This week's screenshot is, again, not a screenshot--but rather a video! Specifically, it's an early trailer for the game!
And indeed, the work of the week just past was dedicated to the making of said trailer:
In structure, the trailer has four parts:
First comes an introduction, a glimpse of the game's core gameplay. Next comes the "driving problem": a description of the danger that sets the adventure in motion. Then comes the answer to that "problem", the "call to adventure": that which the player is called upon to do. And finally, there's an outro, showing the name of the game, a tagline and logline, a byline for myself/Thaumaturge-Art, and credit to the game-engine that I use.
And in the making, it might be said to have involved four broad categories of work:
1) Gameplay recording
2) Lettering
3) Music-finding
4) Assembly into a video
(Naturally, there were likely other things done for it--but the above are perhaps the major parts.)
Of those categories, "gameplay recording" was perhaps one of the simplest: while there were some retakes to be made and a few challenges in getting quite what I wanted, I think that it went reasonably well.
As to the lettering, that proved an interesting challenge! In short, it ended up being rendered via Blender's node-based shader-system, with multiple render-layers in some cases--a process that I've used before, but am not hugely experienced with.
The music, however proved quite tricky, as I recall:
At first I searched for a piece that might fit the whole thing--that would, after all, make it easier to have a consistent, coherent soundtrack. And it seemed to me that the trailer-beats that I had in mind should be fairly common, and thus an appropriate music-piece plausible to find.
But, after much searching, I found nought that seemed to fit.
So I went searching anew, this time looking for separate pieces to fit the major elements of the trailer.
And here, at last, I had success I do feel!
As to the assembly of the video, that had its challenges in timing, and arranging, and selection of clips. The music in particular is a Frankensteinian assembly of parts--indeed, even within a single music-track there is some cutting and reassembly.
These various matters took a while--I think that music-hunting took up more than a day by itself--but the task is now done, and overall I'm fairly happy with the resultant trailer! ^_^
That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^