Decided to split this devlog in two as making a videogame trailer is a fairly long process, particularly when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing! Plus there’s been a couple of other things that needed attending to before I felt I could really progress as I’d like.

1. Audio FX
Firstly I had to do some more work on the in-game audio. There were a number of actions I felt required fx that didn’t have any (some pretty important such as unlocking weapons and worlds) and a couple I wasn’t happy with. I spent a couple of days on this. There are now around 270 individual effects files in the game, and that’s not including background music and loops! I think the audio is a pretty distinctive part of the game due to the fact it’s all produced from scratch on analogue gear – no stock samples here, folks!

2. Performance Optimisations
Secondly, as I was recording a bunch of action footage I began to notice frame-rate drop at a few points where there was really intense action on screen. This was exclusively at places where enemies that release a bunch of ‘offspring’ are destroyed by a weapon that kills the enemy and all it’s offspring in one fell swoop (e.g. the jetboard attack). The resulting explosion-and-bonus-fest was just a bit too much.

So, I worked on some optimisations for the above. This included adding object pooling for every object that’s generated when an enemy is destroyed, combining multiple smaller explosions and/or smoke clouds that are very close together (and instantiated in the same frame) into one larger one, and pre-caching of the terrain elements that pickups might hit as they fall (rather than calculating this every frame). I’ve also let some offspring ‘escape’ in the above scenario as I didn’t like it when absolutely everything got destroyed. I no longer see any frame rate drop now, even when there’s a shitload of fireworks going on, and I’m running a Mac from 2008!

3. Start The Trailer
Before starting the trailer I read through a number of very helpful blogs on the subject by Kert Gartner and M. Joshua. Here is a particularly good one.

3.1 Choose The Tools
One of the most useful practical tips I picked up from these was a pointer to an app called Screenflow that will grab 1080 game footage at 60fps even on my ancient Mac. I’ve been through a bunch of these screen capture applications (Snapz Pro, Capto, Screenium) but Screenflow is the only one that will do this. Capto is cheap and neat (this is what I’ve used for most of my animated GIFs and devlog posts) but will sometimes compress really heavily for no apparent reason, Screenium is almost as good as Screenflow (and cheaper), will let you record a set area AND remembers this rea (really useful) but it still compresses a bit even at the highest settings (plus I found it’s editing tools a tad clumsy and prone to crashing). For the purposes of recording gameplay footage for trailers Screenflow definitely comes out tops.

3.2 Intro
Probably the hardest part of the trailer to get right is the first 15 seconds. You don’t want to lose the user’s interest and you have to attempt to communicate the core mechanics of your game in as short a time as possible (without being overly didactic). I’m still not sure I’m 100% there but I think what I’ve come up with does a reasonable job of communicating abductions, mutations, the jetboard attack and the general carnage of the game in that timeframe. To get this footage I used a combination of scripted events (i.e. faking things through coding) and playing through a set sequence over and over again until I managed to one-shot all the enemies in a way that looked effortless and ‘readable’ enough.

3.3 Shock & Awe
After this initial intro section comes just under another 15 seconds of what I’m referring to as ‘shock and awe’. This is a high-octane segment that focusses mainly on the destruction wrought by the jetboard attack but also features a couple of other weapons. This is all ‘real’ gameplay footage, I just recorded a load of stuff to get a variety of enemies and palettes. I deliberately try and move the action from one side of the screen to the other here.

3.4 Breathing Space
Lastly comes just over 10 seconds of ‘breathing space’. A longer cut in which we see the destruction of a boss, the opening of a treasure chamber and the discovery of a new weapon. This section has a certain amount of scripting (reducing the bosses health and getting rid of some onscreen distractions) but is largely the result of playthrough after playthrough to get things looking slick and pulled off in as short a time as possible.

I’ve tried to keep the player’s position onscreen consistent between cuts so that the viewer’s eyes can easily track what’s going on. I’m also zooming/panning across the action where appropriate in order to avoid ‘dead’ areas of screenspace and create variety. I thought this might be overly distracting but it doesn’t seem to be.

So now we have just under 45 seconds of trailer done which is approximately half of it. Next step, around 20 seconds on enemies and weapons, 20 seconds on bosses, and a five second closer!



Dev Time: 10 days (inc 2 days audio and 2.5 days performance optimisations)
Total Dev Time: approx 292 days