Nova START! Nova Star is Launched… almost!
By: Ryan Yamura
Tags: Intern, Projects, Software Development, Gamedevhq

Culminating the last 3 days, days 53, 54 and 55, have been full of excited work to debug and finalize the working release of Nova Star version 1.0! While it seemed like we were so close the last time I checked in, after some rigorous play testing and feedback from our team leaders, we determined that we fixing certain bugs before release was the right call.

Screen Grab of the different weapons for release!

Some of these bugs were more stubborn than others, but after some long peer coding sessions, we ironed out all the bugs and prepared for release.

My job after the initial build was to build a marketing strategy for the project. I tackled this by first determining what factors needed to be considered for! The Trello kanban board that our lead Joanne set up was perfect for this and the items that she listed provided a clear path for me to follow!

Marketing Strategy!

The one item on the list that I really REALLY thought would be the most impactful was a video. While words are great, and they say a picture tells a thousand words, a video — a video must tell a million.

So, that started my venture into figuring out how exactly to create a video when I have ZERO experience in video editing. This led me to exactly what this whole internship and experience has taught me.

USE RESOURCES AVAILABLE TO YOU!

With this in mind, I remembered that one of the leads actually has extensive video editing knowledge, and I have an Adobe subscription that I’ve been itching to use! I asked Austin Mackrell if he’d be willing to help me make a trailer for the game — and he thankfully agreed! Don’t get me wrong, internet searches and research would have been next on my list if Austin had not been able to help, but I’m glad that he was available to assist, it probably saved me HOURS!

Next, for the very first time I opened Adobe Premier Pro and got to work, having recorded some footage of the release build before hand working away at the timeline and effects. To my surprise, Premier was not all that different from making timeline events in Unity! I was thankfully able to pick it up pretty quick with some (a lot) of help from Mr. Austin and we were able to successfully create a trailer for the Nova Star project!

Watch it here:

Now in full release!

Now, to the “almost” part in the title. The game is technically released as of today, however we do want to be able to present it to our entire internship first. So, until we are able to finish that presentation and reveal, I’ll be keeping the location of the release a secret…for now. Trust me that you’ll be the first to know once all of the secrecy and subterfuge is over!

I’m just beyond excited that this is finally “finished” and the hard work and dedication that my team and I have shown over the past couple weeks can really be shown off for everyone to see. It’s been such a rare and wonderful experience being able to work with people who just mesh well, communicate and cooperate like my team has. And while things weren’t “perfect” its in no fault of my team members and I believe that given the circumstances, the first time working together, the git issues, and time constraints, we did admirably.

And I can’t wait to show it off to all of you tomorrow!

— Ryan

Maker of Trailers