🎬 LAST FRAME

A playable film. Every shot is generated as you watch, and the video model is the dice: whatever happens on screen is what happened, whatever you intended. You asked to leap the chasm; the frame shows you dangling from the ledge by one hand? That's what happened. Take the damage.

Powered by fal + MiniMax H3 Max, a video model faster than realtime, which makes a game rendered by a video model possible: choices pre-film while you decide, so picking one plays instantly.

From a run of THE LOST TAPE, the found-footage horror world. Shot 19: the rocking chair starts moving on its own while the next choices film over the still-rolling clip.

Shot 26, 5 vitality left. It stopped keeping its distance.

The rules

• 100 vitality, one life. The Adjudicator (a vision LLM that watches every shot's final frame) rules on what it sees and charges you for it. Every HP change carries an evidence still of the frame that justified it.
• Three choices per beat, or type your own. The three options pre-film in parallel while you read them (watch the tape labels go filming → in the can). Typed moves are refereed against the current frame and risky ones roll a visible d20: the roll decides whether the success or the failure shot gets filmed.
• Hesitate and the world moves. The choice timer is real. Let it run out and the world takes its own shot, never in your favor.
• What you see is what you take. Objects your hero visibly grabs become inventory cards (with the frame they came from). An item is a stored prompt fragment: arm one and it is written into your next shot, guaranteed.
• Win on screen. Each world has a goal the Adjudicator must see accomplished. Death gets a final generated cinematic; either way you get the full timeline of your run, shot by shot, with every roll and wound.

Quick start

npm install
cp .env.example .env.local   # put your fal API key in it
npm run dev

Get a key at fal.ai/dashboard/keys. Open http://localhost:3000 and pick a world.

How it works

opening (t2v) ──► play ──► ADJUDICATOR rules on the last frame
                   │            (during playback: zero wall-clock)
                   ▼
             freeze-frame choice phase ── 3 branches pre-film in parallel
                   │                          (i2v from the same frame)
        pick / type / timeout
                   ▼
             chosen shot plays (usually already in the can) ──► loop

• Continuity is the frame, novelty is the text. Every shot chains from the previous shot's last frame (image_url), so the film never breaks; prompts only ever describe change.
• The Adjudicator (Gemini Flash Lite via fal's vision router) returns strict JSON per shot: scene ground truth, narration, HP delta + reason, items gained/lost, a ≤60-word synopsis of completed facts, death/victory flags, the next three options, and the world's move if you stall. It runs while the clip plays, so verdicts are free.
• The Referee judges typed actions against the frame: risk tier (safe / risky ≥8 / deadly ≥13 on a d20) plus a success shot and a failure shot. Moderation (strict ALLOW/BLOCK, injection-hardened, fail-closed) runs in parallel server-side.
• Branch pre-generation is the trick that makes it feel like a game: the choice phase is the generation window. All three branches fan out in parallel from the frozen frame; a pick lands instantly.
• Your FAL_KEY stays server-side (@fal-ai/server-proxy), and clips stream through a same-origin media proxy so canvas frame grabs never hit CORS.

Cost note

A run films ~3 branch clips per choice plus one shot that plays, at 480P / 10s each, plus two small LLM calls per beat. Keep an eye on your fal usage; dying is the cheapest way to stop.