About Lore of the Ember

Frédérick, born in 1978. One foot in video games for nearly forty-five years, and it's not calming down.

My first console was a potentiometer Pong my father brought home. Two dials, a bouncing ball, and the blissful grin of a kid in front of his screen. I don't know exactly what went off that day, but I've never really put the controller down since.

After Pong came the Atari 2600 and its brown plastic cartridges, the first real visual jolt for the kid I was. Then pretty much every Nintendo and every Sega, alongside an Atari 1040 STe that changed everything.

The STe is where I truly fell for games that have something to say. Another World blew my mind with its rotoscoped animation and its sense of adventure. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade taught me patience, with some seriously twisted puzzles ;) Gobliins taught me the absurd humour of French adventure games. Turrican II for the exploration and the YM music that stays in your head years later. And Speedball 2, the futuristic sport I still play today for the sheer pleasure of it.

On the Super Nintendo, the holy grail was Street Fighter II. I had ground it down in the arcade before I finally got a version at home, and I still bring it out sometimes. Star Fox hit me with a visual shock few games have matched since. But SNES cartridges cost a fortune: I had few games, and the ones I had I knew by heart. Donkey Kong Country closed the generation in style, with pre-rendered scenery that looked like magazine artwork.

Then the shift to PC, when Atari pulled the shutters down. Duke Nukem 3D and LAN parties with mates, Warcraft II which was simply brilliant, Quake II for the first proper textured 3D that really moved. And the whole extended family of point & click adventures: Myst, Gabriel Knight for the voodoo atmosphere, Space Quest and King's Quest for the humour and Sierra's logic, absurd and severe at the same time.

Every generation left a mark. I still remember the smell of new cartridges, the distinctive sound of a hard disk loading a game, the afternoons poring over an issue of Tilt to pick the next thing to ask Father Christmas for, or simply to scrape together a few tips and tricks for my latest game.

I grew up with Tilt, Génération 4 and Joystick on the computer side, then Joypad and Banzaï on the console side. That is probably why Lore of the Ember exists today: I want to make a game whose preview I would be proud to read in a 1993 issue of Joystick.

So Lore of the Ember is my deliberate return to the machine where a good part of my passion took root: the Atari STe. Not out of pure nostalgia, but because the constraints of a 1989 machine force you to make choices. And it's often those choices you don't forget.

For marketing reasons, I also had to build a Megadrive and an Amiga (OCS) version. I will explain that whole strategy in a Kickstarter marketing section.

So the engine now runs on the Megadrive and on the Amiga as well. The Atari remains the original version; the other two get the same game with their own specifics added. Each version has its own page: Atari ST, Megadrive, Amiga.

The Lore of the Ember engine wasn't born this year: it's an old companion I've been shelving and bringing back out for years, with an unfinished platformer prototype along the way that served as its rough draft. Routines rewritten ten times, notebooks on hardware scroll and sprites, a foundation that took a long time to stand up. What is new this time isn't the code: it's the decision. I'm finishing the game instead of updating the foundation forever.

These days I still play when I have a bit of time left, and I code this game mostly in the evenings. It's long, sometimes frustrating, but it is one of the most satisfying projects I have ever taken on.