A project that didn't start yesterday

Lore of the Ember, or rather the engine that runs it, is something I've been dragging around for years. Not continuously, not every evening, but it's the kind of project that always comes back. You put it in a drawer, you move on to something else, and six months later you open the folder again "just to have a look", and off you go for a few sleepless nights.

The old skeleton

Before Lore of the Ember there was a platformer prototype, heavily inspired by the Castlevania games of the era, which I never finished. The kind of game you love and think you can rebuild in a weekend, until you find out what it really costs on a machine from 1989. Just scrolling scenery cleanly is hard ;) .

That prototype never saw the light of day, but it wasn't lost either. What it left me was a skeleton: enough to boot the machine, put an image on screen, and scrolling experiments I rewrote ten times. And above all, entire notebooks of notes, pages on everything that lets a machine from that era still surprise the eye today. Most of those notes eventually turned into code that runs.

The engine in its early days: a plain red rectangle moving on a black background, the skeleton everything else was built on.

Why it never got finished

The truth is that I had never really decided to finish. I kept starting over. Every time I came back, I decided the old code was badly done, I restarted from something cleaner, and I stopped just before the hard part: filling a real level, writing a real story, making people want to keep playing. Technique is comfortable. You can polish a scroll for months without ever having to ask yourself whether the game is any good.

And then life takes over. Work, everything else. A solo project with no deadline and nobody waiting for it is the first one you sacrifice.

What is different this time

This time I have stopped rewriting the engine. I'm taking it as it is, scars and all, and building on top. All those years of tinkering finally become foundations instead of an eternal starting point. The rule I have set myself is simple: no more rewriting the base for the fun of it, use it to make a game and finish it.

The game will be Lore of the Ember. One game, chosen, finished. The platformer prototype was a springboard, but the direction changed along the way, and that is for the better. I will come back to that in a dedicated article, because that turn is a real story in itself.

What you're going to read here

So this devlog isn't a tutorial on "how to make an STe game from nothing". It's the journal of the final stretch, resting on foundations that took a long time to exist. I'm going to document the steps, the design decisions, the pivots and the mistakes. When I break a rule I set myself, I will say so. When a bug costs me three evenings, I will tell you about it.

The first entry in the journal starts where I pulled the skeleton out of the drawer and got it standing straight again. For once, I fully intend to see this through.