staging — the moments

The staging slice owns the camera of ANVIL CROWN: the three beats that give the run a shape, the two endings, and the framing on every frame in between.

The beats

Each beat is a cutscene definition, so it carries its own letterbox, fade, radio subtitles and cues, and it is skippable. The phase advance lives in onFinished, which fires whether the beat played out, was skipped or was stopped — a player who skips the opening still starts the climb.

The camera between beats

A.claims.staging is set at the top of the module, which stands the director's per-frame camera fit down and hands it here. On every frame that is not a beat the module puts the camera on the one station where the shaft touches both screen edges (A.field.fitCamera), and adds two things on top:

• a slow drift while the title screen is up, so the storm behind the card lives;
• shake — state.shake is raised by anyone through the shake event and is turned into camera displacement here, because nothing else owns the camera.

Dressing

StagingProps is a container under the scene's Staging anchor that lives for the title and the opening and is struck on the way into the climb. The only thing in it is the runner's wake during the entry — a bright streak trailing the airframe as it climbs out of the murk. The weather in the frame is the vfx slice's, and staging adds no scenery of its own on top of it.

Reading the beats while authoring

Each definition is exported, so a beat can be put on screen without waiting for the run to reach the phase that owns it:

local S = require("game.staging.staging")
cutscene.play(S.crown()):seek(3.2)
S.buildProps()          -- a seek does not fire the cue that spawns the dressing

Two rules the shots are written to

• An entity anchor goes into a shot as its ID STRING, never as the entity proxy — entityRef() does this. A proxy is read as a polyline and the whole playback fails.
• The eyewall is a large body, and the distance it reads at is the distance it is fought at. Pushing the camera into it fills the frame with wisps. The reveal and the resolution hold near the gameplay station and change their aim, not their distance.