▶ COMING SOON // ANDROID // iOS
Emberseam
Every escape leaves a fire behind.
You cannot cross it — but you can follow it.
Every piece on the grid is an arrow. Tap one and it slides straight off the board the way it faces — if its whole lane is clear. The lane it escaped down is left burning, and fire runs ALONG a lane, so a later piece may follow the same line out but may never cross it. Fire cools by one on every move. Every board carries a solver-proved par and a budget of par plus a little slack, and not one of those boards was designed by a person: 150 campaign levels and three years of dailies were generated, proved and measured by machine before the game itself was built.
Emberseam is not on Google Play or the App Store yet — there is nothing to download today, and both buttons above are deliberately dead rather than pointing somewhere hopeful. They become real links the day each store approves it.
▶ THE UNUSUAL PART
NOTHING HERE WAS AUTHORED
There is no level designer on this game, and no hand-placed piece anywhere in it. Every board was built backwards by a generator, replayed forwards under the real fire rules, proved optimal by an exact solver, and then measured — and thrown away unless it punishes autopilot. Most of them were thrown away. That is the whole method, and it is why the par printed on a board is a fact rather than a guess.
-
STEP ONE // BACKWARDS
SOLVABILITY FOR FREE
The generator runs the game in reverse: it drops pieces onto an empty grid, each one with a clear lane, and reads the placement order backwards. That order is a legal extraction order by construction — so a generated board is never merely hoped to be solvable.
-
STEP TWO // FORWARDS
PLAYED UNDER THE REAL RULES
A plain forward replay then plays that board under the full scar rules — the same ones you play — inserting a wait wherever fire is in the way. Reverse construction proves a route exists; the replay is what proves the route survives the fire it starts.
-
STEP THREE // PROOF
AN EXACT SOLVER
Par is not the generator's route — it is the true minimum, proved by IDA* searching over (remaining pieces, fire) with a ceiling of 500,000 nodes. Any board the solver cannot prove inside that budget is discarded rather than shipped with a guessed par. Seeds are free; a wrong par would make every shared score a lie.
-
STEP FOUR // MEASURED
DOES IT PLAY ITSELF?
A proved board still has to earn its place. Each is measured on how much worse reading-order autopilot is than the optimum, how many of the optimum's moves are waits, and how often only one move was even legal. Fail any of those gates and it is deleted, not softened.
-
THE REJECT PILE
THROWN AWAY BY THE HUNDRED
Roughly 32 seeds burned per daily board, and up to 270 for the hardest campaign levels, with an allowance of 2,000 before a band is declared broken. Most candidates die in microseconds against the cheap gates. The survivors are the product.
-
BEFORE THE BINARY
PROVED, THEN SHIPPED
150 campaign boards and 1,095 dailies were baked and proved in one 28-minute run before the game was built around them. They ship as data, not seeds — so the app never generates at boot, and every daily is provably fair before the binary leaves the studio.
▶ THE LOOP
HOW IT PLAYS
One verb: tap an arrow. Everything hard about this game comes from what the arrow leaves behind it.
-
STEP ONE // TAP
EVERY PIECE IS AN ARROW
It slides straight off the board the way it faces, and only if its whole lane to the edge is clear. There is no dragging, no rotating, no swapping. The only question on the board is which piece, and in what order.
-
STEP TWO // THE COST
THE LANE IS LEFT BURNING
Escaping sets that lane alight, and fire runs along a lane rather than across it: a later piece may follow the same line out, but may not cross it. Fire cools by one on every move and is gone at zero. Your route is written into the floor.
-
NO WAIT BUTTON
WAITING COSTS A MOVE
There isn't one, on purpose. Tap a piece that only fire is blocking and you spend a move letting that fire die — a smolder. Tap one that a piece or a wall is blocking and it costs nothing at all: a misread is free, a mistimed wait is not.
-
THE BUDGET
PAR, AND A LITTLE SLACK
Every board ships with a proved par and a budget of par plus slack — five spare moves in the opening levels, two by the end. Clear it at par for three stars, within half the slack for two, anything else for one. Par is a minimum, so beating it is impossible.
-
THE ONLY LOSS
BURNING OUT
Spend the whole budget with pieces still on the board and you burn out. That is the only way to lose, and it is always self-inflicted — the board is provably still winnable at the moment you run out. Three undos an attempt are free, and a revive hands back three moves.
-
THREE KINDS
EMBER, ASH AND STONE
Ember pieces leave a scar that burns twice as long as the board's. Ash pieces leave nothing behind at all — the one clean exit, and the piece you hoard. Walls are permanent floor: they never move, never burn, and no piece may ever face into one.
▶ TWO WAYS IN
WHAT'S IN THE BOX
A campaign that teaches the fire one seam at a time, and one board a day that everybody on earth gets identically. Both are scored against a proved minimum; neither needs a signal.
-
MODE 01 // 150 LEVELS
SIX SEAMS
Twenty-five levels each. Kindling — small fires, learn what they cost. Flashpoint — stone in the floor, fewer ways through. Backdraft — some pieces leave nothing behind. Cinderfall — embers burn twice as long as you want them to. Firebreak — long lanes, longer memories. Deepseam — no room, no slack, no second guesses. The grid grows from 5×5 to 8×8 and scars last from two moves to six; par runs from 5 to 17.
-
MODE 02 // DAILY
ONE BOARD A DAY
Seeded from the calendar date, so every player worldwide gets the same 7×8 board with the same eleven pieces and the same two moves of slack — par 13 to 16, and three years of them already baked. Scored on moves against par. The streak survives a loss, because the ritual is showing up. The share card is a scar map: where your fire went, not how to solve it, so two people who cleared the same board post visibly different pictures.
-
MADE OF NUMBERS
NOT ONE BITMAP
Every pixel of the board is a gradient, a rounded rectangle or a triangle drawn in code, and all nine sounds are synthesized in the repository rather than licensed. The fonts are open-licensed. It also means a reduce-motion switch that every painter honours, not just some — this game spends its whole art budget on animated fire, which makes an off switch an accessibility requirement.
▶ THE HONEST BIT
WHAT IT COSTS
Emberseam will be free. Nothing you can buy makes a board solvable that wasn't — every one of them is proved winnable before it ships — and there is no energy meter, no timer and no lives, because none were built. Money buys fewer interruptions; coins buy tools and paint.
-
FREE // AD-SUPPORTED
ADS, ON A LEASH
A full-screen ad only ever appears after a cleared campaign board. Your first five cleared boards are free of them entirely, then at most every third clear, never less than 90 seconds apart, and never more than four in a session. Never after a loss, never after the Daily, never during play. Those limits live in the code with tests around them.
-
ONE-TIME PURCHASE
REMOVE ADS
Ends the between-level interstitials permanently. The opt-in rewarded ads stay — a revive after a burnout, or a free tool when you're short of coins, are things you choose, and removing ads should not remove your choices.
-
COINS // OPTIONAL
A POUCH, A SATCHEL, A CHEST
Three coin packs — 600, 1,800 and 4,500 coins — for anyone who would rather buy the tools than earn them. Coins also fall out of ordinary play: you start with 300, a clear pays 20 plus 12 per unused move (up to 60 more), a par-exact clear pays 30 on top, finishing a seam pays 400, and the Daily pays 45 plus 8 a day of streak, capped at 80.
-
COIN SINKS
TOOLS, NOT POWER
Foresight costs 60 and names a piece that is on an optimal path from where you are now. Douse costs 90, cools every scar by two, and spends no move. A revive costs 150 and hands back three moves. Quiet Hours costs 450 for a 24-hour ad-free window, and buying it again extends the window rather than resetting it. Three undos an attempt are free.
-
COSMETIC ONLY
SIX EMBER PALETTES
Emberseam — charcoal and orange — and Daybreak, the light one, are free from the start: choosing a light interface is a legibility preference and must never cost money. Magma, Frostfire and Verdigris are 500 coins each, Inkwell — no colour at all, watch the shapes instead — is 750. Coins, not money, and they change nothing but the look.
-
NOT IN HERE
NO SUBSCRIPTION
No monthly anything, no season pass, no loot box, no randomised reward, no timed energy gate, no "watch an ad to keep your streak". There is nothing in this game that needs a probability disclosure in any market. There is also no chat, no account and no way for one player to reach another.
▶ ON THE RECORD
YOUR DATA STAYS YOURS
Emberseam asks for no permissions of its own — no camera, no microphone, no location, no contacts, no notifications. There is no account to make, no server of ours anywhere in the picture, and no analytics or crash reporter in the build. Your settings, statistics, daily ledger, campaign progress and unlocked palettes, your coin balance and the two boards you are part-way through all sit in your phone's own storage; delete the app and they go with it. Every board ships inside the game, so it plays fine in a tunnel. Exactly two things reach the network: Google's ad SDK, which serves the ads, and the store that handles purchases — we never see payment details. The full, plainly-worded details live on the privacy page — the same one we will submit to the App Store and Google Play.