What happens in it
Every shot is the game you can play. Tap a time to jump there.
- Cold open. One pumpkin, carved to perfection.
- And one that was not. “Nailed it.”
- The title.
- Seven varieties: Knucklehead, Lumina, Jarrahdale, Big Max.
- Cut the lid. The goop strings stretch and snap.
- The new Seven cam. He scans your lid and cuts his own, enormous.
- Scoop the goop into the bowl.
- Seven scoops his. Some of it lands on his visor.
- Stencils, a knife, a drill and an etching loop.
- Caught peeking. “I wasn’t looking.”
- His copy of your eyes. Upside down.
- A tea light, the lid, then lights out.
- Seven uses three candles.
- The porch, Kelda Head, Lumen Reach, the garden deck, Firehawk City.
- Carve Night. Free, in your browser.
- One more thing about Seven’s pumpkin.
How it was made
There is no separate trailer build. A script loads the game in headless Chrome and stops its clock: the game only moves when the script steps it forward, one twenty-fourth of a second at a time, and a picture is saved after each step. The script plays each shot the way a player would, cutting the lid, scooping, stamping stencils and dropping in candles, and moves the camera along a path.
Seven isn't scripted. He copies what the shot does, the same way he copies you. The script only holds his jobs back between shots, and asks for a particular mistake when a shot needs one. Every sound the game asked for was logged with its time, so the edit could put real sounds in the same places.
Shooting it found five bugs, all fixed in the game now. Four candles in Seven's tiny pumpkin lit the whole table like a bonfire. Small pumpkins glowed far hotter than big ones. Every copy Seven made after his first one landed on the back of his pumpkin, and a copy could fall into his own lid hole. And the sea at Kelda Head and Lumen Reach had never been drawn at all. It also needed a new camera. The Seven cam is in the game now: press it, or C, to watch him from his end of the table. He doesn't know it's there.
The narrator, the music and most of the sound effects were made with ElevenLabs. Seven's chirps are his own recordings from Starlight Menagerie. The titles, the edit and the mix were done in code, with Python and FFmpeg.