Making my first gameplay trailer news - Find Yo Nuts

As a programmer, as many of you likely are, it's usually not in our realm to put videos and other content packs together. Usually that falls on the more creative types, like the artists, or someone dedicated to the marketing aspect.

As an indie developer, you sometimes don't have those people in your projects, so it falls on you.

So I first took to google and searched around. There's a lot of noise out there for taking screen recordings and then how to edit them. I tried a few different screen capture software tools, with mixed results to quality. The most important issue was capturing at a high enough FPS so the games interactions weren't lost. I turned to social media and friends to catch their recommendations. I ultimately found my solution this way.

I finally settled on Open Broadcaster. It allowed for a capture that didn't result in frames lost, allowed me to attach to a window and would hide the mouse/UI frame, as I was capturing the video from a PC build and not from the device itself. It exported the videos in .FLV format, so I used VLC player to check out the final product. I highly recommend both tools, after trying a half dozen different ones, it was by far the best.

From there, I recorded various game play sessions, with the intention of cutting and editing into a final video. I would record some play, then stop, review and delete the content if I didn't catch anything that would be a good edit. This took a few hours in all, as I tried to get videos showing various levels of challenges available in the game.

Again, social media provided the solution. Wondershare Video Editor is absolutely fantastic. I was able to drop in all my individual videos, drop them on the timeline, cut and remove the sections I didn't want, and set up a audio track to the entire thing. I went through several iterations of videos, and I suggest you comment if you want to see the earlier attempts, as only the final video is what's available via the games store page.

The editor also allowed for PIP overlays. If that's not clear, in simpler terms, it lets you put images and masks over the video content. You can do some pretty advanced stuff. Now, if you're aware of the history behind Find Yo Nuts, my friend and artist partnered died before the game was released. So I had to take up working on finalizing art stuff. I turned to Inkscape to create the parts of the video that included in-game characters saying different things during the video. Once I had a .png of the image, I could drop that into the media region of Wondershare, then set the image on one of the PIP layers. Voila, little story tidbits were now part of the video showing the gameplay.

The whole process spanned a couple days, where I spent 2-4hrs each day working on the video and doing edits.

I turned to social media, reddit and twitter to get feedback on the videos. I got a lot of good input about the text I had appearing at various parts of the video. The general consensus, it shouldn't move. It was distracting from the game play aspect. Make sure it's framed. The last part of the feedback was to make it either about the story, or how to play. In the end, I felt the video showed how to play, so the text is more about the story. Why were the nuts hiding, tease enough story to hopefully get people to play.

As for the video, my first video had too many cuts, it was difficult to identify what the game play was. I went back to the drawing board, and creating less cuts, and longer game play sections. That meant recording more videos, and refactoring the first 30 seconds of the video.

The length of the video wasn't commented on, it appears 30-60 seconds of video is ok. I don't have any idea if longer would have gotten comments or not. My opinion is you should be able to show your game in that amount of time.

I went through five different videos, even though the one I finished upon was called "Promo3". It got favorable feedback compared to earlier editions, so it's what is now on the google play store.

Does it work? I honestly don't know. The game is still young on the store, but the general opinion by most is that your game needs a video to help it be successful. My experience has been you can have a game with no video, and still win the app store lottery and get tons of installs.

So what's the point? Think of it like buying an extra lottery ticket. You have that extra chance to win and get more downloads for your game. That is assuming you've done it right, otherwise you might drive people away. Best to take the shot and still do it though. If at least for the experience of making one. This was my first time, and I enjoyed doing it.

Thanks for reading! Check out the game page to see the final video!