Studio Ganzheit

I’ve managed to finish the trailer somehow. It was truly difficult to start working on it because I couldn’t switch modes, and now that it’s finished, uploaded, and I’ve replied to comments, it’s hard to get back to my original work.

While making the trailer, I kept the feedback from the previous one in mind. It felt like I had to make the tempo a bit more breathless than my usual rhythm or feel for people not to get bored. Maybe that means I’m getting old. Since I need music to make a trailer, I started with the music first. I re-edited and used a track that I hadn’t utilized well in the past due to a lack of experience. I bought vocal stems from Loop Master and layered music over them; perhaps because the vocals were simple and in a major key, this was the hardest music I’ve ever made. Still, I had so much fun that I stayed up all night. Among programming, planning, graphics, and music, music feels the closest to pure joy, regardless of the outcome. Storytelling is also very thrilling and fun, but staring at a blank document in the editor is incredibly painful. Music isn’t like that. It’s just pure fun.

After making the music, I spent about half a day just pondering what scenes would fit. In the end, I decided to show some challenging gameplay from the point where the music shifts, and show a summary of early gameplay before that, and then I pieced the B-Roll together. It was just a matter of capturing early gameplay a couple of times and picking them out in order, so editing was easy and choosing B-Roll didn’t take as much time as before. I had my doubts about this approach, but I was exhausted from staying up all night, so I just went ahead and uploaded it. I was happy with how the music and trailer turned out, so I hoped it would be well-received, but the reaction wasn’t quite what I’d expected. I think I just got my hopes up for nothing. Even after experiencing throughout my life that expectation is the root of all evil, I still haven’t been able to let it go.

I also posted in a Russian community for the first time. Since the Russian-speaking world shows the most interest in the game after the English-speaking world, even though I know nothing about Russian, I’m studying the Cyrillic alphabet and reading it slowly. That’s how I learned “соло разработчик” (solo developer). It felt like the kind of difficulty I experienced when trying to move from 3ds Max to Blender (though I never actually managed to make the switch). When I first saw Cyrillic, the existing alphabet kept interfering and it was very confusing, but I think repetition is the only answer. I don’t know how effective posting in the Russian community will be, but I plan to work hard at it for a while.

I’m currently polishing the backgrounds. It’s comfortable and fun, but also agonizing; whenever I look at places like under the stairs or in recessed planters, my hands itch and my heart flutters because I want to make a hidden path. It’s like the feeling I had as a child, hiding in a wardrobe and imagining there’s a door in the back that opens to a large cave underground, and enjoying the thought of going down that cave. But I have to resist because I need to finish and release it quickly. Sometimes the sky shows through an accidental gap in the background, and even then, the temptation is great. It feels so good to go out to an unexpected place and see the sky. I mean, I just want to add exactly one more hidden room.