Sleeping Trees is a game concept where we created environment before gameplay mechanics, and when this happens in game development, the project usually fails, and so did this one. We wanted to make a teaser trailer for this concept, attract some attention, we wanted to see if we are choosing the right path, and if the world building alone would attract any players. Being a small indie studio we did not have much of a budget, so we had to cut some corners - though I believe it came out pretty nicely.

Little postmortem on the project.

Creating a trailer like this can take a lot of time and resources for a small team. Sometimes, months can be spent on such a task, instead of actually focusing on the game development itself. I generally believe that this is the wrong way to do this. Fun gameplay with basic graphics should always have priority, than world with pretty graphics with no gameplay.

This mistake can ultimately kill project very easily. Eventually we used the assets for another project, so the work was not wasted.

How was it done?

• Most of the movement of the character was recorder with HTC Vive, through a custom setup directly recorded to Unreal Engine’s sequencer.
• The tracking was directly mapped to UE character. Some of it can be seen here, sorry for the mess on my table! It was a long day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4KSUjAlzRs, and bones like elbows were done through IK.
• Each scene was build specifically for each view.