Introduction
Ever since I was a child I have been making videos in some form, starting as Lego Stop Motions when I was just seven. I have done my best to curate a variety of demonstrations of my extensive video editing experience ranging from my most recent successes to quietly ignored videos from years gone by.
Build Fight Game Devlogs
As part of my solo game-development career, it is crucial to promote my in-development projects far in advance to try to maximise the size of the game’s audience when it launches. As such, I made a couple videos focussing on the development of Build Fight Game, my current primary project which has been in development for over a year. The game itself is a class-based first-person shooter set in fully-interactable procedurally generated voxel worlds. The first of these videos is an introduction to the concept of the game and the story of the first few months of development, telling a compelling narrative centered around my history as a developer of dropping projects before they ever finish, and trying to fix that with Build Fight Game. The second video focuses on a tighter single story from the game’s development, wherein I struggle with the intricacies and extremely frustrating quirks of Unity’s UI Toolkit system.
For both of these videos, I incorporated my own style blending traditional semi-fast-paced editing, commonplace in other game-development-focussed videos, with a virtual set and my own 3D avatar animated with a pose-to-pose style similar to other popular YouTube animation channels. The videos are presented as my avatar talking in front of a large screen, which the camera either dollies closer to or pulls away from to show just the edited sequences, a combination of the screen and my avatar, or to cut away to entirely separated sequences. My avatar can be seen either narrating parts of each video, or representing myself during the actual process of developing the game, pictured struggling at a computer desk or shooting my monitor with a shotgun, which I have definitely felt like doing at least a couple times.
Both of these videos were very successful from my perspective as a channel which previously had no following and had just been used as an online dumping ground for various unedited clips of my games. Both videos received overwhelmingly positive reception from YouTube commenters.
The first video gained 3,000 views in the month following its release. I was amazed by the response, emphasised in comments such as these. The people also really appreciated me showing my cat in the video.
The second video was comparatively less successful, though I was still happy with the response. It gained only 1,000 views in its first month. I wasn’t especially disappointed in this, as the reception it received overall was still overwhelmingly positive. Furthermore, the video was somewhat rushed out the door as I was going to be away from home for over a week. This led to me missing some - in hindsight very obvious - issues with the video’s audio. My voice was too quiet overall, except for a part of the video where I scream which was too loud. Having proper high quality audio is crucial to a high quality viewing experience, so this is not a mistake I will be making again. Fortunately, only one person actually commented on this, but I am sure that the audio, as well as the editing simply being slightly less polished overall, is the reason the video was less successful. In a lot of ways, this response actually made me more confident for any videos I publish in the future, knowing that my style is enough for me video to find an audience, and I just need to ensure I am making content of a sufficiently high quality.
The Problem with Snipers
Originally, this project began as a simple third entry in my Build Fight Game devlog series, focussing on the implementation of the sniper rifle and its associated in-game player character. As time went on, I find myself frustrated with the format of those videos and felt that it limited me in terms offering more in-depth analysis into my design decisions. As such, I made the decision that this project would be a more long-form video with higher production value, which focussed as much on high-level analysis of my issues with sniper rifles across most games in the FPS genre, as well as a more focussed look at my process for addressing these issues in my own game.
Unfortunately, the video remains unreleased publicly due to fundamental questions in the design of Build Fight Game that have yet to be finalized (which I talk about in my blog), preventing me from properly finishing the implementation of the sniper rifle and therefore documenting this process in the latter half of the video. However, I have mostly completed the first half of the video: an analytical view of the problems with snipers in FPS games, presented with a higher-quality version of my virtual set and 3D avatar.
For this video, rather than using Unity with a basic pose-to-pose animation style, I opted to use Blender with proper fully-animated segments. I recreated my virtual set exactly in Blender, and created a proper rig for my avatar to allow for improved animations. Immediately following
a basic test render, the difference in quality compared to the Unity version was staggering.
After further developing this video, including several comedic animated bits, I was very happy with how the improved style turned out. In retrospect it makes the previous two videos look like low-quality prototypes.
I am looking forward to finalizing the video as soon as possible to share this new style and see what people think.
Build Fight Game TikToks
Before focussing on YouTube videos, I created a couple TikTok videos focussing on Build Fight Game’s development.
The first of these discusses the high-level design for Build Fight Game, while
the second
discusses the technical problems with creating massive voxel worlds. The videos are comprised of me at my desk talking to camera, accompanied by cutaways to relevant visualisations (or sometimes just funny bits). While I am personally very proud of how these videos turned out, each took a long time to produce and I was meth with absolutely nothing in response. All game development TikToks I released following these two attempts at success with high-quality content are instead just simple talking to camera. Ultimately I have found little success on TikTok, hence focussing on the more reliable success of YouTube.
Untitled Project
‘Untitled Project’ was my final project for my first year of college. It is a deeply personal short film exploring my own struggles as a creator constantly chasing ‘perfection’ and fluttering between projects, thereby never being happy enough to finish anything. The story is told as a slightly psychedelic journey of its own creation, with me battling my own personal demons manifested as alternative versions of myself. The short is mostly edited using traditional continuity editing - with the exception of a snippet of a video essay about Spider-Man 2 (2004). I employed heavy use of the classic split-screen effect to allow myself to play multiple characters within the same shot.
College Projects
Throughout my time at college I worked on several smaller projects that demonstrate my proficiency in editing. Primarily, these projects utilise traditional continuity editing, compared to the slightly more experimental styles that can be seen across my other projects.
YouTube Projects
Since I was seven years old, starting with simple Lego Stop Motions, I have been making content on YouTube in various ways, ranging from gameplay compilations to 5-second memes to video essays. These are just a few of these videos to demonstrate both my progress as an editor and the variety of content I have produced throughout my life.
peterkirkcaldy@gmail.com