Mountain isn’t a typical game. Some might even argue that it isn’t a game at all. Once you’ve made a few choices at the very start, all you do for the remaining “game” time is either watch things progress or let the game run while you do something else entirely. But it’s a beautiful thing to watch. There’s a realistic environmental model: day changes to night, seasons come and go, trees grow and die. And of course there’s the weather too: clouds, wind, rain and snow. Occasionally objects will fall from the sky and hit the mountain. Airplanes, asteroids, you name it. The mountain usually lives for about 50 hours and then dies.

Making screenshots

There are loads of apps for screen capturing with a Mac. I recommend Screenflow . But it would be really, really resource-consuming to capture 50 hours of footage, so I decided to make a time-lapse.

I started with this simple bash script which makes a screenshot every 180 seconds:

while [ 1 ];do vardate=$(date +%d\-%m\-%Y\_%H.%M.%S); screencapture -t jpg -x ~/Desktop/mountain/$vardate.jpg; sleep 180; done

It takes three minutes for the mountain to complete each rotation. So in every screenshot the mountain should be at the same angle. You can just open up the game, start this script in terminal, and go about your everyday business.

So that’s what I did. I left my MacBook by itself for a weekend. By Monday morning the game still wasn’t finished, but I had to stop the process, since I needed the Mac for work. But anyway, I still had a ton of screenshots to play with.

I found that the resulting period was not exactly 180 seconds. The screencapture command takes a few milliseconds to run, and in the long run the offset accumulates, so the mountain in the screenshots is very gradually rotating.

Playing with screenshots

So now I had almost 700 screenshots. I used the ffmpeg script to combine all the *.jpg files in the current directory and turn them into a video:

ffmpeg -r 25 -pattern_type glob -i '*.jpg' mountain.mp4

This is what I ended up with:

Day and night change so fast, it looks like a stroboscope.

Then I tried to use every n-th frame for video to make it smoother. Every 6th frame was okay.

Final Shoot

The sign means “Do not touch!”

So, I’ve done all the required research to start the final shoot. I’ve never finished Mountain before, but they say that it should take about 50 hours. I found an old unused MacBook in the office, put it in a dark corner, started the script, and left it for two days.

Putting Everything Together

I missed the final moments of the game. On the third morning, when I checked the mountain, I’d received the message: “You have been destroyed by the eye of love unrequited”.

It seems that this red circle in the last screenshot is that “eye of love unrequited”.

I made 1304 screenshots in total. That’s 65 hours and 12 minutes. Now I needed to select every 6th frame and crop each one. I automated both tasks with a single bash script. I used ImageMagick for cropping:

for x in `ls *.jpg | awk '{nr++; if (nr % 6 == 1) print $0}'`; do `convert $x -crop 664x664+552+80 crop/$x`; done

Then I just used the ffmpeg script I mentioned earlier to make a video, and that’s it:

And make sure to buy Mountain, it’s really cool.

Bonus: So many dumb ways to die for a Mountain and the story how I did it: https://medium.com/coub-insider/using-screenflow-for-creating-coubs-6c235a07c0db