NEXT-GEN Nescot Year 4 HND - Going Indie (Final VideoGame Advert)

Once my Game Trailer project, to advertise my Game Development project (TopDownShooter), was completed, I was required to accumulate feedback and analyse what I could have done differently during the production of the advert, displaying what I thought I could change to get a better output and how I could improve upon the final product.

Once the video was completed, I uploaded the final trailer to YouTube and displayed it to a small audience in order to gather feedback for the project.

 
YouTube Video link: https://youtu.be/4TYwV4Pp6Jk

The feedback I received included:

(Areas of improvement)

• Needing to add music to the trailer, with action music recommended for the style and flow of the trailer / game.

• Needing to increase the pacing of each shot in the gameplay trailer, segments to move at a faster and more action packed pace.

• Needing to fix / improve the transitions between each shot (mostly in the gameplay segments) because most of them are very sharp cuts or have uneven transitions.

• That there is a small slither of the background animated scene visible before door opens at the top of the door frame during the rotoscope scene, and it is somewhat distracting and ruins the sudden change from live action to game footage.

(Areas of good practice)

• That the rotoscope on the door is very good, as it accurately tracks to the movements of both the actor, door and door frame.

• That the animation shown inside the rotoscope flows well and has accurate pacing with the movements of the actor, leading to a better looking animation.

Analyzing feedback (Actions that could be taken in order to improve my Videogame Advert):

• For the first area of improvement, I could use a variety of methods to find royalty free action music, such as using many different sites or making my own music, adding the music into the video and editing it to fit more effectively before then giving credit, if required.

• For the pacing of the advert, I could decrease the amount of time the gameplay scenes are shown for, only showing the parts of importance or action to make the advert flow more effectively.

• In order to fix the transitions between each shot, I could either add more effects for each transition, to more smoothly move between each scene, or better line up and overlap each of these shots to create a more coherent transition between each scene, giving the effect of a continuation of movement.

• Finally, to fix the visible slither of rotoscoped background before the door opens, I could use a masking tool to overlap a cloned section of the door over the gap, tracking it to the movement and perspective of the door, hiding the gap at the top of the doorframe by covering it with a concealing layer.

Development process:

Unfortunately, during the development of my project, I worked alone due to the fact that we were required to create a trailer for the Game Development Project we each were creating and I was working alone on that project because there were too few possible teammates in the class and we were each creating our own individual ideas.

Despite this, I managed to easily plan the creation of the project, creating a GANT chart to track the time spent on each task, a storyboard to plan the different aspects and VFX elements that would need to be created during the production phase of the project.

However, I over estimated the amount of work that could be completed within the time allocated for our projects. And though my rotoscoping and animation turned out well, this led to me spending too much time on the development phase of production and caused me to rush the post production stages due to time constraints.

If there were different decisions made during the creation of the project:

 

I believe that if I had a teammate during the creation of the project, the final product would have been significantly better, as it would have allowed for more flexability with time management, leading to each team member alternating between each of the projects we had been set with, then leading to the project being continuously worked on and improved.

 

Alongside this, another teammate would have helped improve the final project because it would allow for the combination of a more diverse range of skills that could be used in different tasks and to improve upon each other's work.

Meanwhile, if I could have changed something in the project's pipeline decisions to improve the development process, I would have lowered the amount of work required during the production phase so that I could allocate more time and recources towards the post production of the project. However, due to time constraints and over-estimation as to what could be completed within the time limit of the project's creation, I believe I did not do as well as I could have if I had changed this aspect of my project.

Overall, I believe I could have done better on this assignment if given more time, using the feedback I gathered as a basis for how to improve my video game trailer.