Three machines, and only one that decides

Some announcements take weeks to prepare. This one made itself, and the hard part, the day I sat down to write it, was finding the right way to say it to the people who have followed this devlog from the start.

Lore of the Ember was born on the Atari ST. It was born there because that is the machine where my passion took root, and letting go of it was never on the table. It remains the original version, the one I run first, the one that settles arguments. But for a few weeks now, the same game has also been running on the Megadrive and on the Amiga.

I say it in that order on purpose, because the order is half the story: the Atari has not become one version out of three. It stayed the yardstick. Whatever fits there fits everywhere else, and not the other way round.

Why I did not go there sooner

Because it is the kind of idea that kills solo projects.

Adding machines before the game is finished is the surest way to finish none of them. You spend your time doing the same thing three times, each one slightly worse, and the game stops moving. I have watched enough projects die that way not to jump in out of enthusiasm.

What changed is that the game reached a state where the question no longer worked like that. Years ago, tidying this old engine away for the tenth time, I had separated two things: the game on one side, its monsters, its plague, its rules; and on the other the part that talks to the machine. At the time it was just housekeeping, and honestly I did it for my own peace of mind, not as part of some grand plan.

That housekeeping is what made the rest possible. The day I wanted to see what the game would look like elsewhere, I did not have to rewrite it. I had to learn to talk to another machine, which is an enormous amount of work, but which never touches the game itself.

What it changes for you

Entirely depending on what you kept in a box.

If you have an Atari ST, nothing changes, except that you now have company. It is still the most advanced of the three versions, and still the one that gets new things first. It runs on the STe and on the STf, on a stock Atari, and it installs to a hard disk too.

If you have a Megadrive, you will not get a watered-down conversion. I set one rule for that version and I hold to it: the game is not ported to the console, it is improved there. Every step is judged twice, is it faithful to the game, and is it the best this console can do. Copying the Atari stroke for stroke would mean paying its constraints without collecting what the Megadrive gives. The first gain is visible immediately: the scenery is no longer held to the Atari's sixteen colours. Same artwork, far richer.

If you have an Amiga, that is the youngest of the three builds and the one moving fastest right now. The target is the stock A500, the one nearly everybody had, not an upgraded box. A game that only runs on a rare configuration is no use to anyone.

What it does not change

The world, the story, the monsters and the rules are the same everywhere. The plague spreads the same way, the lantern does the same work, the second player joins the same way. Nobody gets an amputated version, and nobody gets an exclusive.

And above all: no version is held back to look like the others. That was the obvious temptation, the one that makes life easier, and it is exactly the one to refuse. A machine that can do better must do better, even if its neighbour cannot follow. A player does not compare three versions side by side, they play on theirs.

Where each version stands

I have added three pages to the site, one per machine, with the real state of each: Atari ST, Megadrive, Amiga. The progress bars on the homepage are now split into three sets, for the same reason. I would rather the gap between the three be visible than let anyone assume a parity that does not exist yet.

The devlog itself now filters by machine. The earlier posts are all about the Atari, which is normal, that is what happened. The next ones will always say which machine they are about.

And what comes next

That does not change either. I did not add two machines in order to slow the first one down: the remaining acts are still the main build, on all three at once.

One last thing, for those who have followed this project since the first post. There is an irony I rather enjoy: spending thirty years defending the Atari against the Amiga in the playground, and ending up writing a game that runs on both. I have not switched sides. I have simply come round to admitting that the other side had a fine machine.