Day 61: Today I was tired. So tired. It was because I could sleep yesterday. I went to bed around 03:30. And I don’t know if it was the deadline stress, the residual coke, or a mix of the two. The worst about not being able to sleep is knowing it. The longer you stay awake, the more stressful it gets. And the more stressful it gets, the longer you stay awake… By 05:30 I just said fuck it and disabled my alarm clock. I don’t know when I finally felt asleep. But when I waked up at 10:00 I was in a comatose state. But yeah gamedev is fun I swear it! Anyway, today I tried to finish early. As it is now 00:50, I don’t know if I can call that a win. It’s earlier than yesterday, but it’s still too late for my taste. Anyway, Today I:

• Upgraded the intergame scene. It was really necessary. It was still the ugly menu on a solid gray background. So I instead I used a wall tile mosaic as the background. It’s not much but it looks way better. I also modified the texts, repositioned some elements. You know UI stuff. It’s clearly not good enough yet. But with my graphic skills it’s close to the best I can.

• Did a trailer. That’s it, that’s all I did today. It took me 9 hours to make one minute of video. And it’s not that much all things considered. Most people advise to spend weeks on it. It was hard to make. It’s way outside my skillset. The last time I edited a video, I was 14 and it was on Windows Movie Maker. It tried downloading it today (movie maker, not my video!). But it wasn’t a good fit for what I wanted. I felt like they removed all the options of the tool. Also I wasn’t keen on having absurd powerpoint like transitions. So instead I tested VSDC. And I must say I was impressed. I only complained 50% of the time (much less than my usual rate). The basic options were enough for me, and easy to use. This soft seems to be capable of more complicated things, but that was less accessible. Anyway, given my non existent skills on video editing, I sticked with the classics. Oh now that I think about it, I should do a bullet points list so that this text doesn’t turn into an unreadable brick (it’s not too late right?). Here’s how I made the trailer:

  1. Research: Most of it was done yesterday. I read all the articles I could find, on how to make trailers. Then I watched a lot of trailers from relevant games (rogue lites mostly). Watching trailers after reading articles gave me a new perspective. Re watching them while making a trailer gave me yet another perspective.

  2. Research 2: Searching the perfect tool to use. For screen recording, I tried OBS Recorder, but I couldn’t understand anything at all. So I went back to the good ol’ Fraps. For the editing, I tried Windows Movie Maker, and then found the graal with VSDC.

  3. Babbling: When you know nothing (like John Snow), all you can do is baby steps. Except the baby in question is blind (and drunk). I did multiples tries to even have a recording that wasn’t all black. But once I understood how it works, capturing videos with Fraps is easy. Video editing however, that’s on a whole other level. It took much more time to kinda understand the basics of the software I used.

  4. Storyboarding: I instinctively started by doing this. And it saved me a lot of time. I didn’t spent a lot of time doing a detail shot by shot thingy. I just did horrible drawing on post it notes to develop my vision. I noted each “phase” of the trailer and the approx time in seconds. I had the idea to use a part of my pitch that was a “how-to” list. With that the trailer became “Rogue Cadet in a nutshell”. There’s 5 parts: 1 Fight, 2 Make money, 3 Die, 4 Upgrade, 5 Repeat.

  5. Recording: Launched the game, played around, trying to get nice shots for each part of the trailer. Having a storyboard really guided the recordings. But I still ended up with 40 gigs of videos.

  6. Build changes: When desperately trying to reach distant zones, and dieing before, you quickly realize that an invincible button would be a good idea. And thus this step is actually done in a loop with the step 5. But since I didn’t keep track of it, I don’t remember all that I did. And so I won’t write it. I’m sure the loss of this knowledge will fatal to mankind, but I can’t be perfect all the time (reminder: I don’t actually have an oversized ego, I just find it funny to make you believe so (and if that reminder actually made you think I have an oversized ego, ask yourself if that wasn’t the goal all along)).

  7. Cutting: This is the first step of video edition. It was also the longest. Choosing the best parts among your recordings, and then cutting it to fit the trailer. It felt like jewelry making: cutting raw materials into overpriced items. Once it was done, I had everything arranged with horrible text placeholders.

  8. Editing: This is the raw step, where you put the text in the right place. Were the transitions comes to life. Where the font changes to something more pleasant than Arial. This is the step of iteration. I changed the format a lot of times, saw what worked and what was horrible.

  9. Polishing: Think you finished the previous step? Run your whole video and magically you’ll fill 5 post it with stuff to change. Back to editing you fool!

  10. Profit: In the end I’m pretty happy with the result. I thought it would be much more awful. By keeping everything simple and dynamic, it almost looks like I actually know what I’m doing. I’ll upload the trailer soon.