Elysian Shadows Revolution #2

[Christuserloeser]

GyroVorbis posted the long awaited update on Elysian Shadow in our forums:

So it has been 8 long months since any of you have either seen or heard from us on Youtube. Despite popular belief, this is not due to the fact that we have given up on Elysian Shadows or were ceasing development. The truth is that we have been working our asses off for 8 months, rewriting an entire engine, and doing more work in the time period than the entire Adventures in Game Development Series combined.

Elysian Shadows Revolution 1 was our experiment at trying to introduce more than just the software aspect of the game development process to the videos. In episode 2, we try to build on this idea and incorporate the entire development process. At the same time, though, we have made a conscious effort to return to our roots established in the Adventures in Game Development Series. ESRev2 has been in the making for 8 months, and tries to appeal to all audiences. Please watch with an open mind.

The engine has been rebuilt from scratch. It has officially reached the point of functionality that the previous one had and then much more. New features displayed in the video include more powerful Lua scripting possibilities and rigid body dynamics. Hopefully future episodes will be focusing more on game design aspects of programming such as the battle system.

LibGyro--our multiplatform back-end--is effectively complete. Elysian Shadows runs on the PC, Dreamcast, and PSP and will continue to do so until its release. LibGyro offers higher level C/++ engine programmers (Kendall) and Lua scripters (Peter) a complete layer of abstraction from the hardware, so that the Elysian Shadows engine may be developed independent of platform.

Yes, Marcel is back on the team. Due to the fact that he seriously rejoined about a week before this video was produced, he has nothing really to show off. He is going to be designing his own Elysian Shadows "toolkit" that will be demoed in videos to come.

Pritam and Kendall both have been contributing greatly to the artistic area. Pritam has been designing and pixeling our starting area and working on various characters. Kendall has been busy concepting and pixeling enemies.

Cypher--our previous sound composer--has rejoined the team. His talent was truly missed, and we have decided to join forces once again. He has since composed several of his finest tracks to date.

The Elysian Shadows team is looking to recruit new blood. We are particularly interested in the areas of pixel art and web development. If you are interested in joining our team, please contact me (or another team member) on Youtube for the forums.

We would like to sincerely thank everybody much for the continued support and faith in our project even though you haven't seen us for all these long months. We are going to be working harder to ensure that the next video will not take this long.

Part 1 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fODMgH31z-E

Part 2 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLQQ8GcCrxE

Part 3 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=begPhY9jLW0

Part 4 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Li0M8XI0lm0

Part 5 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24cUpRVKt2Y

Part 6 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GozStv5WcCc

Part 7 - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHqtUgEKoPg

[GyroVorbis]

Thank you, much appreciated.

[Stryfe]

It's kind of disappointing to hear you needed to rebuild from scratch, because that means the release will be pushed back. But all in all, it's nice to hear that you're moving along with the project, and started a PSP version.

[GyroVorbis]

It's kind of disappointing to hear you needed to rebuild from scratch, because that means the release will be pushed back. But all in all, it's nice to hear that you're moving along with the project, and started a PSP version.

Trust me, the things that the rebuild entail--multiplatform framework, rigid body physics, enhanced Lua integration (and even more back-end stuff)--were all totally worth it. The engine is back to the point that it was now, and development should progress even faster with the new framework.

[Christuserloeser]

I want a DVD along with the game CD.

[GyroVorbis]

I want a DVD along with the game CD.

Yeah, we've been talking about releasing a "special edition" of sorts--complete with every version of the game (DC,PC,PSP) on one disk, a save converter tool (so you can move freely between them), a soundtrack, concept art, programmer's notes, and a DVD containing all of the dev videos.

[Christuserloeser]

Awesome!

[EnigmaticCoder]

Consider me inspired.

With the game I'm doing right now, I'm probably going to move from SDL to OpenGL, so I have to rewrite the rendering system. So I can empathize with you guys having to redo the engine. Overall, it's looking great so far, and the video editing is very professional.

A couple of things I noticed:

- With the song on piano, you end in a cadence, but actually, I read that it's better to tile music just like you tile pixel art. You might want to consider this.
- On part 4 at 2 minutes in, you copy and paste a bunch of code and change indexes into your vector. You could either make this more modular or do this through a loop.

I've been following you guys for some time. It's great to see how far you've gotten. Good luck, and keep kicking ass!

Note: I'm going to post this on your forums too.

[GyroVorbis]

Here was my response at The Chaos Rift:

- On part 4 at 2 minutes in, you copy and paste a bunch of code and change indexes into your vector. You could either make this more modular or do this through a loop.

I was writing every vertex commit out, because the Dreamcast and PSP both submit vertices for quads in different orders. As you can see (I think you could see in the video), the vertex indices weren't incrementing, it was 0,1,3,2. Not only that, but the first and last vertices have different flags that have to be submitted to the GPU.

So yeah, if I really wanted, I could set the x, y, z, and color in an ugly, nonincrementing loop, then handle the individual flags before and after, but what would I really be gaining there?

With the song on piano, you end in a cadence, but actually, I read that it's better to tile music just like you tile pixel art. You might want to consider this.

That's not really fair to say. Kendall was performing her piece, and it made a good ending. It's not like that performance is being recorded and pasted into the game as is. The song was recreated digitally with Reason 4, submitted to Cypher, and now it's done. It loops perfectly (and sounds amazing).

Thanks for the comments about video editing. We spent 3 fucking days doing that, barely released before midnight, and it still wasn't perfect.