If you want to create a high-quality animated gif for your indie game, to showcase to your followers on Twitter, Facebook or elsewhere, then we’ll show you the process on how we do it.
Step one: Record Gameplay Footage
Record gameplay footage of your game using whatever record software available. One software we’re fond of using is OBS Studio.
Once we’ve record our footage, with the setting of recording the footage at a resolution of 1280×720 (this would be done in your OBS Studio setting), then we’d have have the finished gameplay video file ready for editing.
Step two: Edit The Gameplay Footage
There are various video editing software available that you can use to edit your gameplay video. We use Adobe After Effects, which is too much for a simple video trim, but Adobe Premier Pro is more than enough.
With the video editing software that you use, and after you’ve finished editing your video, make sure to render / export the video with the following settings:
- Format: H.264
- Resolution: 1280×720
- Video bitrate: 6
Once you’ve exported that trimmed-up video, we’ll head over to making the actual animated gif!
Step three: Convert The Gameplay Video To Gif
There’s multiple software and online services that you can use to convert your video to an animated gif. We use EZGIF to convert our videos to gifs, where it provides multiple options on the way to create the gif you specifically one (with limitations). Here are the settings we use after we’ve uploaded our video and before we initiate the conversion:
- Size: 480xAUTO
- Frame rate (FPS): 25
- Method: FFMPEG
It’s worth noting that, depending on your video’s length, we might need to lower that length and/or lower the frame rate.
Once you’ve hit that convert button, the gif would be created with all of its details of resolution and file size. If you’re satisfied with how it looks, right-click the gif and save it somewhere on your desktop, and then upload that gif on social media!
General Notes & Advice
- Instead of using a gif, you can just straight up use the video you’ve already created instead, and if you want the video to loop, at least on Twitter, the video would need to be less than 6.5 seconds long.
- You can change the video bitrate anywhere from 3 to 8. The lower the bitrate, the lower the video size and video quality, and vice-versa.
Hopefully this was a helpful post to those who want to make decent looking gifs (or videos) for their game. If we’ve found better ways to do a gif on our end, we’ll update this article.
