Inside Ember’s Verge: A Developer Q&A

Most “survival” games lead with what they have: tech trees ending in rocket launchers, base building with decorative curtains and end tables, endless vehicles because walking is very hard and makes people sad. Ember’s Verge leads with what it lacks: no zombies, no modern tools, no electricity. Some may call that brave, others foolish -or maybe both -but either way, it’s refreshing to play a game with a clear vision.

To mark the launch of Ember’s Verge, I sent a set of questions to Feralless Games. Here’s what they had to say.

Background

Hashtag: First things first - where does the name come from? Is it a philosophy statement, a joke, or something in between?

Feralless Games: Maybe it’s half a joke, maybe it’s something to remember. Honestly, I just hate coming up with names.

Hashtag: Names are the absolute worst. I’m grateful that my nickname (Sifner) has never really clicked with anyone – for the most part if you see a Sifner, it’s probably me!

Hashtag: Can you give us a small crash course on you as a developer? Why this engine, why this genre, what led you to this game?

Feraless Games: I developed my first game with Unity ~7 years ago. It was a mobile game and took me 2 years to create. I sold exactly one copy. After this “great success”, I just started playing survival games. I really fell in love with this genre: managing vitals, gathering resources and building a safe place. As I was already familiar with Unity, it was the most natural way to start this development.

Hashtag: How do you personally define survival? Not the genre, just the word. Because I talk to A LOT of developers - and players - and the answer is almost never the same twice.

Feralless Games: Survival for me is about staying ahead of various threats. You cannot always control threats or completely eliminate them, but you can reduce the risk of being caught off guard. With careful planning and a good strategy you can overcome most of the obstacles.

Hashtag: What survival games, if any, actually influenced this one?

Feralless Games: I played The Long Dark, The Infected, SCUM, Green Hell, Valheim. While they are all great games, at some point I started searching for a more grounded survival game. A game where you would be in the woods with nothing and could only use the resources you find in the wilderness. I believe I found that game: Wild Side. The only problem was that it wasn’t out and after a while, I noticed that the project wasn’t coming out anytime soon. That was the moment where I started to do my own research on open-world games. I opened Unity and started the project.

H: I started following Wild Side on FB roughly…100 years ago – even wrote a piece on the whole lack of details/dead status they had going on for a while. This updated trailer they released, I dunno how I feel about it. Feels like a different vibe. Any thoughts?

FG: Yes, definitely. I was so amazed by the original scene, where the player was sitting by the fire and sharpening a stick. The game looked very nature driven and the atmosphere was amazing (according to the trailer). Now with the new trailer it doesn’t feel the same. Of course we don’t know if that first initial trailer was meant to be the actual gameplay or just cinematic.

Hashtag: The "no zombies, no modern tools, no electricity" is a pretty deliberate stance- it seems like we either get zombies or we get sci-fi tech, usually in space. Was that always the direction, or did you have to talk yourself out of adding those things at some point?

FG: No. My original idea was to create a grounded survival game. From the beginning, I made the decision that there wouldn’t be any pre-made tools to find or NPCs to interact with. The player would have to craft everything from nature’s resources. I had a temptation to add some “high loot” like a knife or an axe, but decided against it.
When I started “marketing” the game after 2 years of development I noticed that many survival games had zombies or a high-tech tree to create all sorts of constructions and items. As my game didn’t include those, I wanted to highlight it.

H: Zombies has definitely been a cornerstone of things for quite a while. My theory has always been that it’s the easiest/low effort way to explain this kinda “abrupt 180” to nothing. That lack of resources or primitive tools or what have you: just create that stylized “chaos and broken world” look, throw in some ambulatory corpses, and good-to-go. However! I love that I am seeing more bushcraft style titles, and more titles that have folks tread the line of being a poor choice away from tragedy.

Setup

Hashtag: Refreshing to be on an island with no plane crash! (Unless there is one and I missed it.) So you have a small backstory: betrayed, stranded, no rescue coming. How much does that framing actually matter to gameplay, or is it mostly flavor to justify the starting conditions?

FG: There are basically two ways to get onto the island. Dropping from the air or shipwrecking on the shore (or 3rd just spawning in without any explanation). As plane crashes are used quite often, I chose a kind of shipwreck. I’m not a story teller, but I wanted the game to have some sort of story (even a very thin one), but still a story. I wanted to create a narrative about how the player ends up on the island with absolutely nothing.

Hashtag: The page mentions an "optional guided start" but no long-term quests. Where's the line between giving new players a handhold and preserving that uncomfortable "figure it out yourself" feeling that makes primitive survival worthwhile?

FG: The optional guided start explains only the very basics of the game, but after that it’s up to the player to find food and a place to live. I have been getting feedback that some mechanics aren’t always clear and that’s why I have recorded the first 4 day video series (non-commentary) to help out if players feel they don’t know what to do. I want to keep that “figure it out yourself” mentality, because that gives the best reward.

H: I’ve spent a lot of time in this genre and in community roles -most recently as the community manager for The Infected – so I’ve seen a lot of player feedback firsthand. One recurring issue is how frustrated some players get when they have to rely on external resources (YouTube, wikis) just to understand core mechanics, especially compared to optional lookups like say, a boss strategy. Would that kinda push-back make you consider adjusting the in-game experience?

FG: The problem is that the game doesn’t know what the player would like to do. Solutions: The game could try to guess what the player is up to, but don’t know how. This would be hard to implement and would be quite annoying. The other thing would be to have a simple search bar for different issues and then the player could search for answers from there.

I didn’t implement any search method, but I added Codex to help out when players feel lost (Will they use it? Don’t know). Also the Codex doesn’t give you all the answers. I tried to implement the most frequent ones. The other thing is the tutorial videos on YouTube. For a new game there aren’t any, so I decided to record a couple days by myself. This helped me to understand e.g. The Long Dark -game much better. I’m definitely going to make some tweaks to the UI based on the feedback if it makes sense. Players must have enough information to understand what is going on in the game. From a developer point of view you will get blind to your own systems when they are lacking appropriate information.

Hashtag: The choice mentioned on the store page - stay on the island or “eventually leave it behind” - means…what? Is there anything you can tell us about that that isn’t a spoiler, or is it more “you can build a boat and get out and “end the save” or what? How much does that actually influence how you play? Different ending screen, or does the whole late-game feel different depending on which path you're working toward?

FG: I wanted to create a game with a start and a finish. When players want to leave is simply their decision, but it’s not a push of a button. Players can start preparing to build a raft platform and a raft, but this takes time. The game doesn’t end just by building a raft and setting sail. Players need to prepare for the entire trip and drift for a week or so. It’s worth taking into consideration that leaving during a cold period is not the most wise thing to do. There aren’t any different endings depending on how long a player has been on the island. So it’s just up to the players to find a suitable path whether to rush off from the island or proceed with smaller steps.

Gameplay

Hashtag: Winter buries resources and slows movement - I’m always a fan of winter games. What was the hardest part of designing winter so it felt punishing without just being annoying?

FG: During the winter there is dynamic snow covering the whole island. The snow can be dug and it compresses when you walk on it. Winter is a time of reduced spawns, and of course cold. It takes more effort to move around. When it comes to how punishing the winter is, it all comes back to planning and preparation. With a good plan winter might actually be nice, despite the cold. The landscape is different and some tasks require more effort.

Hashtag: You've got droughts and floods in there too, which most survival games skip entirely. How dynamic is "dynamic" - random events, or is there actual weather simulation running underneath? Does it matter more as time passes, as “years” go by? Over time in TLD the world steadily gets colder - is a similar mechanic in play?

FG: The world temperatures are derived from the seasons (summer, autumn, winter, spring). I didn’t implement any temperature progression where winters would get colder every year. This is because there aren’t any higher-tier gear options for players to aim to counter that.
Flood and drought are randomized events, but they’ll come with recognizable changes to the world. I find these two challenges serve as an extra layer for the game, nothing players couldn’t overcome, but they definitely force them to adapt.

H: They’re very cool! That type of ‘challenging’ natural event is skipped in many survival titles in favor of more “manufactured strife” – the threat of other players (pvp), a cyclical threat like a zombie horde, or something similar. I’m always a fan of things that occur naturally and require forethought and planning – similar to Subsistence, where the lakes freeze and cut off underwater resources, or similar plans are less frequent (or absent) in some seasons.

Hashtag: Can I just tell you how fucking excited I am to see things like a travois, or the ability to dig down to make a cellar. Did the systems turn out like you hoped? I’ve heard from other developers that they skipped those type of features because of the time/resources involved in creation.

FG: I’m currently happy with the game mechanics, although looking back there are always things that could have been improved. To achieve authentic bushcraft experience, I would have loved to let players build their own shelters by placing each log one by one. But decisions like that have to be made in the very beginning of the development process.

I had travois planned in the very beginning of the game development, but I didn’t manage to implement it into the demo. The travois is designed for hauling wood and moving animal carcasses, so it’s a specialized tool rather than a way to move your whole gear to another location.

The terraforming was one of the mechanics that really gave me a headache. But I’m still happy that I didn’t give up on it, because that is a huge part of the game. Being able to modify the surroundings and clear foliage adds so much to the player’s impact on the world.

H: I’m pretty stoked to dig out my cellar, no lie!

Hashtag: Fire as lifeline is front and center in the description and pretty standard for the genre. What does fire management actually look like in practice: is it a dedicated system, a mini game, or more like 'you have a fire or you don't.'

FG: Fire is critical in every aspect, since the game doesn’t include any modern gear. It’s your heat source, it makes water potable, cooks food, provides light and scares off wildlife. The game has 5 different static fire sources which have their own characteristics and purpose.
The actual starting fire process is skill-based with an RNG element. Different tinder and certain fire-starting tools give you a chance to succeed, and your skill will increase the more you start fires. Also you can ignite a torch only with a fire-starter.

Fire can be carried in a torch or kept in a static source, and you can transfer the flame between them. A campfire might be put off by a strong wind from an unprotected angle, heavy rain or just simply running out of fuel. But as in real life, it’s “only” a fire which requires attention.

Hashtag: A lot of "realistic" survival games front-load the friction and then let the player become a god by hour 20. How did you resist that?

FG: As the game is a grounded survival experience, there is a possibility to advance, but the game doesn’t let the player rule the island. The player can hunt with a bow, preserve food in a ground storage and have a safe place for the fire in the house, but eventually they need to go out and hunt again, craft some clothing and fix the house.

H: And the environment and typical realistic life issues provide the ‘danger’ – lack of food, lack of water, keeping warm or cool?

FG: Yes, exactly. You cannot automate anything. Hunt is manual, snare is “automated/automatic”, but you have to check it regularly and so on.

Looking Forward

Hashtag: What's the one thing you're most nervous about players misunderstanding or bouncing off of that you wish you could just tell them upfront?

FG: Ha! There are many things, but it feels like different players struggle with different things. I have received feedback that the game doesn’t give enough information about the game mechanics or some mechanisms are too frustrating. I have tried to address these points where they make sense, but at the same time I don’t want to break the core game loop just to simplify things. There is no perfect way to please all of the players and figuring out for yourself might be the biggest reward the game gives you.

H: 100% I feel like a lot of great games start to lose their identity when they begin to make sweeping changes to satisfy varied “blocks” of player types/playstyles.

Hashtag: Looking past launch - is Ember's Verge the beginning of something, or is it its own complete thing? Is there a next title already rattling around in your head?

FG: Maybe…

Hashtag: And the hardest question: if you could go back to day one of development knowing what you know now, what's the first thing you'd do differently?

FG: Gosh.. I think I’m pleased with the game overall, but from a coding perspective I would organize everything better from the start and create better state machines. However it is quite normal that the first big project will turn into “spaghetti” under the hood, but I had to learn to cope with it!

Hashtag: Spaghetti code on a first big project is basically a rite of passage at this point, I’m sure you’re in good company! Thanks for taking the time to chat while you were literally on the eve of launch. Wishing you a successful, bug-free launch day – and if you ever want to do this again, you know where to find me.

Feralless Games: Thanks, this was nice! (In Finland we really do mean that!) 😄

Ember’s Verge launched today at 1.0, and you can grab it now with a 10% launch discount. Definitely a game you want to experience hands-on – figuring stuff out is half the fun!

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