Evergreen is a game that I’ve been developing off-and-on for quite some time now, and has grown from a simple engine test into a full-scale adventure full of monsters, magic, and more. Official work on the game started way back in 2014 as a way to see if the engine I’d developed in Flash could be ported to and expanded in C++. I had the idea of making a short game inspired by the stories of my ancestors before moving on to one of the dozens of other video game ideas I had running around in my head, and named the project Evergreen to embody the eternal spirit of life I found in the legends I read. As time went on and I started and abandoned project after project, I noticed that I always ended up coming back to Evergreen. Something about the world of Celtic myth kept drawing me in, begging me to expand upon and finish the game that had started so small. So, in early 2018, I finally gave in and hired a concept artist named Ismael Gil to help me flesh out the character ideas I had in my head.

Though the look of the game has changed since then, it’s hard to overstate how important those first pieces of concept are were to the development of the game. Seeing the characters I’d idly imagined given life in art gave me new drive to bring them to life in the engine. What had been a recurring but still ultimately archived project quickly became my main focus. There was one problem, though: I was a college student, and I’d spent a good chunk of the money I had saved from various odd jobs on this concept art. So I waited. I graduated later that year and got a job as a teacher (not exactly lucrative, but better than part-time minimum wage) and have basically put as much time and money as I could spare into the project since. I found a great team, and we’re inching closer to the release of a demo covering the first of four major areas in the game. Things are looking up, and I’m excited to see what lies ahead!