Setting the scene before handing over control

Lore of the Ember rests on a situation you have to grasp in a few seconds: a man wakes up in a dead village, his hands covered in blood that isn't his own, with a lantern beside him. If you start straight on the gameplay, all that is left is a character shooting at enemies.

So the intro runs five shots, in this order: the village from above, the awakening, the lantern, the walk across the street, and the castle under the storm. Each carries two lines of narration, in French or in English depending on the language chosen at startup.

First shot of the Lore of the Ember intro: a village of thatched roofs under a night sky, with the castle perched on the mountain in the background
The first shot of the intro: the dead village, and the castle keeping watch in the background. The narration appears in the strip at the bottom.

What moves without costing anything

Three of those five shots are still images. And yet something is happening in them constantly: the lantern's flame breathes, the storm bursts over the castle, Alaric's eyelids flutter before opening for good.

Almost none of that consumes any power, because nothing is redrawn. On the Atari, the displayed image has only sixteen colours, and those sixteen colours can be changed at will, instantly, without touching a single pixel. The flickering flame is a colour being raised and lowered. The lightning is already drawn on the image from the start: I simply hold it at the colour of the clouds, so it's invisible, and it's its sudden appearance that makes the event.

The only real movement is the eyelids, a tiny rectangle in the middle of the face. I spent time on their rhythm: at a tenth of a second per blink, it's really an image flickering. At a fifth of a second, it becomes an awakening.

Four black screens to get rid of

The real problem with this intro wasn't graphical. There were four cuts of about two seconds, black screen, in the middle of the narration. The cause was simple: the intro images are read from the floppy at the moment they are needed, and a double density floppy reads slowly. Ten seconds of reading in total, spread across the shots, isn't great.

I first tried doing those reads at specific moments of the intro, while Alaric's eyes are closed, then during the village shot. Both times the reading overran the time available, and the intro sat paused for the whole duration of the load. In short, a bad idea.

The solution was to read everything in one block before the first shot. The cutscene then plays out without a single disk access, at exactly the intended cadence. The price is a wait at startup, but an honest, announced wait is better than four long pauses in the middle of a scene.

That wait is now dressed up, too: a drawn screen, in the player's language, replaces the tiny loading indicator that was there before. It also serves for level loading.

Lore of the Ember loading screen: the knight sitting beside a giant floppy disk and his lantern, during loading
The loading screen, displayed during loads. Alaric waits it out.

What comes next

The intro runs from beginning to end, inside the game and not in a separate program. The fourth shot, the one where Alaric walks across the street, took a job of its own: his gait doesn't come from an invented curve, but from a filmed walk traced frame by frame. That will be for another time.

To see where the game is at, see the homepage.