Raylib Sponsorship, New Courses, and Project Updates

Elega Corporation Now Proudly Sponsors Raylib: A Library to Enjoy Videogames Programming

I am very happy to report that Elega Corp now regularly provides sponsorship funds for Raylib, which has in recent years become a fairly well known game development library. Increasingly, Raylib is used for real, substantially sized indie projects in addition to being a popular pick in educational circles for videogame programming. For Elega, I've found it to be incredibly capable of handling the demands of our needs and serving as a platform on which we can build our Aperture game engine that indeed uses Raylib's handling for OpenGL 2D sprite rendering, audio playback, and a number of other critical facets.

Check out Raylib at its website, Raylib.com, to find Elega Corp listed under its Gold Sponsors! We look forward to continuing to find ways to support the Raylib project as we continue to expand our custom software on top of Raylib as a foundation.

Rust: Unsafe Rust and Compile-time Checks

To catch you up on our latest endeavors in Pluralsight, it's important to mention that we released Rust: Unsafe Rust and Compile-time Checks, a course that teaches the fundamentals of unsafe Rust, which is comprised of much of the material you'd learn from the Rustinomicon for those who are seeking to understand the more advanced and lower level features of the Rust language. I've been using Rust regularly for all of our code here at Elega Corp, including the ongoing work we've been doing on Kalling Kingdom, the current website as of this writing, production-level work within the energy industry for DevOps tooling, and more.

This course will teach learners about the unsafe keyword within Rust, what it means, how to ensure memory safety even when having to work with things like FFI (foreign function interfaces), and should give those who are exploring the language a much better foundation to begin exploring manipulation of raw pointers for improving the performance where needed in their code.

Salesforce: Sales and Service Overview

We also released Salesforce: Sales and Service Overview, the follow-up course to Salesforce: Foundations for New Users, which is focused on teaching *business professionals* about what Salesforce is, how it's used, and how it applies to their day-to-day work, especially when working with their IT department on customizations or special integrations with off-the-shelf services or products.

This course in particular explores the standard clouds behind Salesforce for sales and service, including the objects within Salesforce that are associated with those, and how Salesforce intends for users to work with out-of-the-box functionality on the Salesforce platform.

Project Status Catch-Up: Kalling Kingdom

Kalling Kingdom has been paused lately as I've been dealing with some personal health issues that require my attention. It turns out that sitting at a desk for 8 hours a day without properly exercising or paying close attention to your diet eventually catches up with you. So, I've been taking some time to work on my health, and that work will likely continue as I've let some things decay a bit too much while putting in all these hours of work. Instead of working myself to death, I've had to make the tough decision of focusing on my day job role as a Salesforce Architect, producing the new Pluralsight courses, and looking after my family and health. That hasn't left much time to working on Kalling Kingdom and the new game engine, unfortunately, but I expect the recent delay to be a temporary situation.

As I look strongly after the right decisions to improve my health, I expect to eventually be able to return to work on both the new game engine and finishing Kalling Kingdom as it's intended, including both the initial port out of the Unity engine (which is more than halfway done!) and finishing the game in earnest with its full set of features as I have envisioned (and documented on a work board of to-do items).

Project Status Catch-Up: Other Projects!

Here on the blog, I've talked about a number of other things that have been rattling around the floor within Elega Corporation now for a couple of years and some of these things were put on the backburner as I turned my attention to things that will ensure steady revenue for the business and keep us walking toward next steps in a somewhat stable way. Let's go through a quick runthrough of those things now, as I think there's a lot of them that, if you've been keeping up, came and went with their mentions without much updating.

Elega Corporation store - We still intend to create an Elega Corp online store that will use our own custom web system that allows for users to purchase games, books, and even physical goods from us. This has been intended as a project since 2023 and hasn't made serious headway. However, it's secondary given that we're still working on putting together a business that focuses more on a direct relationship with customers instead of going through third-party platforms (admittedly, like Pluralsight or YouTube). I hope to have more updates on the store after we finish Kalling Kingdom and are looking to expand its retail purchase options.

An Elega operating system, breadboard CPU - This is a research project that was originally announced back in mid-2019. Guess what else was announced back then? Building a 2D game engine and moving toward getting away from the Unity engine! So, it turns out, that even before we began working on the Aperture game engine, which is what we're now building the new version of Kalling Kingdom in, there was this thought back then of not relying on other game engines. Still, the operating system and breadboard CPU projects as research projects - these are unquestionably delayed, perhaps until further notice.

Age of Nomads - a paleolithic real-time strategy game - We announced that Age of Nomads was being put on an indefinite hiatus a while back, and the reasons for this have to do with very bad, very hard-to-recover-from design decisions that were made in the original code. This was Elega Corporation's first significant game development project, and I lacked a lot of experience back then. It's not impossible that we may revisit this project again in the future but when we do: it will likely be completely redone. I intend to eventually do a retrospective on the original version of it for the Elega Corporation YouTube channel but am not sure when that video will inevitably be released.

3D racing game demo - This has also been on the backburner behind other priorities that have come up as we have entered a remarkably unusual economic environment in which I've needed to focus on more immediate ways that Elega can earn funds and maintain stability! However, I haven't forgotten about this one, and it is planned to be produced in Unreal Engine. Our timeline has been greatly delayed due to everything that has occurred since originally mentioning it, but it's still on the list, ranked at the same priority.

Elegant Dev Storytime in the Norwegian (Bokmal) language - Subtitles for the original episodes of Elegant Dev Storytime as well as originally episodes with spoken Norwegian audio in them are still planned for the future. This is still considered an active project within the corporation and on the to-do list! Kalling Kingdom language options, including Norwegian, rank higher on the priority list for the near future, and so expect that to be done first.

In Case You Missed It: The Canceled Nathaniel Bandy Videogame

Nathaniel Bandy released a video short a while back that described a canceled project for a videogame that was based on him and his YouTube channel. It was to be called Super Bandy World. Super Bandy World was mentioned indirectly here on the blog through its codename, Project Papa. The project was canceled after a development journey in which we tried to find a unique 3D platforming hook that would also work with the evolutionary progression of Nathaniel Bandy's video content and we ultimately were not able to find that hook or keep the project in motion amidst other priorities. There's a decent chance we may release some kind of a behind-the-scenes video or retrospective on the project one day, as there's more to the story than what's been revealed, so perhaps stay tuned on that if it interests you!

On to 2026!

Whew! So, that about catches you up on all things Elega Corporation. It's been a very busy year and I have to say that from the revenue numbers we've seen, there are some interesting paradoxes that are both true: we are seeing Elega revenue doing considerably better than it did last year in 2024, as well as 2023. At the same time, we've seen increased headwinds and competition in the IT training space, so finding success even with a platform as established as Pluralsight continues to be challenging.

The goal continues to be similar to what it has been in past years and I cannot help but feel like we've been sort of frozen in time with: working on a path to move into new business that does not involve the IT training space (or does not depend upon it). We have some ideas on what an updated strategy looks like for this, and the first step along that path remains finishing Kalling Kingdom and continuing to deliver new courses. What I am hoping we can expect, though, is that Kalling Kingdom sees an updated major release next year and then we can gradually begin working on a more evolved business strategy.

And by we, remember: I really mean the folks who have worked with Elega in the past, present, and future. I want to extend appreciation and thanks to those who have worked with me on art, music composition, audio and video editing, my bookkeeping and tax team, payroll service - there's so many folks behind me as the lead person on these projects that make all this possible even if I continue to be the solo energy behind it all.

Thanks for reading, and expect to hear from me again not long from now - there's a lot in the pipeline!