Slop Park is a 2D co-op platformer for one to eight players, free in the browser. Its trailer is 64 seconds long and none of it is screen recording: every shot is the game's own code, drawn frame by frame to a ska punk track.
The game's cutscenes are the spine
The game already had a small cutscene engine: a script is plain data, a list of beats on one clock ("this character jumps at 2.1 s", "the camera cuts here"). The trailer plays three of the game's own scenes through that engine and adds three written only for the film: a throw cut as a strip of close-ups, a line of dominoes, and the closing line-up.
Because a scene is a pure function of its own time, the edit is a table: for each shot, which of the scene's seconds each second of the film shows. That is how the bomb's fuse, two thirds of a second in the game, plays over two and a half seconds in the trailer, and how the lever lands on a downbeat without touching the game's script.
The levels are played, not captured
The three looks at real levels are the game's simulation replayed from recorded inputs. The inputs come from the scripted routes the game's tests already use to prove each co-op level can be finished by eight players. A small tool scores every second of every route by how many of the eight are together and moving, and the trailer uses the best seconds.
The first version of those shots failed review three times for the same reason: small figures in a wide frame. What fixed it was not a better camera but better moments, and a camera that aims at where most of the team is, averaged over half a second so it does not chase every hop.
Five rounds of critics
Each draft went to two reviewers: one who knew the brief and one who was told nothing and watched it as a stranger would. They found what the people who built it could not see any more: a caption that faded out and came back three times, a held character covering the line "1 to 8 players" for half the end card, a title gone before it could be read.
The stranger's reports were the more useful ones. "I could not tell what kind of game this is" put the word co-op on the end card.
Two formats from one edit
The vertical cut is the same edit with a different frame: each scene shown a little smaller, a part of its width, with its ground line fixed two thirds of the way down. The scenes paint on above and below their picture, so there are no bars. Captions and the end card have their own vertical layout.
Play Slop Park at games.cynxio.com.
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