Devlog 2: The Blessings & Misfortunes of our First Trailer
Reveal Trailer Planning
We all know that the "first impression" when working on a project is the most important one. That's why, ever since the planning phase of Chasmal Fear's reveal trailer we decided to analyze everything that makes our game Chasmal Fear distinct in the field of survival horror and bodycam video games.
The Planning phase started out with going through our Game Design Document. We wanted to show our players the core mechanics of Chasmal Fear, which makes it different from other video games of that genre but designed as a gameplay trailer and not a cinematic one.
We wrote down our key features on a piece of paper:
• Limited Resources
• Immersive Bodycam
• Monster Mutation System
• Choices that affect playthrough
• Fully Randomized Gameplay Events
• Ultra-Realistic Environments
• Co-Op Possibility
Alright, now that we have started the plan for our first reveal trailer and we have the key features, the next thing we were required to do is to find a cool, immersive soundtrack or ambient sound that really represents the game and has some interesting beats that will be properly synced with the upcoming shots.
It took a while to be honest, but by editing, cutting and adjusting several sounds, we managed to set up the "music" for our first ever trailer. Another point scratched off the list. Now, here comes the Hard Part.
People's attention nowadays is short. Most people do not prefer reading and love when things get straight to the point. And we needed to do a trailer that has the ambience, the surprise, the core mechanics and key features and a story, and it all needed to be in under 1 minute.
Unlucky Circumstances
Unfortunately, a couple of things happened that seriously hindered our work and schedule. I won't dive too deep into those issues, but will mention them briefly so you can understand what was going on during the creation of our first reveal trailer.
Firstly, we found out that an upcoming game festival was coming fast and the deadline for sending a demo and trailer was very short. We needed to do the trailer as soon as possible (only a couple of days).
Secondly, we had some private real-life things that we needed to prepare for (still do until November) which also affected development.
Thirdly, perhaps our biggest misfortune at that time, was that there was a storm and lightning hit nearby short-circuiting a couple of things, including my PC. Not having the time to go and get a new PC, I decided to put some older hardware and do the trailer anyway.
The trailer now was supposed to be recorded and rendered using:
Intel Core i5-2500K, 15 GB of DDR3 RAM and perhaps the only better thing in all of this mess: GeForce RTX 2060 3GB GDDR6.
There are several levels of quality in Unreal Engine 5: low, medium, high, epic, cinematic.
Our trailer was recorded on "high" quality due to hardware constraints (and still it took us ages to record it due to hiccups and FPS drops coming up).
The bad thing with having a slower PC is that you cannot record in the highest quality (cinematic). There will always be hiccups and FPS drops and it's a real nightmare to get it good (not best). Well, looking on the bright side, having a slower PC also affected my development, so I took a lot of time optimizing assets; lighting, textures, sounds, code which in turn will allow more players to play the game (something like a positive side-effect of working on an older PC).
Recording and Editing The Trailer
It took us approximately 36 hours to get the shots from our game. By the end of the recording sessions, we had around 70 GB of video content that needed to be checked and edited and polished. Due to the unlucky accident with my PC, we had to thoroughly watch every single shot and make sure there aren’t any FPS drops or issues while making it look amazing at the same time. Luckily, we somewhat managed to find some good shots and prepare them for editing.
The editing phase of our reveal trailer took around 3 days. Bringing everything together, from sound effects to music, to visuals while showing gameplay features and story at the same time can be quite daunting.
Maybe it was luck, I don’t know, but we managed to finish the trailer and package a simple showcase demo for a particular festival on the last day of admission. Imagine the stress of having to upload everything now and send an email to let them know that it’s all good. The only thoughts that constantly circled in my mind were: “What if I suddenly have an internet connection problem? What if there’s a power outage and everything we worked for these days was for nothing? What if we missed the deadline?”. Luckily, we managed to send everything in the last few hours.
Reception
Thanks to the amazing horror community, players and awesome content creators we got to know during our game dev journey with previous games, as well as the reveal of our first trailer, the reception was overwhelmingly positive! In less than a week, Chasmal Fear has surpassed a 1000+ wishlists with only a couple of posts of organic reach. We still haven’t done any official PR or sent emails or anything to anyone, but one step at a time.
We are humbled and so thankful to those amazing people who support us and push us to work harder and harder in fulfilling our dreams! Check out this tweet:
X.com
What’s Next?
Those of you who have followed us for a long time (since our first game) know that we love listening and working with the player community. We love listening to your feedback, ideas and suggestions to improve Chasmal Fear and bring you a new, fresh, survival horror experience.
Our steps for the near future (in the next couple of months) include:
- Polishing, Optimizing and Improving of what we have so far - we need to take a closer look at everything, including the lighting!
- We need to prepare and update the upcoming demo and get it ready for a couple of festivals
- The demo will first be released for only a couple of people (mainly players who are part of our subscription list: Mystivedev.com - here). These players will get the opportunity to try out the demo a month earlier and give us feedback on how to improve it and what to add.
- An official demo will be released on several festivals
- We’ll carefully observe our playerbase and analyze every single feedback that could help us bring the best out of Chasmal Fear.
- During the entire development, we’ll also work on setting up replication and multiplayer (since Chasmal Fear can also be played in Co-Op with another player).
What can You do to help?
We’re just two passionate brothers who love working on video games full-time. This is our dream. We’ll be immensely grateful if you support us on this journey simply by Wishlisting Chasmal Fear on Steam (and that’ll boost the algorithm):
If you feel even more generous, you can always like and retweet this tweet and help spread awareness about our game:
X.com
