Slop Night: staging a horror trailer inside the game

A horror trailer needs more than a monster reveal. It needs the viewer to understand what
makes that monster dangerous.

For Slop Night, we built an 80-second trailer around the game's rules: listen at the door,
keep watching Ballerina Cappuccina, stay out of the water, and avoid the light. Each rule
gets its own scene and its own lyric treatment.

Use the game as the set

The footage uses the game's characters, environments and systems, staged through a director
mode. That gave us repeatable camera paths and character actions while retaining the look of
the game. The first-person sequences use its native HUD; they are scripted scenarios rather
than a recording of an unscripted player session.

That distinction mattered during review. Ballerina must follow her gameplay rule even in a
trailer. One shot originally let her retreat while the player was watching. We changed the
return-glance timing so the shot preserves the game's actual stare behaviour through the cut.

Make lyrics behave like the scene

Our first lyric passes used a repeated layout. The words were readable, but the treatment
made different encounters feel too similar.

The final version uses timestamped word reveals with a different composition for each section:

• Sahur's three knocks become three offset type impacts.
• Ballerina's section uses a restrained dance-program layout.
• The water verse has floating text and broken reflections.
• The window sequence sends a searchlight across words that have already appeared.
• The escape sequence contrasts opening space with text that closes in.

Each overlay is calculated from the current song time, so a frame can be reproduced without
playing through the sequence first. We kept the lyric timing from the approved draft and
composited the final text over the existing video masters. Typography revisions therefore did
not require another render of the 3D scenes.

Review the actual output

We used 480p30 drafts for iteration and exported the approved versions at 1080p60. Portrait
needed its own text placement: simply cropping the landscape design would cut off words and
cover the gameplay HUD.

The final checks included a sample at every word cue, full-file decoding, frame counts, and
an audio-stream comparison against the approved source. Those checks catch export mistakes;
they do not replace watching the film and judging the pacing.

Watch with sound for the haunted lullaby, or find Slop Night at games.cynxio.com.