A New Trailer
As part of a small development team you really need to learn many new things, and for me one of those things was video editing. We needed a Greenlight video and so I threw one together. And threw is really the right word, it wasn't very good.
But I've been practising, and taking feedback from the community. I have been working on making a trailer that is shorter, more punchy, and with text which is less technical.
Here it is:
I would love to get your feedback on it.
Describing things with images (even if they're still) is gonna have more impact than the text and as it stands, the visual information in your video just says there's a ship in space and it has laz0rs.... (exaggeration)
You need to work hard to wet appetites and help people to appreciate the co-op concept that your developing - the selling point is going to be the 4 player coop and thus everything in your trailer needs to be driving that home. As a punter, gameplay is king, everything else just works to sweeten the deal.
Get more of the UI concept stuff in there!
That really is great advice.
The issue is that the UIs aren't ready to show. I have wireframes and debug UIs but nothing near as visually appealing as the more complete Engineering UI design.
I put all of my focus these past few months into the networking, game systems and rendering. I wanted to be able to support a large amount of players/ships/objects on a huge dynamic map, I wanted to know how the game systems and simulations would work across the network (by building them), and I wanted to see ships firing weapons, hitting shields, taking damage, and blowing up. I achieved all that, and it really does work beautifully.
I could have waited another month or two to go to Greenlight, and probably should have, but I got so excited by the huge milestone that I had reached that I became impatient. It can be difficult putting so much time and energy into something while getting little feedback on it.
Still, the response on Greenlight has been great, better than I had expected even.
I hope this response wasn't too long winded. I wanted to give an honest response on why the trailer is as it is.
I would like to thank you personally as well Samuel, for sticking with UNION all this time. It is people like you who have helped me believe in what I am doing when the going was tough.