scOpening — the opening of Saltcrown

A cutscene definition: four shots, nineteen seconds, over an ocean with one stone left in it. It runs before the first course is laid — no floors, no scaffolding, nothing built — and it establishes the three things the whole game is about: how much water there is, how little stone, and where the line between them is.

1. The sea — long and near still. Grey water to the horizon, the pillar small and off-centre.
2. The approach — the frame commits to the stone; the skiff crosses.
3. The waterline — down onto the surface, where the salt band on the granite says how far the water has already come.
4. The shoulder — a crane up and back that lands exactly on the pose scenes/main.scene/build.luau gave GameCamera, so the hand-over to gameplay is a continuation rather than a cut.

cutscene.play("scOpening")

takeCamera is false on purpose. The game.staging slice drives GameCamera itself along these shots with cutscene.evaluate, so the game's own camera is the one moving and no second camera ever enters the scene. What the cutscene system contributes is the part that is genuinely hard: the letterbox, the fades at both boundaries, the subtitle band, the skip key, and a clock.

Working on it

zero cutscene play scOpening    -- put it on screen now
zero cutscene seek 11           -- land on the shot you are working on
zero cutscene rate 0.3          -- slow enough to read a move

Two constraints the shot list has to keep:

• The last key of shot 4 is the scene's authored camera pose. If the scene's opening pose moves, this move has to land on the new one.
• Subtitles stay under about 38 characters. The band is one line at a fixed size on a 1080-wide screen; a longer line runs off the right edge and is simply cut.