God, I have dreaded making this update for so long... Not because I haven't been slaving away on this game day and night, abusing prescription amphetamines to stay awake and focused, losing sleep and slowly my sanity, but because I just wasn't 100% satisfied with the content we would be posting for the update. My perfectionism coupled with issues internal to our team causing levels to not be as developed as I would have liked them to be is what has caused such a gigantic delay in Kickstarter updates... We have always been 100% transparent with our supporters in the past, constantly posting behind-the-scenes YouTube updates, and posting on social media daily, but suddenly I lost the courage to show the "real" game development once we accepted money from Kickstarter. I didn't want to show anything shy of perfect... But the truth is that sometimes game development is ugly and highly inconsistent. Some weeks you accomplish everything you ever dreamed and more, and some weeks you get stuck and barely finish a thing. It's the nature of engineering and creative work in general, and I swear from here forward to show the true, unadulterated, uncensored, behind-the-scenes progress.
First and foremost, all team issues have been resolved. We let some people go, and we gained some people. Every person who is currently on the team is now living underneath the same roof in our game development studio. We flew our pixel artist out from Poland to live with us for the next 6 months, and my best friend, Cole, flew out from Salt Lake City, Utah to join us as a level designer and video producer for our Youtube series, Adventures in Game Development. We've made more progress in the last week living together than we ever made as a remote team dispersed around the planet trying to communicate on Skype daily.
4 dudes in one cramped lil' room. Welcome to dev paradise.
4 dudes in one cramped lil' room. Welcome to dev paradise.
Buried a 300ft ethernet cable to get the studio and my home on the same LAN... nearly killed us.
Buried a 300ft ethernet cable to get the studio and my home on the same LAN... nearly killed us.
The engine and pixel art have both progressed insane amounts, completely unhindered since the last update. The engine, toolkit, and SDK are easily nearing the point where we could begin allowing our beta backers to begin messing with it and breaking things. We have even laid the infrastructure for implementing bug reporting, feature requests, and issue tracking inside the Toolkit itself for our beta backers. Since the entire team is using ESTk daily for content creation to produce Elysian Shadows itself, a large portion of my time has been spent polishing and adding new features to the Toolkit to aide in their day-to-day tasks.
See, look how robust our software is!
See, look how robust our software is!
Dynamic lighting editor, and an entire full-fledged Lua debugging environment and IDE. Modify any variable in the entire game through Lua at run-time with the SDK.
Dynamic lighting editor, and an entire full-fledged Lua debugging environment and IDE. Modify any variable in the entire game through Lua at run-time with the SDK.
Toggle on and off dynamic lighting, set compatibility mode and screen resolutions for Dreamcast and mobile devices.
Toggle on and off dynamic lighting, set compatibility mode and screen resolutions for Dreamcast and mobile devices.
You think you're done with dynamic lights, then Patrick starts using them with flips and rotations, different plane levels, and different perspectives... This is the "dev-notebook" add-on.
You think you're done with dynamic lights, then Patrick starts using them with flips and rotations, different plane levels, and different perspectives... This is the "dev-notebook" add-on.
Falco GPGPU accelerated the entire physics engine for his masters thesis work. You can now assign GPUs in ESTk for rendering and physics/collision processing.
Falco GPGPU accelerated the entire physics engine for his masters thesis work. You can now assign GPUs in ESTk for rendering and physics/collision processing.
Totally haven't had too much coffee today...
Totally haven't had too much coffee today...
In-Game apology to my girlfriend for working so much and never going to bed with her.
In-Game apology to my girlfriend for working so much and never going to bed with her.
Waterfall in the Loren Forest
Waterfall in the Loren Forest
Town outskirts raw map, no dynamic lighting.
Town outskirts raw map, no dynamic lighting.
Playing with Entities and Waterfall particle effects. It's all 100% in-game.
Playing with Entities and Waterfall particle effects. It's all 100% in-game.
Submitting a bug report will create a ticket for me on our server, automatically attaching all of your debug logs and stack trace... Oh, and ESTk will restart itself and restore the previous state.
Submitting a bug report will create a ticket for me on our server, automatically attaching all of your debug logs and stack trace... Oh, and ESTk will restart itself and restore the previous state.
Mutilating my Dreamcast to be powered on and off by a Beaglebone which will run the new build and execute unit tests every time we change the code on the GitLab server.
Mutilating my Dreamcast to be powered on and off by a Beaglebone which will run the new build and execute unit tests every time we change the code on the GitLab server.
We have complete graphics and tilesheets for MANY biomes for Elysian Shadows, as pixel art has been blazing along. Part of the problem has been the lack of level design progress with these tiles, so poor Patrick hasn't been able to see much feedback from his blood and sweat. Now that he's living with us, he's also taken on the role of level designer along with Cole to pick up the slack that was left in those areas.
Lava biome
Lava biome
Ugly, distorted 3D perspective is gone. Dynamic lighting looks great in dark dungeons.
Ugly, distorted 3D perspective is gone. Dynamic lighting looks great in dark dungeons.
Polytechnica Cathedral (no dynamic lighting yet)
Polytechnica Cathedral (no dynamic lighting yet)
Skeleton-based animation engine implemented... Bosses and lots of polygons
Skeleton-based animation engine implemented... Bosses and lots of polygons
https://vine.co/v/OEPILL5wtV9 https://vine.co/v/O9hALgDOWmW https://vine.co/v/OEluTXLDQIAAs far as updates go, we have addressed this problem in a variety of ways. In addition to daily social media updates, each one of us will be streaming our daily work on Twitch on Monday-Thursday. Monday will be me (Falco Girgis) working on the engine and toolkit, Tuesday will be Patrick doing pixel art and level design, Wednesday will be Tyler doing Lua scripting and gameplay, and Thursday will be Cole doing level design and probably some video production. We've also rebooted our "Adventures in Game Development" series, and we are hoping to release chapters now every weekend. Along with these weekly video updates will be a Kickstarter update like this one with the video and a summary of the week's progress.
Mobs for the Loren Forest
Mobs for the Loren Forest
Figured out a new way to cast dynamic shadows from flat 2D objects to make them look as through they have depth!
Figured out a new way to cast dynamic shadows from flat 2D objects to make them look as through they have depth!
Here's Adventures in Game Development Chapter 28 from this week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X527iBbYlCkIf any of you have any questions, complaints, concerns, or anything of the sort, you can catch us on Twitch four days a week and voice your opinions. We can walk you through anything or discuss our timelines and agenda with you. We have already done that on Skype with quite a few of you, and I don't think there was any pissed off doubter who left the Skype call not being completely optimistic and excited for the project. We deeply apologize for the lack of Kickstarter updates, and we assure you that things have already changed on our end with regards to this, and the new team will stop at nothing to complete this game.