Official Announcement Trailer!
Hooray, I made a trailer! That's a thing you do when you release a video game, right?
This is all very exciting and it makes the game feel official in some way. I mean, it's definitely a game I made and will sell for money (that's weird!), but making a video about it for some reason makes it seem like a legitimate game. Also I'm impressed that I don't completely hate watching the trailer. I can't be around when other people watch it yet, but one thing at a time.
Anyway, some insider info for those of you who care. As with most game stuff, making a trailer is hard and also time consuming! I've never made a video like this before and due to not really having any video editing skills to speak of it was kind of a challenge from the start.
The trailer is done entirely in game! All the level transitions, changes to the player, text overlays and so on are all in game. It's actually piggybacking on the tutorial system I wrote which allows you to display some text (or anything really) on the screen and then transition to the next step when some condition is met. The sequences where the player moves in the tutorial are just me. I actually recorded the footage for it probably 10 - 15 times and each one was unique for any sequence that requires player input. Also the level generator continues to do work so if you looked at the raw footage the levels would also be different.
This was mostly done due to my aforementioned lack of video editing skills. Rather than capture a ton of footage of what I thought would be cool and splicing it together in a video editor I just staged it all within the confines of the game itself. A lot of sequences are trimmed for time of course, so the cuts when you "play" the trailer aren't as abrupt. Either way it probably cut down on the work I had to do since I already know how the game works but not how video editing works. I don't know if this is the best way to make a trailer (I'm guessing it's not) but it worked pretty well for me.
And a final note, the music in the trailer is called "Ice Cave" and it comes from a Creative Commons album called "Songs from an Unmade World" by Visager. You can check out his website or follow him on Twitter for more. This is also the music the game plays and I'm pretty happy with it. Thanks to Visager for releasing some great free music and I hope my game does it some justice.