I spent the last week working up a new (debut) gameplay trailer for Gimbal Cop, introducing the Snake gameplay mode (which has been a big game design focus of mine for much of the last year) and Oculus Rift virtual reality support. Here it is:

I made this trailer in After Effects, which is a program I’ve used very little, but have a lot of fun with when I do use it.  The first big chapter of digital media-making in my life was Macromedia (and then Adobe) Flash, and in a lot of ways animating and editing in After Effects feels like coming home, back to my layers-and-keyframe roots.

The only other project I’ve done in After Effects was a demo reel from my 3D artist days, and I geeked out hard about nested compositions in AE on that project: it’s a feature / pattern I wish more programs employed.  This time around, I picked up some new tricks; including using a null object to make animating position, scale, etc of multiple layers easy, without using nested compositions; masks, though I had a hard time figuring out exactly how to do what I was looking for, which was really frustrating since masks are the pivot point of my Photoshop workflow; and a handful of simple little keyframe tricks and shortcuts from this site.

This trailer is the keystone in a media push to bring Defective out of our long shadow period (we haven’t put up any new screenshots, videos, or real blog posts in over a year!). There are new screenshots of the game at its site, and I also wrote up two devblog posts: one retrospective about the last year, and one about where we are now.