The story behind the story of Shadowdawn Genesis has been a serendipitous one.
As many of this journal’s followers may know, the original project Shadowdawn had a very involved thought process behind the characters and story and lead to an enormous amount of detail involving the world of Lexis that both games are set in. In the time since delaying production on Shadowdawn (due only to the fact that I want the game to be done justice that one person alone cannot achieve), I have also been writing a novel set in the world around five centuries later which you may recognize as the website name, Legend of Euterra. Having a deep relationship with the source material, this backstory for Arashi almost lent itself to creation and without the burden of having to make it extraordinary to make it interesting.
As I’m painstakingly drawing each frame of animation for Arashi’s many actions (I do regret the fact I was too young to work professionally on 8 or 16-bit consoles for this very reason as I’d be done by now), I have also been working on finalizing this story. Now as I said, the storyline has been pretty much finalized, but the nuances – exposition, narrative, dialog, that sort of thing – are going to be the difference between what people love and what people find annoying. The RPG genre is not known for following even the wisest conventions; almost the entire spectrum of bad to mediocre writing habits are used even in the “best” games. I want to do the best I can to make people respond to Arashi’s story and personality, along with all those she interacts with, especially Ket, Tristen, and Nephele.
In the end, the tale of Shadowdawn Genesis is going to be quite different than almost all RPGs. I’m not sure how well it’s going to do because… let’s face it, in a genre that everyone claims is overly cliche there’s a reason those cliches are used, and that’s because games that have tried to do things differently tend to fail miserably, even when executed well. Most games that are “different” barely even get recognized by big preview media sites as if they are less valid than their mass-market brothers.
The game’s new animation artwork looks really sharp and you can actually see details on Arashi’s face and hair – it helps that I’m using a bit larger sprite size for the final version. I can’t wait to show you all how things look in motion 🙂 Also, I recently picked up the newest version of Reason, for higher quality music production and have been ramping up the compositions for the final release of the game. I don’t want to post the final version of the main theme because I don’t want people tired of it before the game even comes out, but I’ll post some tracks when the game is closer to done.
