One of the best ways to get noticed on the App Store (any one) is to have a video that markets your games best assets. We recently did one for NumBlocks which has, in all honesty, been struggling to make an impact on the Play Store. The game is elegantly simple and looks great. It has a good mechanic and is easy to learn and play. We built it as a platform to test our ability to publish something and to work through the hurdles of getting a game finished. In that respect it is perfect!
Have a go of NumBlocks and let us know what you think? (click image to Play)
Not having a huge budget for marketing we wanted to make it ourselves. Were not audio visual newbies and weren’t looking for anything too complex. Plus the game is free so there is really no point paying someone to effectively polish a lump of coal in the diamond that we know it is.
Here is the finished product (click to Play!):
We used the OpenShot Video Editor. Here at ZuluOneZero we support open source community driven projects as our default posture when looking for software to work with. OpenShot Video Editor is crafted with love and open-source. It’s under the free & open-source license forever (GPL version 3.0).
It’s very good and worked perfectly for our project. It has a simple but powerful interface and comes with a very nice set of built in transitions and other features.
We started off with a straight image of our NumBlocks logo. I really like the glowing internal light of this logo and the straightforward “Play” on the front. We did this icon in Gimp and imported it into the editor.
Check it out:
Next we got crafty. I asked the team (read ‘my brain’) for a flashing run through of the numbers in sequence to build tension and to lead in to the game play. We tried doing this manually in the editor but it was too fiddly lining up 40+ images with the right timing. So we came up with a novel solution and ended up opening all the number icon jpegs directly from the operating system folder onto the system picture viewer. We then used the built in Game Bar that comes with Windows 10 to record a screen capture of the viewer. I manually scrolled through the number icons with the arrow keys on the keyboard at the tempo I wanted and sped up to a crescendo at the end.
We used the record feature of the game bar again to record the game play sequences. This time we ran the app on a mobile emulator on the desktop. The only issue I had with the final outcome of this was that the mouse pointer has to be used and looks a bit derpy. Next time I’ll download a pointy finger mouse icon to use so it looks more like a mobile game. We edited the footage down to key sequences and game play.
Next I used the OpenShot speed manipulation tools to speed up a section of the game play footage to make it look more exciting and to showcase the game.
Next we stripped the audio from the existing clips and laid down some original music from the game. You can listed to the music here on SoundCloud.
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