For ages, we’ve kicked around the idea of making videos counting up the number of enemies we frag in our most beloved videogames. People do it all the time with action films like Rambo or John Wick – yet a quick YouTube search indicates that hardly anyone has tried doing the same thing with videogames. Given how Superhot is basically John Wick: The Game, and how for ages we’ve wanted to make kill count videos with games, we decided Superhot would be a perfect testbed for our new video. How much thought went into our simple idea?
It turned out to be more than we’d expected. Sure, we had past experience with planning major video projects, but making EVERY SINGLE KILL IN: Superhot still demanded plenty of decision-making on both a creative and technical level. Here’s a smattering of such decisions...
#1: Choreography
We might not be dedicated speedrunners, but we always play and record with efficiency in mind. A rule we mandated from the start was that we wouldn’t record any footage till we’d learned to beat the game in less than 45 minutes, including replays. Technical reasons for this ranged from not having space for excess footage, to not wanting to manage hours of footage. But creatively, we also felt that this rule – being able to finish the game in less than 45 minutes – would force the choreography of our fights to be as efficient and blunt as possible. Nobody who sits through our videos should have their time wasted by amateurish or fumbling kills.
Another reason we needed to choreograph our fights was due to the game’s final level – enemy placements are randomised, which resulted in inconsistent kill counts. To resolve this, we developed a strategy to beat the level in the fastest way with the fewest casualties possible, sometimes even running past enemies instead of shooting them. We ran through the level multiple times to see how many kills we averaged per run, averaged those averages to settle on a final number, and then recorded a run of the level where we got that number of kills. Whew!
#2: Recording
We used Shadowplay to record footage, which was more complex than we’d anticipated. Shadowplay can’t directly record footage in Superhot, presumably because the game’s engine defaults to windowed borderless mode. Instead we recorded via Shadowplay’s Desktop Capture, but this came with its own problem – the audio in the resulting footage is often completely out of sync when recorded with Desktop Capture.
The generally accepted solution is to transcode footage via Handbrake first, but transcoding entails quality loss, which is a sacrifice we refuse to make. Instead of transcoding through Handbrake, we imported the footage into our video editors and painstakingly matched up all the audio with corresponding video. Good thing we had fewer than 45 minutes of footage to edit!
#3: Video editing
We’d planned to use the game’s replay editor to help with recording slow motion footage. Sure, we knew the replay editor had limitations, like the inability to record gameplay audio – but we were going to work around that by manually editing sound effects into the replay footage. We even worked on extracting audio from Superhot for this purpose...
Until we realised we couldn’t use the game’s replay editor on the final level. After beating it, the game goes directly to the epilogue. So we tossed out all the replay footage we’d recorded of the other levels, and decided to use live gameplay footage for the whole video instead. Granted, this meant we didn’t need to manually edit sound effects into our footage anymore – but it also threw off the intended pacing of our video, which we thought would revolve around slow motion carnage. We spent hours on experimenting with new styles of pacing for the video, but when we finally found a style we liked, we realised the music we’d originally developed for the video no longer suited that style. So now we needed new...
#4: Music
This was tough. We spent days on testing temp tracks and ideas, favouring some over others but not really loving any of them. Ultimately, we looked to the French public domain for a solution. We found an old composition by the late Erik Satie, developed a stripped-down version of one of his works, and found that it not only meshed well with the simplicity of our visuals but also contrasted beautifully with the carnage onscreen. Satisfied with this final result, we exported the video and submitted it to the #Makeitsuperhot art competition. And now we’re writing this blog post about it.
Art is the result of countless judicious compromises, and we’re proud that EVERY SINGLE KILL IN: Superhot has matured over time into what it is now. If you’ve ever wondered what decisions go into these sorts of projects, we hope this post provides some answers. Of course, we’re also thankful for the Superhot Team making the Matrix videogame we always wanted. :-p
