon wrote:
Being passionate about what you are working on is what matters. So if that involves colorful language, then I am all for it Wink. You should hear me when I get started about the bash scripts I am writing with regards to Archiving (escaping chars for regex replace in toolchains is a nightmare). I am actually a Front End Developer/Designer career wise, and I am a new media artist, so I can relate to everything you guys are working on at the moment. I am happy to give feedback on various aspects of the game given my technical/creative background and my historical knowledge of games.
Haha, thanks, man. We were pretty much ripped apart by GameFaqs the other day for our "language"... Very supportive DC community over there... Rolling Eyes

lordnikon wrote:
It looks like you guys are working on some interesting tech. Are you operating in a full 2D engine? or 3D with 2D sprites?
It's actually a full 3D engine with 2D sprites. Chapter 24 doesn't really demonstrate it, but we have a dynamic camera that can swap between 2D and 3D seamlessly in-game. We plan to use a more 3D perspective for certain cutscenes and dialogs (it'll give you a better view of the character sprites and their emotions).

lordnikon wrote:
Also, are you taking into consideration proper pixel mapping for 320 x 240 (240p) rendering on consoles that would support it, like the Dreamcast? Or is this a 480i and up experience?
The engine itself started off on the Dreamcast, and we have a multiplatform abstraction framework implementing the low-level driver calls optimized for each platform. I have been developing the DC version with 480i/p in mind and have been doing all of my testing with a VGA cable... We also wrote our own custom renderer, optimized for 2D sprites, and our matrix transformation pipeline and vector math library utilized by our physics engine is SH4 assembly optimized on the Dreamcast.

lordnikon wrote:

The dynamic lighting stuff you guys are working with seems like a great idea, but just make sure you don't overdo it. In-fact, I would supress the feature moreso than let it go wild in your game. Lightbloom in 3D games was a huge problem for some people when companies were first experimenting with it. Just the right amount of accent to the environment will make it special, but adding too much of it could be a turn off for some people. Maybe its a feature in the options menu that can be toggled.
I absolutely agree with you here...

I personally have a bad habit of lighting the SHIT out of everything during AiGD episodes, because I'm the guy developing the engine and doing the R&D, so I want to push it to its knees for testing... But the actual game itself will use these features (especially bump and specular mapping) much more sparingly than I have been showing off. You will see more in-game usage of the lighting engine in move videos moving forward, as the lighting R&D is now complete.

And yeah, I totally agree about having it toggle-able. That will actually probably be a necessity, since we want ES to run on really old hardware and handhelds. Part of our design philosphy of our engine has been to allow each console to take full advantage of its hardware and effects, while not making them gameplay-effecting so other, less capable platforms don't have to implement them and the player's experience will remain unchanged (other than visually).

For example, dynamic shadows probably will not be realistic on the Dreamcast (too much rendering overhead), and the specular mapping will require per-pixel fragment shaders which it doesn't have... Instead we will be implementing the lighting engine with per-vertex lighting and hopefully hardware bumpmapping on the Dreamcast, which should still look great... As for turning all effects off, we want to support this for old PCs and consoles with fixed-function hardware, so we might as well make this option toggle-able in game. Very Happy

Thanks for the input, man. Our team is trying to reach out to fans and enthusiasts wherever we see ES posted on a forum... I'm the Dreamcast fanboy of the team, so I called dibs on the DC communities. Laughing
  _________________
http://elysianshadows.com
Elysian Shadows is an indie 2D RPG seeking to fuse elements of the oldschool 2D RPG classics with modern gameplay, dynamic lighting, physics, and music.
brmanuk
rank 7
Posted:
Mon Apr 28, 2014 9:56 pm
quote : #9
profile : pm
Posts: 51
Looking forward to this. Best of luck!
 
GyroVorbis
rank 2
Posted:
Thu May 22, 2014 9:32 am
quote : #10
profile : pm
Posts: 8
Not sure if this community has caught word of the press release yet, but we have gigantic news for Elysian Shadows:

Press Release wrote:
There have been huge things happening for Elysian Shadows since the launch of AiGD24, as we've been working towards our Kickstarter this summer... Our social media presence and press coverage has increased dramatically, we have been featured on three different podcasts, we have been convered on gaming sites for Android, OUYA, iOS, and (most importantly Dreamcast), and our press release even made it onto Gamasutra.

We were also contacted by the president of Watermelon Co, the company behind Pier Solar and Pier Solar HD shipping for Dreamcast this summer about a publishing deal on the Dreamcast. We have been long-time fans of their work and are honored to be given the opportunity to be affiliated with them.

We just released Adventures in Game Development Chapter 25, which is by far our most gameplay-oriented video to date, giving fans a huge amount of gameplay, art, and music to digest, including our battle engine. Here are the hightlights:
  • Finalized dynamic shadows and lighting
  • 3D particle and rigid body physics engines
  • Dynamic 2D/3D camera perspectives
  • Tons of unique SFX for walking on different environments
  • 3 new background tracks
  • New areas revealed
  • Real-Time battle engine revealed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEplKnoXBZQ

And of course, the screenies:




If you haven't already, please subscribe to the newsletter on our website and follow us on our social media sites for continued updates and news as we work towards our Kickstarter!

Let us know what you think of this episode in the comments below or on any of our social media pages:
http://elysianshadows.com
http://facebook.com/elysianshadows
http://twitter.com/elysian_shadows
http://plus.google.com/+Elysianshadows
  _________________
http://elysianshadows.com
Elysian Shadows is an indie 2D RPG seeking to fuse elements of the oldschool 2D RPG classics with modern gameplay, dynamic lighting, physics, and music.
amcdc79
rank 10
Posted:
Mon Aug 04, 2014 11:02 pm
quote : #11
profile : pm
Posts: 127
Now on Kickstarter,

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1945059142/elysian-shadows-next-gen-2d-rpg?ref=nav_search

I wish them all the best, may it actually be done, when they say it will be.
 
lordnikon
rank 87
Posted:
Wed Aug 06, 2014 8:53 am
quote : #12
profile : pm
Posts: 5902
Type: NTSC-U/C
It looks to me like this project is coming along very well. There is a working game, technology examples that reflect coding prowess, art assets, and the marketing/promotion/community interaction needed to drive sales.

GyroVorbis: So what versioning system are you guys using? GIT? SVN? Mercurial? and are you using any 3rd party services like github or bitbucket?
  _________________
I'm already numero uno on Dark Helmet's hit list...
Mir_wan
rank 7
Posted:
Wed Aug 06, 2014 2:51 pm
quote : #13
profile : pm
Posts: 74
I backed this project on Kickstarter to get the Physical Dreamcast copy of the game. I cant wait! Heard about this project on a podcast and been following it closely.
 
willis
rank 5
Posted:
Thu Dec 04, 2014 11:37 pm
quote : #14
profile : pm
Posts: 35
Type: NTSC-U/C
Not sure if I'm waaaaaay late or not as I've been away from this site for quite some time. However everyone can still purchase/order this game over at:

http://elysianshadows.com/paypal

I've got my DC LE paid for and couldn't be more excited for its release. I know they said something about releasing their dev tools for people to use, so keep an eye out for that.
 
lozz
rank 41
Posted:
Wed Dec 10, 2014 10:39 am
quote : #15
profile : pm
Posts: 1087
Type: PAL
Thanks Willis, I thought I had missed the boat, glad I can still order a copy.
  _________________
It has to start somewhere
It has to start sometime
What better place than here
What better time than now

All hell can't stop us now
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