Adventures in Game Development Chapter 21 [Elysian Shadows]
Posted by GyroVorbis on Jan 13, 2014 at 11:19am - 2 Comments
Team Elysian Shadows has just released Adventures in Game Development Chapter 21, a feature-length look at the inside development of Elysian Shadows, a top-down Chrono Trigger-influenced indie RPG for Dreamcast as well as various other platforms.

The video spans almost an hour and a half, and looks at development from the perspectives of the artists, musicians, and software developers. A dynamic lighting engine, 3D audio engine, several pathfinding algorithms, various tilesheets, and two background music tracks are created and demonstrated within the video, complete with the trademarked antics and dysfunction that made the series so appealing to their Youtube audience.

While the Dreamcast build is not actually demonstrated in the video (we broke a few things adding the lighting and shaders), it is mentioned many times. The team jokes about having an optional boss that corrupts your VMU's non ES save files until you beat him, and forcing the player to manually invoke Lua's garbage collector by pushing the R-Trigger to clean up after Tyler's scripts.

Please note that this game is cross-platform at its core, originally came into existence as a Dreamcast-exclusive, and will always be a Dreamcast game in my own heart. We're looking forward to continuing support for our favorite little white box.

Elysian Shadows is an indie 2D RPG being developed for Windows, OSX, Linux, Sony PSP, iOS, and Sega Dreamcast by a rag-tag team of engineers, artists, musicians, and drunks.