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How to make a promotional video game with small forces



In the article “Game for 2 days,” I, using the example of the Pope Penguin project, told about how to make a game for iOS using Unity in two days.

In continuation of this topic - an article about how you can make a small cartoon in support of the game with small forces. The text of the article was prepared by Alexey Lunin ( type_2 ), our artistic director. This article can be useful for small development studios and enthusiasts who make small toys for mobile (and not only) platforms.
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If you do not want to repeat the same mistakes that we made, read on.

Little cartoon

Hooray! Resolved! Making a video for the game on your own! Having released the Pope of the Penguin, we decided to make a small cartoon in support of our micro-game and to coincide with the release of this cartoon to the release of one of the future updates. Initially, the task seemed trivial. Especially those who were not directly involved in its decision.

The work algorithm was assumed to be as follows:
  1. Formulation of an idea / script
  2. Creating a storyboard with timing
  3. Creating Flash Animation Scenes
  4. Record gameplay scenes
  5. Mixing all the scenes in a single track
  6. Rendering
  7. Send a render to the sound engineer
  8. Getting a sound track
  9. Post processing

Before creating this cartoon, I ( Alexey Lunin ) had practically no experience with animation except for a minimum of Flash knowledge, which allowed me to make an object move from corner to corner. And although, as a result, the work proceeded according to the algorithm described above, due to several errors we made, some of the tasks had to be solved anew several times.

Scenario and storyboard

We throw a storyboard in pencil, taking into account the possibilities (we draw what we will be able to do) and proceed. The main idea of ​​the video follows from the essence of the game - the penguins-kids constantly ask for fish, for which the penguin father is forced to dive deeper and deeper, dodging predatory fish and in the process swallowing air bubbles. Accordingly, the video itself consists of alternating gameplay and flash animation.
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First mistake: single flash scene

Because of the lack of experience in such matters in general and in working with flash in particular, it was decided to make the flash part in one piece, and then cut into several small scenes. This led to big problems with editing bad places somewhere in the middle of the flash movie. As a result, every time I had to make some minimal adjustments to the flash animation, I had to roll the whole scene. Changes made at the beginning of the video and related to one frame of the cartoon could cause changes in completely different places related to completely different frames of the final movie.

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Difficulties with exporting video from flash

Having tried several export options, we didn’t receive a video with reasonable frame rate and quality. As a result, we decided not to export the video, but to remove it from the screen as well as the gameplay. After going through a bunch of programs and finding nothing suitable (either paid, or crookedly removes, or crookedly kodit, or our hands are not growing from that place), we transferred the process from PC to Mac, where all the necessary moments of Flash movie were removed using Screenium and gameplay.

Second mistake: using iMovie for editing

After several attempts to use different PC software for editing, we decided to go in a seemingly obvious way and took advantage of the included Mac OS X Mac OS X program. But there were no surprises here either, since iMovie does not have a “save” button, and autosave works quite strangely, as it turned out, although the program itself is quite simple, and you can cope with it without having any experience with video. And then the electricity blinked and everything was mixed up in a practically mounted roller.

As it turned out later from the thematic forums, this problem was not only ours. Someone everything worked without problems, and someone lost all groundwork. Rescued final cut . The intuitive interface and the relative simplicity of the task allowed us to complete the installation without any problems, to impose interframe effects, and then to impose a finished audio track on the video. And be sure that nothing happens to your source code.

Main mistake: correction of the storyboard scene at the final stage of work

The biggest mistake was made by our management. After we had already received the sound track made for the already mounted video on the approved storyboard, it was decided to do a little dopilivanie video.

Most likely, the edits made really good for the video. However, taking into account the above-mentioned problems with technologies, this resulted not in one edit of the video, but in almost a dozen alterations, when we had to correct the soundtrack of the cartoon several times, adjusting it to the updated (but with errors) editing, then re-remix the video from - due to errors found in a convulsively made audio track update.

Conclusion

In a hurry to quickly make a small cartoon to support your game, remember the following:
  1. Keep each frame of the cartoon in a separate scene / file, so that during the editing stage you will not have any problems with timing adjustments and making corrections for reviews.
  2. If you use flash, then most likely to get high-quality pictures and frame rates of your cartoon, you will need to use not export to video format, but banal video removal from the screen using, for example, the program Screenium .
  3. Do not use iMovie for editing if you are not ready to be at one moment without the source of your cartoon.
  4. Clearly follow the production algorithm indicated at the beginning of this article, and consciously and without haste take every step of the work so that, for example, you don’t have to make adjustments to the storyboard during the final stages of editing.
Used software

PC:
Mac:
Software, which for one reason or another did not fit:

RS:Mac:
PS
Finally, the Web version of the game .
Pps
Game Update 1.2 for iOS devices is already available on the App Store .
PPPS
Updated : I finally wrote an article on how to implement 2d on the Unity3d engine.
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Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/120361/

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