Well, my first experiment with the teaser trailer was disappointing… It has some good ideas, but the timings are absolutely terrible!
Been working most of the day on getting a better feel for it… Everything looks cools in the preview window, but as soon as I render the video (which takes about 20 minutes), I become very unhappy with it, so I have to do some more work on it, and so on…
I think I have to build an actual storyboard and try to figure out where a cut might be better, in a more “scientific” way, instead of the way I’ve been doing it so far…
Now listening to “Sky Blue” by “Devin Townsend”
Hard at work on the teaser trailer…
This is especially hard because it’s not my comfort zone at all… I have to stop every 5 minutes to check how you do something in Adobe Premiere, then choosing the right bits, all the while keeping track of the timings… This last part is particularly hard for me, to be honest, since I keep forgetting at which scale I’m looking at things…
Anyway, the idea at this point is to have a working skeleton of the teaser, to get a musician to add some music to it, then I’ll fine tune the cuts, etc, so that it fits the music properly…
And rendering the video takes forever, since this computer is not exactly a video processing station… And the computer is more or less useless while it’s rendering…
So now I’m finishing the first draft of the video and then I can start my usual “I’m not happy with this…” dance…
Now listening to “Space Police – Defenders of the Crown” by “Edguy”
Link of the Day: This is a quite cool test… I scored 35, which is not too bad, I think: http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge
Kept working on the teaser trailer… This is very time consuming, especially because I keep finding small performance issues that aren’t visible in the small areas where the game usually takes place, but become huge bottlenecks when I’m using such a big area (about nine times as big)…
Since I can’t afford a top-of-the-line video card, I have to make do with my mid/lower-level card and work around the issues…
Hopefully, tomorrow I’ll be done with recording videos and can start assembling this all in a single video with transitions, etc, so I can give it to a musician so he can put some music in it…
Now listening to “Razorblade Romance” by “HIM”
Link of the Day: Only really played the first one (mostly because I dislike the art direction of number three), but this looks nice… At least it has colors!
Started working on the teaser trailer for the game… Maybe it’s a bit premature, but it’s good for my motivation to see this sort of thing taking shape!
Anyway, had some difficulty with the tech part of it, since I wanted a big map to be able to navigate through it, but the game engine wasn’t built for handling that (a lot of stuff is “per-area”).
Anyway, got a sequence that I want to “shoot” using all different biomes (maybe not all, the cave one might look stupid, need to see)…
Now going to spend a lot of time choosing random seeds for the planets so they look interesting for trailer purposes, recording video and finally putting everything together (with my extremely meager skills with video composition tools)…
Now listening to “The Great Divide” by “Allen-Lande”
Link of the Day: Quite a lot of interesting ideas on this game (still under development):
Today was a pretty calm development day, just moved the tutorials from the Skydancer area to the new “dreamscape” area… It’s not major, but I had to do some rewriting to make it work properly…
Now listening to “The Human Contradiction” by “Delain”
Link of the Day: Not my sort of game, but pretty!
Today I lost most of my dev time working on a bug… This new area has two things I’ve never used:
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A cutscene that spans two different areas
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Two “special areas” right after each other (without passing a planet area before)
Both of these resulted in a problem with managing areas with the multi-threaded system…
It took me a bit, but I finally tracked down the source of the problem and fixed it… And then the gamedev time expired, so I’m left with this sense that I didn’t achieve anything today… 
Tomorrow I’m working on moving/changing the initial tutorials from the Skydancer to the initial area…
Now listening to “Tales of Mystery and Imagination” by “Nocturnal Rites”
Link of the Day: This looks like a neat tool, a cool way to do 3d modelling with mainly 2d tools…
Finished the initial cutscene, I’m quite proud of it… Well, not really, really proud, but it looks good…
Now I just need to wrap up the area (some props, etc), and add the enemies that will be making the player’s life difficult!
Now listening to “Legion of Boom” by “The Crystal Method”
Link of the Day: This is a very cool gadget:
Work continues on the start sequence of the game… Most of the work is on the cutscene itself. After all, you want to make a good impression! 
The gameplay part shouldn’t take long, but moving the tutorial back to here will be a pain!
Now listening to “Luna Park Ride” by “Tarja”
Link of the Day: OMG! OMG! OMG! OMG!
Not much time for game dev today, but I started working on a new story part…
Although the storyline components are done, I was unhappy with the way the game starts… It is a bit slow initially (the tutorial, establishing the game world, etc), so I’m afraid some people will lose interest in the game before it gets to the good part… 
So, I decided to start the game with something more action-driven before moving towards the rest of the storyline… This way, the player will have contact with the faster gameplay that becomes more common after an hour or so of game, in a more immediate fashion…
It will be just a normal “shooting” stage, in which waves of enemies will come in… Hopefully this will alleviate some of my fears!
Now listening to “In Defiance of Existence” by “Old Man’s Child”
Today I revamped the game over system…
On the old “Chrome Hunter” code, after the player was dead, I’d open an image screen with Game Over:
And then go to the main menu…
Now, it opens directly on the game, and gives the player the option of continuing from the last save, or go back to the main menu, to reduce latency in getting back into the game:
Obviously, everything is placeholder stuff, just to get the code up and running…
Think the next step is to add a bit more of story to the game, an idea I had for some time, but I’ll talk about it tomorrow! 
Now listening to “The Congregation” by “Leprous”
Link of the Day: This looks so absolutely delicious and awesome:
