For those that do not know, Elysian Shadows is a new, upcoming, role playing game that is being built from scratch, no pre-built engine is being used here. The interesting thing about ES is that it is going to be playable, at the behest of the player, in 2D or 3D- interchangeable on the fly. Some key points to keep in mind about ES is that it is being published by Watermelon Corps (Piers Solar anyone?) and is coming to a plethora of platforms. Soon, Elysian Shadows will be on Kickstarter with stretch goals covering a myriad of platforms.

We had the chance over the weekend to talk with the team behind Elysian Shadows and pulled them away from their work (if the game is late by a few days, blame us) for a quick five question interview. Here were their collective answers. Enjoy.

Retro Gaming Magazine (RGM)– Who are the key team members working on Elysian Shadows?

Elysian Shadows Team (ES)– Falco Girgis is our lead engine and toolkit developer, really driving forward the technical aspects of the game. He just quit his cushy network engineering job to work on Elysian Shadows full-time, and he’s also pursuing his masters in computer engineering with a focus on GPU programming and architecture as he develops ES. Tyler Rogers is our lead gameplay engineer–he is really the middle-man between our musicians and artists and the engine itself–helping to fully realize the creative vision of Elysian Shadows by implementing the crazy things we dream up within the engine. He also just quit a full-time network engineering job to work on ES. Patrick Kowalik and Leandro Tokarevski are our two artists, from Poland and St. Petersberg respectively. Patrick is a home-taught pixel artist, teaching himself the art of oldschool computer graphics specifically to work on Elysian Shadows. Leandro is a classically trained artist, attending an academy of the arts while working on ES. Connor Linning is our team rock star, a self-taught Canadian musician who has produced several heavy metal and survival horror records, and he is also pursuing his bachelor’s in computer science as he produces the sound for Elysian Shadows. Daniel Tindall is our British web and level design master, really helping us to refine our look and presentation on both the web and in-game… He’s been kind of a secret weapon. Eddie is the team baby (and is the only other guy from America). He has been focusing on moving our engine and technology over to the Android, OUYA, and mobile devices while the rest of our programmers focus on gameplay-specific development.

RGM- Why do a role playing game when everyone else in this area is doing much easier shooters or working with game engines of some sort?

ES- We honestly think the role-playing genre is the most powerful form of artistic expression there is. It’s a marriage of art, music, code, and especially writing. An RPG gives you the creative freedom to mold an entire world, storyline, cultures, and characters after your own vision. It gives us endless freedom to create an experience that is meaningful and is intellectually stimulating–and most importantly, it has the greatest potential for establishing an emotional connection between a game and an audience, which we think is truly the ultimate goal for any form of artistic expression.

Along that same vein, we have also found ourselves able to freely incorporate aspects of other games and even non-RPG genres into our own RPG, which I think has been a profoundly rewarding experience. You will immediately notice that we like to emphasize the “3D”-ness of the world of Elysian Shadows, and our players can even jump, climb, and interact with the world in a platforming nature. This has literally allowed us to introduce platforming mechanics and level designs from games like Mario and Megaman to spicen up the RPG genre.

Another aspect of this is our survival horror-influenced dungeons and ruins. Something we really wanted to establish artistically with ES is a strong dichotomy between the lush, beautiful, and vibrant overworld and the dark, gloomy, forboding ruins. We quickly found that with our dynamic lighting engine, we were able to create a sense of fright and tension in some of the environments that we don’t believe has ever been possible with a traditional 2D RPG… For example, in one of our ruins, the player is alone, in the complete darkness, with just a little torch to find his way around, with a multitude of creepy monsters coming after you with full surround sound sound effects–it’s pretty terrifying…. I think Connor, especially, who is a die-hard survival horror fan has really been able to find his creative place with ES and grow attached to a 2D RPG by being able to endow it with some of his survival-horror influences. The project truly is a melting pot of various inspirations.

RGM- What games are you pulling inspiration from for Elysian Shadows?

ES- Like we kind of hinted at previously, we pull inspiration from dozens of games… games that aren’t even remotely related to RPGs. We all come from different countries and different backgrounds–some of us growing up more on the Nintendo side of the fence, some of us playing more Sega. We are all obviously very influenced by games like Chrono Trigger, Secret of Mana, Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, but beyond this, I think each one of us brings our own creative influences to the table. Falco and Tyler both grew up loving the Megaman Legends series, and it has been highly influential on storyline aspects and especially the whole ruins culture and aspect of Elysian Shadows. Connor is a huge fan of games like Resident Evil and Silent Hill. Tyler is a huge fan of Legends of Dragoon and the Castlevania franchise. Our platforming mechanics were inspired by Mario RPG and Alundra, and our battle system was dreamt up as “a marriage between Secret of Mana and God of War.” Even in Connor’s music, you can very prominently hear samples from other games. Our boss theme, for example fuses an epic modern guitar and electronic sound with the classic Sonic 2 drum sounds from Metropolis Zone.

RGM- Recently the lighting engine was shown off, there is a 3D engine involved along with a 2D perspective option. What else can gamers look forward to seeing revealed in Elysian Shadows in the lead up to release?

ES- I think especially right now is a very exciting time for this project. We have always had a very clear creative vision for how we wanted the game to look and feel, but it has been a long road to take that vision from our minds to being a playable experience. We had to develop our own lighting engine, our own physics engine, our own particle engine–and we had to figure out how to make these things work in both 2D and 3D with our unique aesthetic style. It has been a huge challenge technically and creatively, and it has taken us awhile to get it right… It’s not like there are many other games out there attempting to do what we’re doing, so we’ve really had to find our own way creatively.

As far as what’s new, I think we have finally nailed the dynamic shadows, the specular and bump mapping, and especially the dynamic 2D and 3D perspectives. The world is really starting to look “right” in both 2D and 3D, which is something we struggled with for quite awhile. I also think we’re only really now starting to see the full potential of our ambitious audio engine, which is fully positional in 3D space and is completely dynamic–allowing us to fade in new instruments to match the tension of the environments and battles. We have also been able to get the engine up and running on the Android and OUYA, and we even had a team mate build and run the engine on Google Glass in literally half an hour which really impressed all of us… With the additional resources from our publisher and partner-in-crime, Watermelon Corp, and a successful Kickstarter backing, the hardware options become unlimited. We have stretch goals for every modern console and handheld. We also have a stretch goals for a very ambitious, Poke’mon-influenced VMU/Mobile App monster trainer minigame, a cloud-based save system, and even multiplayer modes for ES.

RGM- Being independent can’t be easy, what would you say is the toughest part of creating a game such as Elysian Shadows?

ES- God no, it’s not easy. Not at all. I think the toughest part for us is what we had to go through to start the project. If you decide to make your own engine, you’re already starting off a great deal further behind other indie games who start off with something like Unity for example. It will be much longer before you have anything impressive or demonstrable… and unfortunately consumers do not understand this at all. In their mind, it’s “What the hell is taking you so long? The screenshots look like shit!” which is really rough to take emotionally when you spend 10 straight hours optimizing some back-end memory manager or your renderer. You can also see an interesting side-effect of this with Elysian Shadows. You have the people and news sites who ran into us when we were first starting, who saw screenshots that were far less than impressive, judged us as nothing special, then moved on. Then you have the hardcore fans who stuck around long enough to see the fruits of our labors and really witness our engine and tools come to life to produce the vision we had originally set out to realize creatively. Even now, I think a lot of the media is coming back to give us a second look, because of how far we’ve come in the last few months.

Developing our own tools and engine has not only allowed us to target the platforms we want (Dreamcast and everything under the sun), but it has also allowed us full creative freedom over every aspect of our game. It is 100% optimized to create the game of our dreams. It was worth the time investment absolutely, and it has especially allowed us to develop a talent as engineers and programmers that I feel is completely missed when you use somebody else’s engine. Falco routinely gives graduate-level lectures using the Elysian Shadows engine and has tied several of his projects in with his work on ES! Just our engine itself is a very academically relevant engineering feat.

We would like to thank the Elysian Shadows team for taking the time to do this interview.

Elysian Shadows will be available on Kickstarter on August 1st (there is a handy counter and e-mail alert on the KS page). If you are interested in backing an interesting role playing game that is has grown leaps and bounds, check out Elysian Shadows. It just may be the game you are looking for.



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For more on the Elysian Shadows lighting engine, check here

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