Ground that gives back the image

Everything in Lore of the Ember is matt. Earth, stone, trunks, ash: nothing shines, nothing gives anything back, and that is on purpose, this is a world going out.

Hence the urge to drop, right in the middle of it, a surface doing the exact opposite. A sheet of ice, flat on the ground, on which you watch your own reflection walk.

What it looks like on screen

The hero steps onto the sheet and his reflection appears under his feet, upside down, translucent, offset by just the right amount. It follows him step for step. When the hero shoots, the reflection shoots too. When he leaves the ice, the reflection is cut clean at the edge, it never bleeds onto the soil around.

The monsters do not escape it either. A golem crossing the sheet drags its reflection along, and that is where the effect earns its place: you stop watching only the character and start watching a surface that answers everything moving across it.

The ice sheet in two player mode: every character drags its reflection.

With two players, it counts double

In cooperative play the sheet turns into a little stage. Two heroes, two reflections gliding side by side, and the monsters walking into frame with theirs. I made the sheet bigger for exactly that reason: the first version sat in a corner of the screen, you crossed it in three steps and never had time to see the effect. This one fills almost the whole screen, you walk in, you fight on it, you walk out.

How it holds on an Atari

This is the kind of effect you expect to be expensive, and that is precisely what made it worth doing.

The reflection is not a second drawing. It is not one more image handed over by the artist, nor a copy stored somewhere: it is the character himself, read from bottom to top. Eight walking directions stay eight walking directions, there is nothing extra to draw.

The transparency costs no extra colour either. The reflection is laid down through a pattern that lets only one pixel in two through, so the ice shows underneath and the eye reads a ghost rather than a second character. One detail I care about: that pattern is pinned to the surface, not to the character. Pinned to the ice, it behaves like what it stands for, a state of the ground.

What comes next

The most satisfying part is that none of this talks about ice. What reflects is described separately, and ice is only the first case. A puddle after the rain, a polished slab in a place of worship, black water at the bottom of a cellar: all of them will now give your image back the same way, and I fully intend to use that.