Trailer and Cover Image Updated

I just updated my game with a short and quick trailer as well as a cover image. I was finding that I have a very low click through rate (0.36%) so I figured I have to update my cover image to make it more appealing. The first thing I did was to make the background black and add the cave texture to background the two enemies. This makes it pop out more and gives a better look as to the actual look and feel of the game, trying to escape a cave. 

The first thing I did wrong was not having correct resolution between my cover image and the gameplay I was showing. The cover image is more like a square and I was including parts showing the humorous dialogue which is the length of the computer screen, much more rectangular. I decided to just add some music and have this be a quick trailer instead, so the players who view my game page are more likely to download and play it after seeing the gameplay, and not just from screenshots. 

I then decided to have the cover image only show an example of the core gameplay without dialogue or enemy introductions. It’s like a dungeon crawler with turn based movement and procedural generated rooms, and having the cover image be a gif to show a quick preview of that could entice more people to click on it. 

The second thing I did wrong was having it be way too long. My first iteration was 22 seconds long, which led to a gif with a file size of 130 MB.  I realized after struggling to decide what to cut, that the people who mouse over my game are only going to watch the animated gif for a few seconds before deciding to click or move on. I shortened the video to 5 seconds, highlighting quickly parts of the gameplay.

The third thing I did wrong was exporting directly to a gif. I have been using Premiere Pro for the editing, exporting it to an animated gif. However, this kept leading to large file sizes that I couldn’t get to 3mb even when optimizing with a service like ezgif.com. So I tried something else, instead exporting it to a video and looking for a video compressor instead. This worked much better. Using https://www.freeconvert.com/video-compressor, I reduced the file size by 84% and combined with optimizing it with ezgif, I got it down to just 2 mb. 

It’s still not the perfect size for a cover image, but I think it still looks pretty good.