Elysian Shadows Kickstarter Live NOW!

[mankrip]

Yes, we're in good terms. Life was rough for both of us so I understand how things can get abrasive sometimes. I'm also difficult to deal with from time to time (as many people here know).

[BlueCrab]

Elysian Shadows fan Discord channel https://discord.gg/kpTY6w

Just wanted to point out that the Discord invite there seems to be invalid.

[GyroVorbis]

Elysian Shadows fan Discord channel https://discord.gg/kpTY6w

Just wanted to point out that the Discord invite there seems to be invalid.

Whoops! Thanks so much... I forgot the invites expire if you don't modify them.... shows how new I am to discord.

[law56ker]

Countdown to 2019....

[law56ker]

Any updates after 2 months? thanks

[law56ker]

Three is magic

[radgegames]

I noticed that there hasn't been an update on the website for almost a year now, so I went to the social media accounts and I have to say even after I read this entire thread I still think this project is glorious. Don't get me wrong I can understand the frustration with development concerning the fact the game is WAY late and some of the reactions were probably not the most professional but after watching the last dev a thon and really listening to GyroVorbis explain the logic behind ESTK and the level of detail they are seeking and the number of ways they are outperforming unity I really do hope development finishes with this project as a whole and I hope things go well for the dev team in their future projects. Now I'm not a backer for the project but I think the fact the developers are still heavily working on this or at least seem to be just from their passion alone really says something and personally, I'd probably still be down to buy the game once it releases.

[law56ker]

[Nico0020]

Countdown to 2019....

Countdown to 2020!

At this point Falco, why not release what you have to the community and call it a day? That wouldn't stop you from working on your game in your spare time as a hobby, but at least the backers who wanted your toolkit would get it and could make their own projects with it.

[|darc|]

Countdown to 2019....

Countdown to 2020!

At this point Falco, why not release what you have to the community and call it a day? That wouldn't stop you from working on your game in your spare time as a hobby, but at least the backers who wanted your toolkit would get it and could make their own projects with it.

Cause he's still working on it? I mean, I see him talk about it in the Discord regularly.

No idea if he's making actual real progress or if things are just going around in circles like vaporware though.

[law56ker]

can't wait for my pressed dreamcast disc, well hopefully my dreamcast still works

[I.M. Weasel]

Its been 6 years and you havent put out anything yet??? That $$$ could have paid you a full time salary for 7 years or a team for 1 year to actually produce this thing.

If I hired a company to make me a game for that amount it would be out in the year, even on the shitty OG katana devkit.

You dont have depression or whatever. You're a sociopath, scam artist, and a professional baby. You stole peoples money and you probably deserve jailtime for fraud.

[Nico0020]

Its been 6 years and you havent put out anything yet??? That $$$ could have paid you a full time salary for 7 years or a team for 1 year to actually produce this thing.

If I hired a company to make me a game for that amount it would be out in the year, even on the shitty OG katana devkit.

You dont have depression or whatever. You're a sociopath, scam artist, and a professional baby. You stole peoples money and you probably deserve jailtime for fraud.

Yea. Him and his whole project were a failure. Any decent person would have come forward and said "Sorry everyone, we tried our best but we just couldn't do it. Thank you for all your support and patience," followed by releasing everything they have made up until this point to try and satisfy some of their backers. There are a lot of honest, generous and hardworking devs in the Dreamcast scene these days, and Falco is definitely not one of them. No one would have faulted him for failing to produce a game if he was honest, upfront and humble about everything. Plenty of indie games and kickstarters fail. But instead, he attacked anyone who dared question the status or quality of the project, followed by radio silence on all of the game’s sites and social media.

I don't like to just shit on people, but I just don't care anymore. I tried to understand him or what happened with his team and game, but it just seems like he is a toxic individual and drives everyone away he works with. He claims he takes full responsibility while simultaneously blaming everyone. That kind of arrogant and narcissistic attitude is what turned the community against him. I'm not missing my $60, but I know there are many others that gave him a LOT more of their money and could probably use it right about now.

[I.M. Weasel]

I came back and posted this after I read about this in another forum i go to; and it turned out to be true that diddly has been released. I remember when this thing first started, and now to see that its been 8 years and to see the INSANE amount of money they raised without anything happening. I find it kind of offensive that we helped release this upon the public at large by fostering him and his behaviour.

8 years and 750k or 800k and not a single game? That is just unfathomable

[|darc|]

How are you coming up with that $750K and $800K figure?

[I.M. Weasel]

Huh, the screenshot i saw listed thats what the kickstarter made. I guess that was incorrect - looking at the ks page. Well, that completely de-legimatizes some of things i said. what a mess

[|darc|]

I think you might have been looking at the stretch goals chart for added features if the Kickstarter made it over its initial funding. It goes up to $800K, but the Kickstarter made it to $185K.

I have no insight to how the money was spent or as to where it went, but it was funded in August 2014 and was supposed to ship December 2015.
And it wasn't just a DC game, it was also funded for iOS, Android, PC, Mac, and Linux.
$185K from Kickstarter, I don't know how much they made outside of Kickstarter, let's assume $20K
Plus Ouya matched the KS money if they also worked on an Ouya build. So all in all, if we assume they had $400K, that's $400K to pay 7 team members' salaries for a year to build a game that runs on 7 platforms. That's an average $43K annual salary to do that, and that's assuming that the salaries are the only expense the project would ever have, which is definitely not the case as they had to budget money for physical items and other expenses. [according to falco earlier in the thread, this was not how the payouts worked, so this is an average]

It's easy in retrospect to say you could throw that much money at someone and give them a Katana SDK and $400K and have them pump out a DC game in a year. But that's not what they promised and that's not what people pledged for.
You can't just wave a magic wand and convert all the time spent to make 15% of a game on 7 platforms and convert that to 105% of a Dreamcast game and ship it.

It was way too ambitious because Falco thought he could do anything and everything (that should be obvious in retrospect given that his ADHD brain took a detour writing an entire VMU emulator for this game after it failed to ship on time)
Because it was way too ambitious, it was inevitable that it wouldn't ship on time.
Because it wouldn't ship on time, it was inevitable that once the money dried up and it wasn't shipped yet, the team would fall apart.
So I'm not surprised things collapsed by 2017.

None of this is to absolve Falco of blame. He is responsible for the project's failures.
On top of that, like I said before, he is fucking terrible at public relations, I saw that firsthand discussing with him in private how to handle Wikipedia's article for Elysian Shadows, which he did not take my advice on and he and his publicist ended up getting it deleted and salted for a year.

From my perspective it's started a stupid vicious cycle where everyone dogpiles on him, which makes him more averse to just being straight with everyone, which makes him look even less trustworthy, which makes everyone dogpile on him more.

I mean, that's still his fault in the end, and he may well have misspent some/a lot of the money, I don't know, but I also don't see any concrete proof that the whole project was a fraud and he just wanted to pocket the money and ride off into the sunset or that he deserves to be in prison.

By the way, I said earlier in this thread in 2018 that I believed the game is still being worked on, and I can still say in the last 6 months I've seen proof of that firsthand in more than one way. I also have partial access to the ES private gitlab server.
I'm not saying it will be finished or released, ever, just that if this was all a con job, it was a ridiculously long con job for an audience of 1.

[cube_b3]

Just have to say that I was responsible for the Wikipedia page.
It was my responsibility and he jumped ahead of me, finished the article independently.
As we all know Wikipedia requires articles to be constructed around references and back in the day, I was using my DCS, Sega Addicts, Sega Bits and Sega Nerds channels to post said articles. I had just completed the DCS entry and he couldn't wait for the rest of the media plan to be executed as he had finished the whole article. I conceded and we posted the article prematurely. Rarely does a client ask you to do something and does it themselves. It was a first and last. Positives and negatives. I've not had a client like him.

That said, as soon as the Kickstarter went live and we executed our media plan. I was able to successfully have the article live.
I can also attest it was not a conjob, it was just a managerial fail.
Wish him the best though.