User:Pete Cartier/sandbox

Elysian Shadows is an upcoming homebrew 2D/3D role-playing game for Sega Dreamcast, Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS, Android, and Ouya. It is being marketed as a "Next Generation" 2D RPG, as it fuses aspects of 16-bit era console RPGs with modern advanced rendering techniques, dynamic 2D and 3D perspectives, positional and dynamic audio, rigid body physics, and particle simulators. The game is best-known as the focus of the "Adventures in Game Development" YouTube webseries, where fans have been given a behind-the-scenes look at the development of Elysian Shadows since its inception in 2007. The team is currently promoting the game in preparation for a Kickstarter crowd-sourcing campaign at the end of Summer 2014.

Setting
Limited information has been revealed regarding the storyline of Elysian Shadows, although the developers have been vocal in insisting that the game was originally conceived as a storyline concept and that plot and character progression would be the central focus of the RPG.

World and Story
Elysian Shadows takes place in a land known as Asphodel, playing host to a diverse set of biomes, including forests, caves, mountains, jungles, plains, tundra, and a variety of ancient ruins. The societies of Asphodel are caught in constant conflict between magic and technology, as the religious sects have been bestowed with the gifts of magic, while the intellectual sects are forced to turn to science and technology in their day-to-day lives. Upon uncovering a long-lost artifact in an ancient ruin, players find themselves thrust into the middle of this rising conflict to maintain the status quo.

In addition to a lush overworld, Asphodel also plays host to a variety of different underground ruins scattered about the lands. These ruins are excavated by "diggers" and scholars seeking to uncover their ancient secrets and hidden treasures. While the backstory of these ruins has not yet been revealed, they will play a major role in the plot progression of Elysian Shadows.

Various pieces of concept art for the ruins and their inhabitants have been posted by the team to social media sites, and the developers have announced during interviews that at least one of these ruins will be survival-horror themed, inspired by Resident Evil and Ocarina of Time's Shadow Temple.

Main characters
While the complete party has never officially been revealed, various party members have been released at one point or another through episodes of "Adventures in Game Development," or on the team's official social media pages.


 * Julien is the main protagonist of Elysian Shadows. He is revealed to be a digger living in Loren, uncovering artifacts for the local museum. His name was reportedly inspired by the team's favorite band, Julien-K.
 * Eryn is the female protagonist of Elysian Shadows. She also lives in Loren and runs the local museum, studying ancient artifacts with her father. She has been said to be a strong female lead, inspired by Lucca of Chrono Trigger and Lara Croft of Tomb Raider.
 * Angel (name not known) has been teased as a third party member during an episode of Adventures in Game Development. Nothing has been revealed of her backstory, but her sprite has been shown displaying a prominent pair of wings.

Visuals
Graphically, Elysian Shadows uses mostly pixel art in the style of 16-bit RPGs, with slightly higher resolutions. The team has cited console RPGs such as Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, and Phantasy Star as artistic inspiration; however, the unlike other games of the genre, Elysian Shadows features advanced lighting techniques such as shadow mapping, normal mapping, and specular highlighting. The environments are also rendered in full 3D, which allows the game to dynamically change between 2D orthographic and 3D perspectives during cutscenes or other in-game events.

According to the official website, the team's mission for the visuals of ES is

""[..] 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.""

- Elysian Shadows Team

Audio
Similar to the graphical style, the audio of Elysian Shadows is also a fusion of old and new. Background music dynamically changes in intensity to match the player's environment, and sound effects are positional, in full 3D. The soundtrack uses vintage electronic music hardware with modern synthesizer software, resulting in songs with a distinct 16-bit chiptune-style mixed with a variety of instruments, choirs, and electronic sounds. In his blog posts and during Adventures in Game Development, composer Connor Linning has sampled various beats and sounds from popular Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo games, including Sonic the Hedgehog, Harvest Moon, and Donkey Kong Country.

Gameplay
Elysian Shadows' gameplay has drawn influence from a wide variety of games, many of which aren't even RPGs. The RPG aspects of Elysian Shadows have been said to be primarily inspired by 16-bit Squaresoft, Enix, and Sega RPGs, while the adventure aspects of the game have been primarily influenced by the Legend of Zelda series, with an emphasis on environmental interaction and rewarding overworld exploration. Additionally, the game includes platformer gameplay mechanics such as dashing and jumping not usually found in top-down RPGs. The team believes these mechanics will open exploration up into the third dimension and will make combat more interesting, citing the speed and agility of the Megaman X series. The team has referred to the battle engine as a marriage between the Secret of Mana and the God of War series.

During a podcast interview, the team mentioned that the recurring theme of scattered underground ruins in the world of Asphodel was inspired by the Megaman Legends series, and that their composer's primary source of inspiration comes from the survival horror genre and franchises like Resident Evil and Silent Hill.

Development
Development on Elysian Shadows is widely regarded to have started Oct 7, 2007, as this is when the first Chapter of the "Adventures in Game Development" series was uploaded to YouTube. Going by date, the game has been in development for almost 7 years, and this number is often cited by critics regarding the game's lengthy development cycle. The team has publically dismissed the "7 year" estimate during interviews, as it is claimed that they were just kids in their parents' attics at the time, with no development experience, and much of the time has been spent growing into their roles as game developers. In addition to time spent on the actual game, the team also cites time spent developing their own engine, tools, and multiplatform library, further bloating this figure. They have also taken several extended breaks throughout development, as many of their members are attending graduate school and work full-time jobs.

Sega Dreamcast Support
Elysian Shadows began as an an RPG exclusively for the Sega Dreamcast, but the engine was quickly ported to many more platforms as the Adventures in Game Development YouTube series rose in popularity. With the inclusion of advanced shading techniques in Elysian Shadows' visuals, the team has stated many times that the game will be pushing the console to its limits. The limited resources on the Dreamcast have often been the target of many jokes throughout the Adventures in Game Development series, as the team has stated that the development builds frequently run out of texture memory. They have also joked that players may have to manually free memory resources allocated to scripts when the framerate drops.

While the Sega Dreamcast is no longer the sole-focus of the Elysian Shadows project, the lead engine developer, Falco Girgis, insists that Elysian Shadows continues to support the aging console, calling it his "quest" to release a game for the platform he grew up developing for.

Technology
The majority of the technology behind Elysian Shadows has been developed in-house by the team, including the Engine, Toolkit, and platform-independent driver back-end.

ESGamma
ESGamma is the proprietary engine developed in-house to power Elysian Shadows. It is written in C++11 and links against the LibGyro API to achieve platform independence. The engine boasts full 3D dynamic lighting, 2D and 3D dynamic cameras, 2D rigid-body physics, advanced particle effects, bump and specular maps, and shadow mapping. It is fully extensible through the Lua scripting language, which allows the Elysian Shadows team to create and script custom contents and events for the world of Elysian Shadows in a manner similar to Behavior Scripts in the Unity3D engine.

ESToolkit
ESToolkit or "ESTk" is a 2D level editing and creation tool developed by the Elysian Shadows team to create the environments for Elysian Shadows. It is developed in C++11 with the Qt framework and is said to share a significant amount of code with ESGamma. ESTk offers advanced editing features for developing environments using tilesheets. It also contains an entity/component editor that was influenced by the Unity3D editor. One of its most well-known features is the ability to give flat tiles "elevation" information within the levels, allowing the team to create 3D levels for Elysian Shadows using only 2D assets.

LibGyro
LibGyro is a platform-independent multimedia API written in C, providing interfaces for rendering, device input, audio, asset management, linear algebra, and system management. These interfaces are implemented as statically-linked libraries on various platforms, including Sega Dreamcast, Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS, Android, Ouya, which are then linked against the ESGamma engine, allowing it to remain truly platform-independent through compile-time and link-time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymorphism_(computer_science)|polymorphism). It has been demonstrated at various times throughout the "Adventures in Game Development" series that the linear algebra library implementation for at least the x86 and Sega Dreamcast platforms are assembly-optimized to take advantage of SIMD instructions for vector and matrix processing. LibGyro has enabled the Elysian Shadows team to easily move the game to various platforms without ever requiring engine rewrites or modifications.

Adventures in Game Development
"Adventures in Game Development" is an ongoing YouTube video blog series uploaded to GyroVorbis's Channel, giving viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the life of indie game developers, by chronicling the development of the Elysian Shadows 2D RPG from start to finish. The majority of the videos are filmed in the style of a reality television series, with limited post-production and editing effects, and a raw, uncut presentation. The series is well-known for its adult humor, caffeine abuse, lack of sleep, and dysfunctional antics. Despite this fact, many of the videos dive into great technical detail and the series if viewed by many as being partially educational.

While the series has historically been mostly programming-oriented, the latest Chapters attempt to follow all aspects of game development, including coding, art, music, and design.

Accidental Success
While the series has been highly successful as a game development video blog on YouTube, with over 9k subscribers as of May 2014, the team has admitted that this success was purely accidental in a recent podcast interview. Chapters 1-3 were apparently recorded with the purpose of being end-game unlockable content, inspired by the developer videos at the end of God of War. The team was shocked to find a positive reaction to the original videos on YouTube, and they decided to continue documenting their development progress on YouTube, transforming the series into a video blog.

Chapter Summaries
Adventures in Game Development is released periodically as a series of "Chapters," with "Adventures in Game Development Chapter 25" being the latest release.

Team
While the team roster has changed throughout the years, the current line-up has been present for most of the game's development and rise in popularity.


 * Falco Girgis - Lead Engine/Toolkit Developer
 * Tyler Rogiers - Lead Gameplay Engineer
 * Daniel Tindall - Web Development/Level Design
 * Connor Linning - Composer
 * Patrick Kowalik - Lead Pixel Artist
 * Leandro Tokarevski - Pixel Artist
 * Brandon Morgon - Pixel Artist
 * Eddie Ringle - Mobile Developer