What changes this week

Lore of the Ember has just passed a milestone I had been waiting for: the game now has sound and real scenery. Borrowed music and borrowed scenery. Placeholders, but placeholders that work.

The result: when I launch the game, I see a real level scrolling in front of me, I hear a chiptune theme that fits the mood, and the character walks through it. For the first time, it looks like a game.

Why placeholders

Simply because I'm not an artist, nor a musician for that matter. And I would like to finish the engine first. So let us take existing music and existing designs. For a prototype it does the job and it lets me move forward. It makes me admire all the more any solo developer who creates a game from A to Z.

The music

I took the soundtrack of Ghouls 'n Ghosts by Tim Follin, in the Atari ST's standard chiptune format. The game plays it on its own, in the background, without weighing on the rest: it's the machine's sound chip doing the work.

The file contains several tracks. I listened to them all and kept the one that fitted the mood best. And it's the best known, too.

I had first tried music based on digital samples. Cleaner, but precisely too clean: it sounded modern, and it betrayed the retro side Lore of the Ember owns. Chiptune, on the other hand, is tiny (one small file holds every track), it eats almost no resources, and it sounds right for this game.

The scenery

For the tiles I took the scenery from the first world of Chaos Engine. It's not a brutal copy and paste: I run it through my own palette, those sixteen cold colours, blue-grey with a few blood-red accents, that give Lore of the Ember its identity. Then I assemble it on the map I draw in my level editor, and the engine displays it.

I picked Chaos Engine for good reasons. The style fits: top-down view, dark industrial atmosphere, limited palette, perfect readability in full motion. The tiles are consistent with each other, edges aligned, clean transitions, so I don't have forty junctions to patch up. And it's exactly my target resolution, so nothing needs resizing.

Those Bitmap Brothers were good!

And to be honest, Chaos Engine remains one of the finest top-down art directions of the era. If my placeholder is at that level, the specification for the final version is crystal clear.

Does it run well?

Yes. Really well. The game launches on a stock STe, loads in under a second, and runs at full speed.

For the first time since the project started, I can play Lore of the Ember rather than just test Lore of the Ember. And that changes everything for the rhythm of development.

What comes next

With real scenery and real sound in place, I can start the jobs that depended on them:

  • Balance the corruption against coherent scenery, where it reads differently than on an empty screen.
  • Tune the Ashen Wolf's movement, now that I can see where it gets stuck and where it gets lost in the scenery.
  • Build the first act end to end: the engine holds up, and workbench assets are enough to move on to real gameplay.

And in parallel, quietly, I can start drawing the real tiles of the Forest of the Hanged and composing the music for Lore of the Ember, without blocking the rest. But that is likely to give me trouble.

The engine is done. Now the game begins.

Try it

Download morteveille-009-ghouls-chaos.zip (122 KB, contains the .prg and the music file LEVEL1.SND). Unzip everything into the same folder and run morteveille.prg in Hatari in STe mode with 1 MB. Arrows to move, fire to clean the plague, P to pause, Esc to quit.