Elysian Shadows - Development Update

The first update in a very long time has been posted on the Elysian Shadows Kickstarter page.

God, I have dreaded making this update for so long… Not because I haven't been slaving away on this game day and night, abusing prescription amphetamines to stay awake and focused, losing sleep and slowly my sanity, but because I just wasn't 100% satisfied with the content we would be posting for the update. My perfectionism coupled with issues internal to our team causing levels to not be as developed as I would have liked them to be is what has caused such a gigantic delay in Kickstarter updates…

We have always been 100% transparent with our supporters in the past, constantly posting behind-the-scenes YouTube updates, and posting on social media daily, but suddenly I lost the courage to show the "real" game development once we accepted money from Kickstarter. I didn't want to show anything shy of perfect… But the truth is that sometimes game development is ugly and highly inconsistent. Some weeks you accomplish everything you ever dreamed and more, and some weeks you get stuck and barely finish a thing. It's the nature of engineering and creative work in general, and I swear from here forward to show the true, unadulterated, uncensored, behind-the-scenes progress.

One dev explains in the comments that things are progressing at a good speed now:

I was waiting for that question...

It's honestly hard to say right now. We were behind schedule from lack of level progress and our musician quitting, but now that we're all living under the same roof working together 12 hours a day (which we hadn't originally planned for), we're rapidly catching back up on everything... It'll be close.

If we don't make it by December, we have several options, and we will most likely wind up polling you guys. We could release things incrementally in chapters to let you guys start playing in December (and obviously you get the rest of the chapters for free, since you did pay for a complete game), or we could wait to release it all at once. At very least the beta backers should be well into play testing and playing through some serious content, so their opinions on the matter if that time should ever come would be more than welcome.

Also different platforms may take longer to complete than others. For example, if we screw something up on Steam or mobile platforms, we could easily push an update to fix it... If we screw something up on the Dreamcast, you have a coaster, so we want to make damn sure everything is solid before we press that to disc. Obviously if the Dreamcast version is released later than the other versions, we don't want to screw the DC backers over, so they will be able to play some form of digital copy in the meantime (and I will work on a save-file converter).

We also promised more than just Elysian Shadows itself as well. ESTk and our tools should definitely be very mature by that time, and there's almost no way they will not make the December release. We're actually very, very close to opening that up to beta backers already.

Anyway, this is all up in the air right now. I just want to be completely honest with regards to the fact that it could go either way right now and let you all know that we will do anything possible to make it right in case this does happen. If we do wind up being late, you will all know 100% exactly why between the weekly updates and Adventures in Game Development videos. You will know it will be for a good reason and that we are working our asses off. :)

Thanks Couch!