Published August 4, 2024
Welcome to the second installment in the Ember development article series! If you are not yet familiar with the Ember project, get started by reviewing our reveal page. We will periodically post articles that look deeply at a specific facet of lore, design, features, or gameplay to begin revealing details about what makes Ember such a memorable and spectacular digital game experience. This installment focuses on the intricately detailed, immersive, and interactive area maps which elevate gameplay in Ember to new visual levels.
Please bear in mind that the examples shown in this article are still unfinished. Ember is in pre-alpha and certain aspects of visual presentation will still improve meaningfully, but we are excited to communicate the direction that the project is taking to reinvent the role of area maps in tabletop role-playing content.
Immersive Environments
In-game footage of an assortment of area maps which demonstrate some of Ember's immersive features.
Pre-Alpha footage captured inside Foundry Virtual Tabletop.
The video above showcases several of the awesome features which make explorable areas in Ember highly immersive while still using top-down 2d rendering technologies: parallax to convey elevation, environmental animations, multi-level scenes, and optimized performance.
Parallax and Elevation
An artistic challenge for 2d area maps, especially those which are top-down in perspective, is to effectively convey elevation so that aspects of three-dimensional gameplay can matter in encounter and area design. Our area maps in Ember are composed of many layers with parallax effects applied according to each layer's elevation to create a subtle but impactful 2.5d feeling which makes it easier to visually interpret the elevation differences presented in a scene.
Environment Animations
Another huge enhancement to visual flavor comes through the addition of animated environment effects like flowing water, moving trees, swaying grass, and billowing fabric. Our rendering engine is optimized to use shaders and particle effects to bring sections of each map to life in a way that adds remarkable vitality to otherwise static scenes.
Working on Ember has been so cool! The cartographers are able to collaborate directly with the writers and designers to bring all these amazing locations to life with a map that truly reflects the cultural details and immersive story that's been created. I have got to see new features within Foundry that have blown the lid off what I thought was possible - maps are being designed from the ground up to function seamlessly across multiple levels, animated terrain is adding so much atmosphere, and it feels like anything we can think of is possible!
Cartographer
Multi-Level Scenes
Several of the features we have developed for Ember become the precursors and foundation for the next generation of Foundry Virtual Tabletop features. A major feature we are pioneering with Ember is a framework for multi-level scenes which seamlessly allow for multiple overlapping levels of vertical gameplay. Many of Ember's areas make use of elevation which adds tactical depth to encounter design and a broader sense of scale to our worldbuilding.
Integrated Audio
Every scene in Ember has a seamlessly integrated audio soundscape designed for it. The music and environmental audio in Ember is composed by Ian from TabletopRPGMusic; we will be focusing on Ember's unique and powerful audio engine in more detail as part of a later development article. A short explanation, however, is that Ember's soundscape automatically adjusts to the scene, the time of day, and other gameplay factors. We utilize a mixture of scene-wide music and ambience coupled with specific local sound effects that are only audible to characters in the vicinity of their origin.
Interactive Features
In-game footage of an assortment of area maps in Ember demonstrating interactive features.
Pre-Alpha footage captured inside Foundry Virtual Tabletop.
This second video demonstrates several of the techniques used by Ember to ensure our explorable environments are engaging and interactive: animated doors, dynamic puzzles, moving platforms, and triggered events. Enabling the gamemaster and players to interact with the map in ways that meaningfully change gameplay or advance the narrative provides us with a powerful dimension of storytelling tools beyond what is in Ember's written adventure text.
Animated Doors
Interactive doors were one of Foundry Virtual Tabletop's hallmark features; a simple but powerful enhancement that was a game changer compared to the way that other virtual tabletops worked at the time. We later added integrated audio effects for door sounds, but Ember follows through with the visual missing piece of door animations. Ember supports all kinds of door animations: basic doors, double doors, sliding doors, ascending or descending doors, swiveling doors, magic doors, plant doors, and more! Seeing doors open and close as you explore a building or traverse a dungeon is a small touch that does a lot to make you feel immersed in the moment.
Dynamic Puzzles
Area maps in Ember are used for more than just combat; exploration and social encounters can also happen in these maps and puzzle solving can be a key component of this non-combat gameplay. Most of our large dungeons as well as some overland areas incorporate at least one puzzle element which makes the process of exploring the area more interactive and engaging. Puzzle state is synchronized across all players so that finding the solution is a collaborative problem-solving exercise both in character and out.
I'm absurdly lucky to be a part of the Ember team where we're building a truly immersive virtual tabletop experience like no other! Every part of the game's world is crafted with incredible care and attention to detail; the rich world-building, the colorful characters, the beautiful and evocative artwork and music, and the battle maps, where all of these things are combined through Foundry Virtual Tabletop's immense potential to present your party with incredibly atmospheric encounters. I can not wait for people to see what we're working on here!
Cartographer
Moving Platforms
Another innovation being prototyped especially in Ember involves platforms which can enable parts of the map to be moving relative to others. This allows for things like carts or vehicles which move along a defined path, elevators ascending or descending, or platforms which transport characters and items across the map. These methods of conveyance provide a satisfying visual alternative to teleportation when transitioning between areas of the world.
Traps and Triggers
All of the areas in Ember fully utilize Foundry Virtual Tabletop's new Scene Regions feature to implement scripted events and automation encountered while exploring a scene. This includes traps which can be detected (or not) and disarmed, ambushes which trigger automatically when characters enter an area, automatic changes in token elevation as you traverse multiple levels of a Scene, and much more.
Balancing Quality and Performance
We have showcased many reasons why the quality of Ember's area maps is extremely high, but we should also celebrate the quantity and scope of the project. Ember's adventure campaign will feature over 80 area maps created with this depth of immersion and interactivity. These maps are generally between 6,400px and 8,000px in size and are designed for a 200px grid which can make use of detailed high-resolution tokens.
Conventionally, accomplishing this level of detail and dynamism of a scene in a virtual tabletop entails use of extremely large video files which are slow to load, taxing for each players' computer, and cannot support advanced features like multiple levels of verticality or interactive gameplay. Ember does not use any video files, instead, area maps in Ember are rendered using optimized 2d texture formats and graphical shaders that can create these vibrant scenes at a fraction of the performance cost. Each of the scenes depicted above only requires loading between 10 and 15 megabytes of assets and can easily maintain a framerate of 60fps or higher on a modern laptop or desktop PC.
We hope you have become excited by the beautiful presentation and engaging features of our area maps in Ember. Please click the button at the top of this article to follow the project on Kickstarter and stay in the loop. There will be lots more Ember content coming your way soon!
Many of Ember's most innovative features focus on state-of-the-art exploration and social gameplay, but our design team still loves the thrill of combat encounters and the fun that is delivered when gameplay transitions to a "battlemap". Our creative team of cartographers and developers are working together to evolve and enhance the classical foundation to create top-down area maps which are immersive, responsive, and engaging as fully explorable game locations. We are really taking the idea of top-down maps to a level that hasn't been seen before.
Andrew (Atropos)
Game Director and Lead Developer