Making shareable gifs of your game is boring and lot of manual work. As a developer I've been told that if a task is repetitive, boring or takes time the solution is automation. Thus I want to present my attempt at solving it.

Posted by CatalopeGames on May 16th, 2018

The hard thing about developing games is reaching out to your target audience. The most common approach to this is to post fresh content to your social media. But how do you make lot of fresh content with limited resources, specially when you find it boring to take lots of screenshots or sit down and optimize gifs?

As a developer I've been told that if a task is repetitive, boring or takes time the solution is automation. Thus I want to present my attempt at solving it, at least partly.

What I hacked together within just a few hours was a gif studio on Unity 3D. Using the Moments asset in combination with a spinning camera. The object of interest is placed in the middle and a camera with a spinning animation is added to the scene. This camera contains the gif record script from Moments.

The object of interest can also have a wobbly animation of some kind to make the gif more interesting. I also added quad with a scrolling background texture attached to the camera. You can pretty much go wild and crazy with one rule; make sure the time of all animations corresponds to the Record time of moments, in my case I use 2 seconds. Here are some output examples from it.







Future upgrades could potentially be a batch mode where you simply tell Unity that you want to record gifs of all models in a certain folder, and adding more cool animations and effects to them. Why not automatically upload the created gifs to tumblr or twitter?

All models where made in Magica Voxel for my upcoming game Skeletal Dance Party. It is a game about a necromancer hosting a dance party where the gameplay elements are physics and AI. You can also follow me on Twitter.