The 1.2 update has several awesome improvements in store for you Beast Boxers out there. First off, to give people some more stuff to do aside from the story mode, there’s a new Endless mode. We added two holiday-themed beastly fighters and a brand new fighting arena that will be available in Rematch mode and Endless mode. We tightened up the responsiveness of the controls – it doesn’t read your mind yet, but it does improve on the speed you’re able to chain attacks and blocks together, and it feels great! Oh, and we’ve got four brand new music tracks from multi-talented developer Shadi Muklashy!

The update’s in review now and should be available as a free update in a matter of days. We can’t wait to share it with you!

• Improved performance
• Reduced memory footprint that should help address some of the crash issues that users have been reporting
• Streamlined savegame UI
• Fixed tap-to-select problems on scrolling menus.
• A new icon!

Beast Boxing 3D's new logo!

Download it and enjoy! Next up is a new character and also the first challenge mode for players who finish the career story…

Luckily, I just went through this experience so you don’t have to! In this post, I’ll describe a general process that you can apply to make trailers of your game that communicate well and look semi-professional. You can also refer to my earlier post about creating Unity iPhone Trailers on a Budget to see the technical how-to that will let you capture your game with clarity for Youtube or other distribution methods.

Step 1. Understand your Appeal

This might seem obvious, but it’s easy to get mired in the technical details of trailer creation without considering what you want to communicate in the first place! So start with the basics. Open your text editor and answer the following questions:

• What are the 2 or 3 coolest short/quick visual features of my game?
• What sets my game apart from other look-alikes?
• What is the most common action that occurs in the game?
• What are the things that occur at the boundaries of levels in the game? (like story dialogue or intro/outro scenes)
• What is the most interesting special effect in my game?
• List 10-15 places/levels/characters in the game that exhibit one of the above characteristics, but are audiovisually distinct (or as distinct as possible). This is your scene list.

Step 2: Create a crude storyboard

From the scene list, order each of those listed “scenes” in a way that avoids direct repetition of things that look similar to one another. Don’t worry about exact composition – this is your time to try and mentally visualize the color or tone of your trailer so that it doesn’t feel repetitive.

Try your best to use some of these rules of thumb:

• Take the 2 most visually interesting things in your list and place them 1/3 and 2/3 of the way through your trailer. This creates space and provides peak excitement spread out.
• If you were able to find things that occur at the boundaries of levels, place them at the front and back of each third (or each half) of the trailer.
• If you have 2 scenes that share the same art or audio content, put them at least 2 scenes apart from one another.

Step 4. Start recording content

This part is easy – take your scene list, and use your vidcap software of choice to record LOTS of video of each of those scenes. Make sure to demonstrate a good amount of your functionality, and try to have action sequences that flow smoothly instead of taking actions slowly. For the most visually interesting things, record 4 instances (preferably with variety) for later use.

Step 5. Editing

Now you’ve got to fire up your video editor of choice. I use iMovie because it’s very affordable! Now, for each of the types of scenes I listed, you can try some of these approaches and see how they work for you:

• Start with a company / publisher logo, and end with the title of the game and the URL of your website.
• For really visually interesting scenes, cut up your 4 instances so that they hop between visually distinct styles and repetitively show the same thing. Your cuts should be really short for these – play with the start and end points and don’t use any transitions to get a punchy, rhythmic feel.
• In between those, use your more common scenes. These can last 3-4 seconds in length, which gives a break in the rhythm for your viewers.
• Use transitions only between action scenes and buffer scenes. Use cross and fade transitions but stay away from Wipe or other fancy transitions unless the scene you’re going to is scrolling, as it looks kind of home video-ish. When cutting between action scenes, just cut directly without a transition.
• If your character has actions that they go through, try placing the start of your clip at the first or second frame of the action taking place. Leaving space beforehand leads to a jerky feel when transitioning, and going with the first or second frame can feel more natural and give the sensation of action.
• Make sure you include unique or special features – if you can’t find a good place for them, try putting them at the end right before the final scene.

If you get lost, a great way to get restarted is to watch a trailer in the same game genre that gets you excited and try to discern its structure, then use it as a template.

Step 6: Publish!

The last step is just to publish! If you use Youtube, make sure to take advantage of linking to your promo website in your description, and use Annotations accordingly to have your viewers subscribe for future videos. If you followed this far, you obviously care about providing a good experience for your users, and that’s the most important thing! Keep on working hard, and good luck!

Sized perfectly for iPhone and Retina backgrounds – enjoy!

Poster for non-Retina displays

For Retina displays

Step 1. Set up your Unity editor environment.

Before you start, you need to decide on the screen resolution you want to capture. I’ve heard that some development houses capture at high res then downscale, or even capture at 50% game time so that they can speed it up later and make games look like they perform better! Since there are multiple resolutions now for iDevices, it does make more sense to capture at say, Retina or iPad resolution for videos, but that might require some additional work to make your game resolution-independent, and a heavier-duty machine that can handle playback and recording at a high res too.

Anyway, once you decide on your capture resolution, make sure you click “Maximize on Play” in the Unity Editor. This will help in a couple of ways – first, if you have other editor windows with the scene open, it takes some resource load off of your computer so that it can focus on delivering the fastest framerate. Having to duplicate animations and keep the inspector up to date does slow it down the editor a bit. Second, it also provides a consistent placement for the game scene so that you can have your capture area set up perfectly when you’re ready for it.

If you have a second monitor set up, I’d disconnect it and reboot, and also make sure that background processes like Time Machine aren’t running at the time.

Step 2. Set up your recording / vidcap software.

Everyone’s got their own preference for vidcap software, but I like to use iShowU HD. On my Macbook Pro, other software packages like Camtasia (which I love on PC) or Screenflow just weren’t able to keep a high framerate going, were tricky to get a capture area set up for, or I couldn’t get them to produce output video at my desired resolution. iShowU HD is pretty affordable, too, and has a free demo. In any case, I’d recommend that you try all of the demos that are available to see how they run on your setup, and pick the one that works best for you. These instructions are specific to iShowU HD, but the general idea is the same thing regardless of your software.

First, set your output video size. Since Youtube has a default display height of 360 pixels, I set my capture area to 480 x 360. This provides a 4:3 aspect ratio and a 1:1 mapping with letterboxing on the sides, so it turns out well in the end. Hit the Gear button next to Output video, and select Change Size > Set Size…, and set it to 480 x 360. Hit the Gear again, and select Change Format > Apple Animation. This is a very high quality capture, so you can get a nice vidcap that isn’t blurry and also works with iMovie. Hit the Gear one last time and select Change Frame Rate > 30. 30 fps is what Youtube does, and is all my MBP can handle, so there’s not much point going higher, but feel free to experiment. Make sure that you uncheck “Record sound from input device”, unless you like having your own breathing in your trailers.

iShowU Settings

Over Capture Area, high the Gear, then hit Same as Video Size… this will set up a 1:1 capture mapping and give you the best quality video. Press the Play button in the Unity editor, then go back to iShowU and click Choose over capture area. Drag the rectangle over your video area, and if you want, center it vertically as we’ll see horizontal letterboxing added later in iMovie.

Now, for videos that I’ve capped with iShowU, I used to have problems with the color getting really washed out. The solution I found on their forums is to use the experimental color correction. Go to iShowU’s Preferences, then General, then click “Color correction (experimental).” It did wonders for me, and it might work for you!

Video washed out? Try "Color correction" in iShowU Preferences

Step 3. Record videos.

Fire up your Unity iPhone remote if you need it, then hit the Play button in Unity and press the Record button in iShowU. Record to your hearts’ content, and hit stop when you’re done. Repeat this process as necessary, and stay tuned for my next post if you need tips on what to record!

When you’re done, it’s time to bring your videos into iMovie.

Step 4. Import your videos to iMovie.

I assume you know how to use your own version of iMovie. I just completed the Beast Boxing Trailer with iMovie ’11, so I’ll just speak about the general settings to choose and revisit iMovie specifics another time.

Import the vidcaps into your Event Library, and start working with them in your Project. When you’re satisfied with your trailer, there are many options for sharing. Publishing directly to Youtube with the “Medium” setting resizes and expands your content to 640×480, and ends up adding horizontal letterboxing, and this is what I do. It makes the natural 360px high content look a little better, and users that pick the 480px high HD setting will get an even nicer display.

If you’d rather export directly to Quicktime, choose Share > Export to Quicktime, and pick Options to open the Movie Settings panel. I use H.264 compression, Key Frames Every 24 frames, Data rate of “Restrict to 6000 kbits/sec”, Optimized for CD/DVD-ROM, and a High quality on the Compressor with Encoding: Best Quality. In the Size panel, choose NTSC 720 x 480 4:3, and check Preserve aspect ratio using Letterbox (if required). If you decide to upload this to Youtube, it’ll look pretty much the same as the direct Share to Youtube option, so it’s up to you.

iMovie Quicktime Movie Settings

I had good results with this process, and I hope it’s helpful to you to promote your iPhone games as well!

It’s still a work in progress, but you can take a look at an example dialogue screen of the character Treimann talking some trash:

So yeah, you’re gonna get trash talked by a tree.

In the Kingdom of Beasthalla, the strongest monsters fight in grand boxing leagues to prove their strength. This is called….

BEAST BOXING!

Kamander rose through the ranks of beast boxers, defeating all comers in the Pro League even though suffers from no depth perception. His strong defense and devastating hook combos have very few weaknesses, and his fan club is rabid and devoted.

Kamander was a really fun character to set up. He’s the second time in the game you encounter a snake-style character, and he’s set up to be very quick and powerful, requiring a good base of upgrades to take him on successfully. Since the last time I intro’ed a character, some people wanted to see more gameplay, I’m happy to show off this new video highlighting a full, if lopsided, round fighting Kamander.

This promo shows off some of the polish we’ve been adding into the game over the last month and a half since the last video. The most fun addition was definitely adding in a powerup that activates when you land 5 consecutive hits – you’re on fire! We’ve been psyched about the new NBA Jam trailers coming out and it reminded us that our game feels a lot like the NBA Jam of iPhone boxing games!

We certainly know and admire about all the ultra-realistic, simulation-oriented fighting games that have come out, but we’re more interested in providing a quick-paced, super fun and awesome-looking fighting game instead. Hope you enjoy the video, and sign up for our mailing list on http://www.beastboxing.com to get notified when it’s ready!