Slop Hunt is our free browser hide and seek game: hiders turn into props, hunters try to work out which lamp is a player. This is its trailer, 57 seconds, cut like a jazzy detective anime opening.
How it was made
None of the footage is a screen recording. Because we own the game's source, the trailer runs the real game in a director mode:
- Puppets in the real levels. Each shot is a small script: which level, who is in it, what they do on which sung word. The game's own renderer draws it, with its own props, beams and glitch effects.
- A collision checker. Scripted actors have no physics, so the first draft had characters walking through sofas. Now every walker takes a route from a small pathfinder over the game's collision data, and a checker lists any actor or camera that ends up inside a wall, a prop or another actor. Nobody moves faster than the game allows either.
- Cuts on the music. The song is analysed for its beats and the lyrics are aligned per word, so a prop bursts into its character exactly on the shouted name. The whispered countdown turned out to be unevenly spaced, so each number is timed on its own.
- Detective dressing. A spotlight searches the room and settles on the prop when it is named, and a drawn magnifying glass really magnifies the picture under its lens.
- Drawn eyes in five frames. Each hider has a strip of illustrated eyes that goes from shut to peeking to wide open on its name. The five frames are drawn as one sheet so they match.
- Offline rendering. Frames are rendered one at a time in headless Chrome at 1080p60, eight sub-frames each for motion blur, then piped to ffmpeg.
Play it
Slop Hunt runs in the browser, with nothing to install: https://games.cynxio.com
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