![]() The variables that we have to tune are resolution, frame rate and image quality. This means that I want all of the GIFs I am creating to be between 3 and 4 MB in file size. The most important venue for my own GIF output thus far has been Twitter so it's important to make sure that any GIFs I am authoring can be posted there, along with wherever else. I mark in and out points and then export this directly to GIF using Premiere's Animated GIF export option. I then go through the captured footage and find five or six nice moments that show new features, look good or whatever my goal for the GIFs are. Once I've got my footage captured I drop it in my NLE, in this case Premiere. Third it gives me lots of material for GIFs! Second it forces me to play the game differently and focus more on playing and less on bug seeking and note taking. First, I'm capturing high quality video footage regularly which I could use in other video content (like a new trailer I'm planning to cut soon). I've gotten in the habit at the end of a dev session to make a build of the game and capture myself playing for half an hour or so. In this case because I have an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription I'm using Adobe Premiere for video editing.The settings I use to capture in OBS (which aren't super important, but I'll share for completeness sake) are as follows: I've used other capture packages like Screenflow (Mac only) and while it can be nice to have editing functionality in your capture software I've since switched over to using OBS and a Non Linear Editing (NLE) package instead. It captures great looking footage, allows you to stream on Twitch if you want to and is FREE. Captureįirst, I capture HD footage of my game using Open Broadcaster Software. So! Here is a work flow that I've found works for me and allows me to produce the quality of GIF I want and seed them into the world. When you're a one man band like me you want the time consuming thing you do to be making your game more awesome, not tweaking GIF compression. Making and sharing GIFs, especially if you obsess over them, can be surprisingly time consuming. They're like little visual snacks that you can sprinkle into your promotional efforts for your game.I think this is a strength of them as a medium and therefore instead of obsessing over quality you should focus on quantity. The fun thing about GIFs is that they are ephemeral and a bit disposable. The trailer is a piece of content that will be used in many places, hopefully seen by many people and will be a key selling tool for your game. There are places for trying to make things perfect and beautiful, like in your trailer. It's possible to get very fussy about creating perfect, beautiful GIFs of your game but I would advise that this is a mistake. What they lack in complex features or output quality they make up for in ease of use. Both of these are stand alone applications designed to allow you to record things on your screen and output directly to GIF. There are a number of simple tools like Gyazo and GifCam which may be all that you need, depending on how involved you want to get. You know it's going to be short, you don't have to wait through ads and you can instantly see some piece of a game. ![]() For players and press, there's very little friction in viewing a GIF. In a conversation on Twitter with Jonathan Holmes of Destructoid he suggested to me that a simple email with a nice GIF embedded in it might be a good way to quickly capture a writers attention, and get them to click on further links to learn more. ![]() This gives your game a chance to reach new players that weren't keen enough to click through a YouTube link, but might become interested seeing your GIF at a glance. When people are scanning a feed or thread, the great thing about GIFs is that they automatically start playing, and looping as the user scrolls past. Twitter is a great place to post GIFs but they're also great for development forums like TIGSource's Dev Logs area or your own dev blog. I've found that the amount of interaction and interest I've gotten for my game Monarch Black on social media has increased the most at two key points: The first was when I started participating in the #screenshotsaturday hashtag on Twitter posting still images, and the second was when I switched to regularly posting animated GIFs, instead of stills. Seeing your game in motion is a great way for people to get an idea about what it will be like to play it. Video games are an art form of moving images (mostly!) and if a picture is worth a thousand words an animated GIF is worth 80 to 100 thousand words. There are many ways to do this but one of my favorite is to use animated GIFs. As indie developers more often then not it falls to us to market and promote our own games.
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