game.staging.beats

The four moments the camera of First Light: Goura takes itself away from Tawpy for. FloorCam.component runs them; this module holds their shape.

local Beats = require("game.staging.beats")

cutscene.play(Beats.opening(ctx, narratorLine))   -- the opening
local pose = Beats.seen(t, ctx)                   -- t runs 0 → 1

The opening — a cutscene

The opening is a real cutscene: a shot list, letterbox bands, a fade up out of the night's own colour, and the narrator's line as a subtitle. It ends by giving the game back, however it ended — played out, skipped, or stopped.

Three shots, continuous:

1. The crown. A station under the canopy, looking up the lane at the head of the roost tree, rising and pushing slowly in. It sits under the canopy on purpose: the shot has to read at every light the run can open on, and a station out above the canopy is a legible silhouette at dawn and a dark mass at night. Under it there are always trunks, shafts and canopy.
2. Down the lane. The camera falls out of the canopy and retreats the whole length of the lane, past her, while the aim comes off the crown and settles on the floor ahead. Every look anchor sits further up the lane than the camera does — that one rule is what keeps the aim from swinging across the frame, and it is the difference between a descent and a whip. She arrives in the last second of it, tiny, at the bottom of the lane.
3. The settle. The camera comes down onto exactly the pose the chase camera takes over, with her in frame the whole way, so the hand-off is a continuation and not a cut.

Beats.replayShots is the short form — the settle alone, 2.6 s, no line. The first night gets the whole opening; every retry after it gets this, because eleven seconds between two attempts is a wall rather than a beat.

Escape is deliberately not a skip key here (SKIP_KEYS), and staging.inputMap leaves it off too: Escape is the pause control, and a key that both ends the opening and opens the pause card lands the player on a menu they did not ask for.

The three pose beats

Beats.seen, Beats.won and Beats.lost are functions of a normalised clock and a ctx of live readings. They return { px, py, pz, ax, ay, az, fov }.

seen hands the camera straight back; the two end beats hold their last frame under the end card until the phase moves on.

No state

Nothing here reads the world — every beat is handed its ctx — so the module holds nothing a hot reload can lose, and any beat can be evaluated without playing it. That is how the filmstrips were taken:

local eye, at, fov = cutscene.evaluate(Beats.openingShots(ctx), 5.8)

then capture from that station. It is much faster than watching the shot forty times, and it does not disturb anyone else playing in the world.

What it needs from the other slices

ctx.crown is where the roost tree's head is. FloorCam reads it from FL.get("roost") when the floor slice publishes one, and otherwise from its own crownHeight / crownBeyond fields against FL.LANE. A published roost.crown() would be the better contract — the opening and the win are both aimed at a landmark the floor slice owns and moves.