Ah, it’s been a month since I last posted an article. I actually had to put my project aside for a few weeks to work on two side projects.
That said, it feels good to take a bit of distance, and I’m coming back to the project with more perspective. It helps to step back, stay grounded, see things more objectively, and then iterate in a healthy way — cutting what doesn't work and improving what does.
This week I mainly worked on setting up my Steam page. I decided to offer a demo of what I already have — I’d like to get feedback on my game: a sort of validation to see whether the potential I see in this project is actually real.
I started by preparing a teaser using Meshy’s tools (thanks again!):
3D to image: I built a layout with a tape recorder, a 3D model of my parody MI-6 file, a water gun, and an adorable floatie (which will be used in the game’s logo). Then I generated everything with Nano Banana using a prompt for a nice desk scene with slightly dim lighting. The result is very cool — it looks like a cliché old-school detective movie.
Image to video with VEO 3.1: A first prompt to get a backward tracking shot, and after a few tries I managed to position the camera at the office entrance door.
Then I took the final frame of the video to create another prompt for another backward tracking shot, leading into the hallway.
And then I did the opposite: I reused my original image to create a close-up.
I also tried to have the tape recorder fall for a small comedic effect — like the cameraman bumping into the table. But I couldn’t get a usable result: too many hallucinations, random characters entering the frame… I’ll do it another way.
Next I wrote the script and prepared the voices. I legally sourced a great deep, heavy, engaging narrator voice — the idea is to have a voice-over announcing the game like a blockbuster, and Archibald Figgs constantly interrupting him. At the end, the narrator loses patience and walks out of the scene (and I have a great pun there, but it only works in English, not in French!)
Then came the rough cut and editing in Shotcut, adding music, effects, and text.
My only regret: I don’t have enough videos for proper transitions, because it’s a single sequence made of 8-second clips (the length of VEO 3-generated videos).
I added effects to “mask” the transitions so they’re not too noticeable, but I’ll still end up with two cuts that I’ll have to patch with camera-glitch effects — not ideal.
Honestly, I should have generated more videos, but I already spent 1000 credits on this. (And I dream of having insane hardware to generate videos locally and make short films — the rendering is so good.)
The video is ready, and I made a French-subtitled version.
Not bad for my first trailer!
Then I moved on to the visuals using the image created by Nano Banana and prepared the full set of assets for SteamWorks.
Finally… back on my game, I redid the menu and settings panel, then coded all the logic, fixing a few bugs along the way.
I prepared the Steam page and uploaded a build — now I just have to wait for their review. But I think I’ve put together a pretty nice page for the Alpha demo!
The demo will probably be a bit short, but it will show the work done so far and the universe I’m building.
