The poster said YOU DIED

Every night at 3:20 a headless browser opens the studio's games, actually plays them for about twenty seconds, and comes away with two things: a poster and a short looping clip. This isn't a flourish. Dark Cell is on version 43 and Maze Lume on 35: a single still shot once would be showing, within a fortnight, a game that no longer exists.

There was one rule for picking which frame to keep, and it seemed reasonable: the liveliest one. High contrast, plenty of colour, plenty happening on screen.

For Dark Cell it picked the YOU DIED screen.

The rule was right

Huge red lettering on black. It is, quite literally, the highest-contrast frame in the whole recording. The rule did exactly what we had asked it to do.

The flaw wasn't in the calculation. It was in the question. "Lively" measures how strong an image is; it says nothing about what that image is telling you. And the death screen is the strongest of all precisely because it is designed to stop you.

Two filters instead of one

The fix wasn't a cleverer rule. It was asking one question before that one: is this frame alive?

The screens that embarrassed us — death, menus, pause — all share a property: they are still. The next frame is identical to the last one, because at that moment the game isn't running, it's waiting. A game in play changes thirty times a second.

So: first discard frames identical to the next one, then among what's left prefer the one with the most edges. The second filter still does the job it did before; the first one takes the wrong material out of its hands.

And the number that threw away the good frames

There was a second flaw, and it's more insidious because it was a precaution.

The recording skipped the first six frames, so as not to photograph the loading screen of a Godot web export. Prudent. Sensible. Wrong.

The automatic player gets Dark Cell killed within the first second. Of the recording's thirty frames, only the first three showed the game: the other twenty-seven were the same motionless game over screen. Skipping six threw away exactly the good frames, leaving nothing but death to choose from.

Loading was already covered by a nine-second wait before we start looking at all. Those six frames protected against nothing: they only subtracted. It's two now.

What we take away

• An automatic rule isn't wrong because it chooses badly: it's wrong when the question we asked isn't the one we wanted answered.
• Precautions have a cost, and the bill doesn't arrive until the edge case does. Six frames of margin look free until there's a game that lasts one second.
• When two safeguards overlap — the startup wait and the skipped frames — the redundant one isn't harmless. It's the one that loses you the good data.