To keep with last article's theme of writing by the seat of my pants, the other day I published something peculiar on my sporadic and dusty YouTube channel.
A few months ago, I made Uproar in Bug Parliament, which is still in (very slow) development. You play as an insect who must debate with fellow Ant and Grasshopper members of parliament. Its source code is right here if you're interested.
This weekend I decided to just open OBS and record myself playing the first 5 minutes of the game. The unedited recording then went straight to YouTube. Then I decided to record the rest of this "playthrough", also in 5 minutes parts (to stay consistent and to allow for easy recovery in case of a mistake in one part).
And thus was born Uproar: The Animated Series. No actually it's just 5 short gameplay videos, plus one bonus music video. Sorry for the clickbait title.
Editing considerations
Not doing any editing has advantages:
- Saving time
- No need for editing software (though I have them installed), just a recorder like OBS
- No conversion between video formats
But I'm considering doing some editing next because:
- Clips like "Previously, in [series]…!", or "In the next episode of [series]…!" are cool, there is a sense of episodicity. Although I can do a very limited version of that by simply leaving the game idling for a while at the start and end of each video. For bigger chapters, I can follow the format in Professor Layton and add those "previouslies" in the game itself.
- Upscaling in higher resolutions than what my laptop can do. For Ace of Rope's trailer, I recorded everything in GIF format, so that was lossless, but here I need the sounds so it's a bit more complicated.
But those are not really necessary so I might continue on the unedited path.
File size musings
The problem with videos is that they are big. Take part 1, which is 5 minutes long:
| 960x540 (raw) | 99.5 MB |
| 960x540 (through ffmpeg [1]) | 19.5 MB |
| 640x360 | 11.2 MB |
| 320x180 (ugly) | 7.9 MB |
| All of Uproar 0.4 web (for comparison) | 3.5 MB |
[1] - What?? Turns out the raw file I uploaded to YouTube was very far from optimal. I guess OBS optimized it for writing speed instead of file size, but STILL. The difference is HUGE. And the only argument I gave to ffmpeg was the size which is the same! I guess ffmpeg will be my sole "editing" tool from now on.
So if I want to provide a lightweight way to "read" the game, should I add a Story Mode to it? I mean, it's a very linear game for now, so story mode is basically like watching a video series, +/- some choice/skill details.
I guess lightweight executable program + non-interactivity would technically make Uproar Story Mode… a demo. In that case that would be a pretty crappy demo compared to the rest of the demoscene (no astounding visual effects, doesn't fit into 64 kB especially with engine data). The circular saw thing in the boss fight is kind of a 3D effect, but it's the only one for now if you don't count parallax foregrounds and backgrounds.
By the way, there aren't any plans to make the game highly non-linear.
Chapter 2 when?
I don't know!
See ya in the next one!