Usually, if you want to pick apart the ruins of a lost civilisation, you send in Tony Hart and the Time Team. In Lost Ember, that responsibility falls upon an even hairier archaeologist: one lone wolf. What this daring doggo lacks in a history degree and several hydraulic excavators, it more than makes up for in motivation. You’ll ascend steep mountain peaks, dive deep underwater, and even soar amongst the clouds in a bid to discover what caused the downfall of a once mighty civilisation. That’s more than Tony Hart ever did.
But how, as a wolf, do you manage to tackle such extreme environments? The answer will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever fallen foul of a debt collector: repossession. You can take over the bodies of any animal you come across, whether it dwells on land, at sea, or in the air. There are mole-like creatures who dig deep underground, colourful birds that flock over jungle canopies, and exotic fish that dart between swaying fields of kelp.
Inhabiting these faunae will be effortless for your magical wolf, but it was much less straightforward from a game design perspective. We talk with Mooneye Studios CEO and programmer Tobias Graff to find out how Lost Ember uses the power of Unreal Engine 4 to bring its animal kingdom roaring, squeaking, and squawking into life.
AI is one of those features you mainly notice when it doesn’t work. Nothing shatters immersion quite like an NPC that’s become trapped in level geometry or stuck in an infinite animation loop. Lost Ember features a massive amount of AI-controlled animals, so as the menagerie grew, the problems multiplied. Mooneye Studios needed to overcome a hefty technical challenge in order for the game to hang together cohesively.
According to Graff, getting huge swarms of birds to fly together without clipping into each other, or vast herds of buffalo to believably interact with a vast, uneven steppe, took a lot of trial and error. This is where Unreal Engine 4 comes in.
“For those particular challenges,” he says, “the Visual Logger and Profiler were really useful for figuring out what exactly is happening and what part of code eats up the frametime. They both enable you to really dive into the game logic and to just learn what happens in the engine itself.”
For those not in the know, Visual Logger is a debugging tool that lets developers see scores of debug information during a play session. It also records these bugs to review later. This is incredibly helpful in identifying a rare or difficult-to-reproduce bug because it lets developers scrub through footage frame by frame and catch it in all its filthy action.
Profiler, meanwhile, is an improved version of Unreal Engine 3’s StatsViewer. Where Visual Logger is about obliterating bugs, Profilier’s focus is on optimising game performance by highlighting possible sources of hitches or slowdown. In a game like Lost Ember, which hides a lot of its complexity under an idyllic visage, these two tools were all-important.
From AI to control methods now, another challenge Mooneye Studios encountered was deciding how each animal should move. As the player changes animal states, the controls changed too.
“In Lost Ember you play over a dozen very different animals from a fish in the water to a parrot in the sky and we didn’t want the player to learn a completely new control scheme every time they switch characters,” Graff says. “We certainly tried a lot of different approaches until we got something that felt unique for each animal and still familiar.”
This is where the blueprint system comes in. It’s one of Unreal Engine 4’s most celebrated features, and for good reason. An alternative to complex scripting languages, the blueprint system allows developers to programme gameplay elements using a simple, node-based interface. And, in Lost Ember, Graff and his team used it to quickly prototype new animal movement.
“We could just talk about what we thought would work best,” he explains, “and then quickly implement a basic version of that in an hour or so to see if it actually works, before we dive in deeper and move it to code.”
And of course a very important part of Lost Ember is the visual style. Some systems like the Material Graph enabled us to quickly create stunning shaders even without knowing too much about shader code, which allowed our artists to build a lot of materials without the need for a programmer to help out. And lately we’ve been working a lot with Niagara, the new particle editor. It’s an amazing tool that gives you a lot of control over any aspect of the effect that enabled us to enhance a lot of effects in the game pretty quickly.”
Lost Ember will launch later this year. You can learn more on its Steam page. Unreal Engine 4 development is now free.
In this sponsored series, we’re looking at how game developers are taking advantage of Unreal Engine 4 to create a new generation of PC games. With thanks to Epic Games and Stainless Games.