Resonant Blade Devlog 38

Making a STEAM Page For My Game!

Hey, everyone! Sorry, things have been pretty busy lately and I keep ending up pushing back these devlog updates. Most of what I’ve been working on recently is getting the game prepared for Steam. There’s a ton of art assets I needed to create and tweak, and I’ve also been working on a new trailer that highlights a bunch of the more recent stuff I’ve added. Setting up the Steam page is taking a while, but the bulk of this work should only have to be done one time. One of the more tedious things when it comes to setting up the Steam page is having so many different resolutions for your game art. Sometimes, it’s easy to just scale something up without any weird artifacts, but other times, you’ll have to scale it up and go back over it with a fine tooth comb to get things nice and tidy.

Most of these art assets started out with something I did a few months ago. Looking at it again, I could tell it needed a lot of love.

And here’s what it looks like now.

A lot of the changes were fixing Atlas’s proportions and contrast. Adding things like some cool particles in the foreground and a glowing aura around Atlas really added some depth and made things pop. I took it a step further and worked in a Dark Synth robot in the background. I actually took that from another cutscene that I’ve also been working on.

Another thing that seems easier than you would think is writing up the description blurbs for the game. I’ve done several versions of these in the past, but I felt that this would be a good time to update everything and make things sound more accurate of the current state of the game. I wanted to try and make the gameplay description more interesting and also add in some more detail to the backstory. I’ll need to do this for the game’s website as well. I added some visual banners for the subtitles and threw in a couple of GIFs to show a potential buyer some quick action of the gameplay.

The last big thing to add to the Steam page is the game’s trailer. I’ve done a few trailers in the past, but they’re pretty dated now and don’t represent the game currently. This was a chance to make the trailer much better, too. The first rough version I finished was about 3 minutes. I knew that was way too long for an initial Steam gameplay trailer, so I worked on cutting it back to 2 minutes. I really struggle with making trailers. I think the hardest thing is coming up with the format and progression of the trailer. Some people just want to hear all about the story, which is cool, but I knew I needed this to be more action-packed and showcase some of the game’s mechanics. Using some other game trailer references definitely helped me figure things out. The trailer is broken into a few different sections that will hopefully interest potential players. The first scene shows Atlas waking up in a healing tank and picking up the Resonant Blade. After that, the trailer goes through the combat, exploration, puzzles, crafting, abilities, and bosses. I tried to keep the edits on the shorter side so it will keep the viewer more engaged. I added some custom pop up art for the titles that pop up throughout the video, too. Right now, I’m finishing the final details for the trailer and will be releasing it soon. So stay tuned.

Besides the Steam page, I’ve also been trying to work out how to introduce the story to the player. I started working on some potential cutscenes that I might use for the beginning of the game.

Ok, that’s it for this week’s episode. Overall, I’m happy with the progress on the Steam page so far and I’d say I’m about 90% of the way there. Thanks for reading!

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