The Age of the Dawnshadow

I worked on a lot of other projects before I ever started on Dawnshadow. Most of these will never see the light of day. Some of those projects were other incarnations of Serinor. I worked on Age of Heroes on and off between 2002 and 2012, and did a bit of work on what is now called Lightfall in 2015.

A non-trivial amount of the tile artwork from Lightfall made it into Dawnshadow. The image above shows how most of those tiles fared over the years, with Lightfall on the left and Dawnshadow on the right. I think the key takeaway for me is that more colors doesn't automatically lead to better art. I'd also forgotten how much I had to desaturate the colors of the original tiles to make the Shadowed Vale feel shadowy.

I've been playing at video game design for 20 years now. I even went back and checked the file dates on the oldest project I have that yet survives (my absolute first endeavor has been lost to the ages.) The files are from December of 1998. I was still in high school then. And it shows.

I've been asked how long I worked on Dawnshadow, and the answer is complicated. I've been cannibalizing half-baked games and stories and worlds for two decades now, but the answer's not twenty years. I started work in earnest on Dawnshadow in March of 2018, but the answer's not nine months either. The absolute oldest notes I have that are specifically for Dawnshadow are a numbered list of all the major plot points of the original Dragon Warrior with their Dawnshadow equivalents listed beside them. The digitized copy was created in August 2016, which is when I transcribed all my design notes out of a black composition pad into OneNote. The answer isn't necessarily 2-3 years though, since I started and dropped and restarted the project several times. But it's probably the best answer I have.

I first conceived of the world of Serinor in late 2002, though it too is based on the bones of worlds that came before it. I have lived with Serinor a very long time, and I have watched it grow and develop alongside the friends who have lived in it with me. But in early 2016, I came to the conclusion that if I was ever going to turn my irregular tinkering into an actual video game, it had to be of a scope and scale that I could manage independently. So I took my familiar world and some familiar characters and set about building my own story around the skeleton of Alefgard.

Now Dawnshadow is scheduled for release on December 21, 2018. However long it took me to get here, I am approaching the final phases of the process. And I will never be ready.