Chronicles of Elyria dev again recaps backend work, saying ‘the core platform is nearing completion’

By Jason Junior On Apr 14, 2023

We now return you to your regularly scheduled recap of whatever the heck is happening with Chronicles of Elyria, which… still doesn’t appear to be all that much.

Soulbound’s Jeromy Walsh says that since the last update, he’s finished the “Spatial Partitioning System” part of the server-side game engine and spent time working on a developer visualizer tool. The former sounds like a system constantly running global checks on the game simulation. Walsh includes no less than six videos on this concept, in case you’re the rare server engineer who needs to know and doesn’t yet, and he also addresses why he’s devoting time to building his own visualizer instead of using an existing one as included in Unity (he says it’s because the Soulborn engine is “client agnostic”).

Perhaps recognizing that all of this is very far from what gamers actually Kickstarted back in 2016 (never mind from the spinoff game he keeps centering), he does note that he’s nearing the end of all these back-end projects and will soon be moving on to the mechanical bits of the game.

“These are exciting times! While we’ve had visualizers in the past, this new one is significantly more performant, engine-agnostic, and is here to stay. Likewise, while we’ve had spatial partitioning and physics before, they were always client-side authoritative. Now we’re finally entirely server-side authoritative. There’s still more work, but the core platform is nearing completion, as is the core game engine. After that, it’s just game mechanics and more game mechanics.”

The game’s subreddit, which admittedly is extremely skeptical about the project, isn’t impressed. But then again, those folks have been waiting seven years, put in millions of dollars, and weathered the drama and lawsuits, so they’re entitled to that.

Chronicles of Elyria, Kickstarted in 2016, stunned MMO gamers in 2020 by announcing it was out of money, had laid off the devs, had closed Soulbound Studio, and had ended development on the game. Though CEO Jeromy Walsh later retracted much of that and said the game was still in production with volunteer staff, the gamers who’d backed it for $14M+ in crowdfunds pressed on with a lawsuit that was dismissed in 2022. Since 2021, the revivified but ensmallened team has focused on spinoff game Kingdoms of Elyria.