# Marcus Delgado, Lead Dev / Co-founder at Silverline Interactive — read of CinemaForge, June 9 2026 > "8 years in games, first 5 at a mid-size Unity shop, last 3 going indie with my co-founder. We shipped one mobile thing and we're 14 months into a PC title. I do most of the code, she does most of the art." ## How I got here Someone in our Discord server (Indie Dev Collective, around 200 members) posted a link with the message "anyone tried this for trailers?" No context. I clicked because we are actively dreading trailer season. Last time we hired a video editor off Fiverr for $400 and I hated the result and we still shipped it. Came in around 11:15 PM after my daughter went down. ## What I clicked first The line that got me was "Your cinematics live in Git as code. Diff changes, branch experiments, and merge cinematic updates just like production code. No binary video files clogging your repository." That is a real problem I have had, actually. Our repo has a `/trailers` folder with four untracked `.mp4` files that no one wants to touch. So that framing landed. The hero headline "Generate Stunning Game Cinematics in Minutes" is the kind of thing I scroll past without reading, but that Git line made me stop and read backward. ## Where I paused The React component approach. "Define camera movements, actor positions, and scene timing using simple React components." I know React. I do not know what a cinematic defined in React looks like. There is no code sample, no screenshot, no 15-second gif of what the output actually is. This is the only thing I actually wanted to see. I scrolled the whole page twice looking for a demo video or even a static frame of rendered output. Nothing. For a product that sells visual output, that is a strange omission. ## What I distrusted Two things, one small and one large. Small: "broadcast-quality video" appears three times. That phrase has been used to describe everything from Premiere Pro to a $12 app on the App Store. It does not mean anything without a sample. Large: I got to the bottom of the page and saw this section with an "Adoptability" score of 62/100, "Year-1 take-home (Fermi): -$30,900," and then this: "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet. We shipped the strategy package; you ship the customer conversations." There are also buttons to "Unlock the dossier for $5" and "Adopt the build for $99-$199." So this is not a product. This is a product idea for sale. The pricing table above with $0 / $29 / Custom tiers is a mockup of what the pricing could be. The FAQ answers ("rendering happens locally on your machine," "a 30-second 1080p cinematic typically renders in 2-5 minutes") describe software that does not exist yet, or at least has no paying users. I should have caught that sooner. The whole page reads like a real product page, which is deliberate. The "Honest Hire team to build" link in the nav also should have been a tell. ## What would convince me If the code existed and worked: show me 30 seconds of output from a real indie game that used it. Not stock footage, not a generic space scene, an actual game I can look up on Steam with a trailer that was made this way. One real example beats every line of copy on this page. If this is still in the idea phase: I do not need to be convinced of anything. I need to know if someone is actually building it and when it would be usable, because I have a trailer deadline in roughly four months. ## What I'd ask in an email reply 1. Is there working software I can download and run right now, or is this an idea you're gauging interest on before building? The bottom of the page implies the latter but the pricing table implies the former. 2. What does the React component API actually look like? Can I see two lines of example code? Something like `` or whatever the syntax is -- I just want to know if I am writing JSX that describes a camera path or something more abstract. 3. The "offline rendering" claim is interesting to me specifically because we have game assets in proprietary formats. Does CinemaForge bring its own asset pipeline, or do I need to bring pre-rendered frames and it handles the compositing and camera work on top of them? ## Verdict: on-the-fence The concept is genuinely interesting to me and the Git-as-code angle is the first time I've seen someone frame the problem that way. But there is no product to evaluate yet, and the page is structured to obscure that fact until you get to the very bottom. If someone emails me saying "here is a build you can try this week," I reply same day. --- *Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-09. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*