game.staging — the camera and the moments

Saltcrown has one camera and the player never touches it, so this slice is the whole of how the game is seen. It is the only code that moves GameCamera, and it owns everything under StagingRoot.

local Core = require("game.gamecore")   -- everything this slice reads

The four things it does

The climb. The everyday shot. It frames the live tower — from the waterline up to the top of what stands — and re-frames continuously as the stack grows and the water rises, so the two things the player is choosing between are always both on screen. A slow parallax swing keeps the frame from going dead.

The opening. Nineteen seconds on the empty pillar and the empty sea, before the first course is laid. Fires on phaseChanged → "play", holds the season clock still (Core.state.paused) while it runs, and hands over on exactly the pose the scene authored, so the cut to gameplay is a continuation rather than a jump. Authored in art.staging.scOpening.

The beat. A floor going under is the only irreversible thing in Saltcrown, so it is the one thing that takes the camera: the frame drops to the surface, pushes in on the water closing over the course, holds, and lets go. A ruled plate names what was lost. Fires on floorDrowned and floorSacrificed; only one beat runs at a time, so a season that takes two floors still gets one clean moment.

The ending. On runEnded, a sixteen-second crane off the waterline up the whole tower to the crown — which then holds. The last frame of a run is the thing the run built, with the end card over it.

Things worth knowing before changing it

• The ledger owns the bottom of the screen. On a 1080×1440 portrait viewport the clear window the 3D plays in is only the top of the frame. BAND_CENTRE and BAND_HEIGHT are where that is compensated for, and both were set by capturing the running game. Retune them if the ledger's panel changes height. The beat's look points sit below the waterline for the same reason.
• The opening does not take the camera. It borrows the cutscene system's letterbox, fades, subtitle band and skip key, but takeCamera = false; the shot list is evaluated with cutscene.evaluate and written onto GameCamera. So capture { source = "main" } always shows what a player sees, and no second camera ever enters the scene.
• The overlay and the camera are two clocks. Ending the camera move does not end the letterbox; anything that takes the frame away from the opening has to stop the overlay too.
• Entity refs are re-resolved by name every frame. A scene reload destroys and rebuilds everything, and this slice writes the camera on every frame, so a proxy held across a reload is a warning per frame until a reboot.

Asking for a shot

Other slices do not move the camera; they raise an event and this slice answers it. The bus events it listens on are phaseChanged, floorDrowned, floorSacrificed and runEnded. For anything an execute wants to drive directly:

local Staging = require("game.staging")
Staging.playOpening()
Staging.beat(Core.state.floors[4])
Staging.playEnding("crown")

What it spawns

art.staging.scSkiff — the settlers' boat, under StagingRoot. It floats, so it rides the tide up the tower for the whole run.