· Enes
Recording the home page from the game itself
The home page now opens the way the game does: the last wall at night, its torches throwing sparks into the fog, fireflies over the field and a flock of bats crossing it. It is twelve seconds long and it never ends. This is how it was recorded from the game itself.
A plate, not a screenshot
The title screen has words on it and a frame around it, and it rolls a new sky every time it opens: rain, snow, storm or fog. A build made for development has a switch that opens it as a plate instead, with nothing written on it, no frame, and always night under fog. The battlefield's own life comes in too: the bats, the fireflies and the ash that drift over the field between assaults. The game players get never takes that switch.
Recorded in real time
A browser with no window runs the game at twice the size, 2560 pixels wide, and records the canvas as it draws, cut to the field without the empty bars above and below it. The game is held at thirty frames a second while it records, so every frame it draws is a frame of the clip. The first take did not do that: the machine fell behind, recorded fewer frames than it should have, and the sparks came out about a third too fast.
A loop with no seam
A clip that simply stops and starts again jumps: the fog is somewhere else, the sparks are somewhere else. So the first two seconds of the recording are kept back and slowly blended into the last two. By its last frame the clip has turned into the frame just before its first. Anything that crossed the screen during the blend would show twice, half faded, so the bats are sent across once, in the middle, twice as fast as they fly over the field, and are gone before the blend begins.
Sharp, and light
The browser's own video encoder is built for live video: it spends its bits as the frames come, and at a bitrate a web page can afford the soft dark of the fog suffers first. So the browser only records a master, at a high bitrate, and Blender encodes the file the page plays afterwards, at a constant quality: three megabytes for twelve seconds. The picture the page shows before the video plays is its first frame, and if your system asks for less motion, that still is all you see.
When the title screen changes, the same tool records it again.
— Enes