Hello everyone and welcome to the first Elysian Log, a monthly devlog where I will present everything we have achieved this month and announce our goals for the upcoming month! Elysian Eclipse got a lot of attention already and reached 1,668 members on Reddit and 558 on Discord, all in such a short time. I'm really glad that so many people are excited for this project!

Milestone: The Cell Creator

One of the most important aspects of our game will be to create your own creatures, vehicles and buildings to populate the game world with, so of course the first major goal for Elysian Eclipse was to create an ingame editor. With the "cell creator" you can design a small 2D organism, which will act as your avatar in the first stage of the game. You can freely shape the body of your cell with "body structure"-parts and further detail it with "decoration"-parts. Each part can be scaled and colored individually to create patterns and give your cell an unique look. We plan to add lots of parts that will affect the actual gameplay in the future, aswell as many more options to customize these parts.

Milestone: Start of the Cell Stage

Speaking of gameplay, we also made a prototype of cell stage to test movement and physics. While you can't do much in it, besides swimming around and pushing objects, it's great to get to see your creation in motion, influencing the water around it.

Milestone: First Biome - The Valley

Additionally we also worked on procedural planet generation for the later stages of the game. Planets can have a variety of biomes, based on their temperature and atmosphere. To start out we created the valley biome, which features wide planes of grass and huge mountains. To save on development time we used existing assets, like trees meant for more "normal" environments and edited their textures and shader to make them look alien. The atmosphere was inspired a lot by "No Man's Sky" and "The Eternal Cylinder".

What's coming next for Elysian Eclipse

For the second month of development we want to focus on the following:

• Better environment for the cell stage prototype
• An improved editor that allows you to make 3D creatures
• Procedural animated body parts, like tails that react to your movement
• The Elysian Archive, a library where you can store all your creations