The Indie Game Magazine August 2014 | Issue 40

FEATURED INTERVIEW ELYSIAN SHADOWS When Nostalgia and Next-Gen Collide by Vinny Parisi If you told me back in 1999 that nearly 15 years later, I’d be interviewing a team working on an exciting new RPG for my favorite, yet-tragically-failed console, I’d probably have thrown some Pogs at you, before going back to playing Sonic Adventure. But the future is full of surprises. One such surprise is the intriguing Elysian Shadows project, in development from the aptly named Team Elysian Shadows. Their work looks to set a new standard for both pixel art and 2D RPG games. To find out how they plan to accomplish such a feat, I chatted with the entire team about everything from 3D positional sound, to Skies of Arcadia. (Whew, I just got chills. Man, I love the Dreamcast!) Indie Game Magazine: So I guess we should probably get the obvious question out of the way first: What made you decide to develop a version of Elysian Shadows for the Sega Dreamcast? Team Elysian Shadows: Haha, that’s always the first question we get. The original Elysian Shadows actually began as a Dreamcast-exclusive engine being developed by a 17 year-old Falco Girgis in his parents’ attic. Falco had received his first Dreamcast a few years before, and he often says the Dreamcast was the “true” Next-Gen console of the time: All the PS2 ports looked better on Dreamcast, it had online capabilities, it had VGA support, it had an amazing line-up, and it even had a freaking controller and screen built into its memory cards—it had everything the other “next-gen” consoles didn’t have. He soon stumbled upon a small, but closeknit community of hobbyist hackers and developers, who were developing their own home-brew games and emulators for the console. Inspired by their passion and conviction, and his own loyalty to the console, Falco taught himself C programming from his parents’ attic, and set out to create his own Dreamcast game. He was rendering polygons on the console before he was even able to render a sprite on a PC. IGM: How long has the team been working on the game? Has the idea changed much since the initial development? TES: If you count the entire duration, from a young, inexperienced Falco and friends dreaming up the storyline concept all the way to where we are now, our development has spanned nearly 7 years. This team started off as a group of kids with a dream. Kids who would eventually teach themselves how to code, create art, and compose music. Kids who would eventually get engineering degrees, attend art academies, and produce records of their own. Much of this development time was just learning our own respective trades, and the initial R&D time required to create the proprietary engin

The Indie Game Magazine August 2014 | Issue 40 | Page 14