Two months ago, Relic Hunters Zero: Remix launched on the Nintendo Switch eShop. While that launch went great and we have since moved on to our upcoming titles Gone Viral and Spinch, we also wanted to collect and publish the full list of GIFs made for social media during that campaign. If you’ve ever wondered what goes into the thought process of creating content for a social media campaign, it’s Buddy Sola – Community Manager – here to provide a bit of insight and commentary into how these were made.  The entire library is also being mirrored on Imgur; though there are multiple versions of these GIFs (optimized for our Instagram, for instance), the ones shown here are the standard versions, built for Twitter and other general use!

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Titled “Grenade Miss” because I completely whiffed with the grenade, this was the very first GIF I ever made for the Relic Hunters Zero: Remix campaign. As a rule, I always record footage of myself when I’m playing any of our games and when this moment happened, I burst out laughing. Immediately, I pulled the footage and started making it for a joke tweet. I hadn’t realized that the best part of it was what came afterward, though, which ended up showing off a ton of the game’s core mechanics (shooting, using cover, using melee, picking up enemy weapons, dashing.) A great introduction for our audience that was beginning to grow was to see what Relic Hunters had to offer.

 

 

For the second piece, I wanted to focus on creating something with a smaller file size for the press kit. Blaster Kill Chain came from that desire to just find high octane action and keep it very simple. My favorite piece of it is the shells flying out behind Jimmy’s submachine gun onto the ground, which ends up dominating the first half while the camera is centered on Jimmy firing.

 

 

Some GIFs are about wild action and high excitement, but others are just there to display core functionality. Like taking a screenshot of your menu interface, Character Screen was made for the sole purpose of showing off the new character art and the ability to select between multiple characters. This one ended up being on the longer side, but its more simple composition meant that it could go far and show off the alternate skins for Jimmy, Pinkyy, and Raff all at once.

 

 

If you followed the Relic Hunters Zero: Remix marketing campaign, you probably saw this asset quite a few times. Very Extreme is known internally as a “Prime GIF”, something akin to key art that will be threaded into email outreach, as well as bigger and flashier updates where we expect to be branching out and showing the game at its very best. This came together like clockwork – telling a short, quick story full of drama. Jimmy, finishing off some Ducans with his minigun, dashes away from a group of enemies only to find himself embroiled in another that have just spawned in behind him. With a sliver of health, he doesn’t flinch and mows them all down! Fun fact: It took hours of footage for me to put this one together because it’s in the very late game of Relic Hunters’ Storm mode. The title of the GIF references the difficulty displayed down at the bottom.

 

 

One of the new features Remix offered was the official induction of ten new weapons from a variety of mod creators for the original version of the game. This GIF, S.H.R.E.D, shows one of them off! You can actually see that this came from the same footage as Very Extreme, but deeper into the run! The difficulty has scaled to Ascendant and I have one more relic to show for it!

 

 

Another weapon-focused GIF, Triple Revolver also took quite a bit of footage to get right. The two pieces that I wanted to focus on were the long sight lines of the weapon and seeing the three damage numbers (hence, triple) pop up against multiple enemies. This clip ended up being perfect since there are four times you can see the three 27s pop on screen from defeating the Turleks.

 

 

Another showcasing functionality, Endless Shop showcases some of the ways you can spend Bounty in Endless Mode: to buy relics and weapons, or clear debuffs from your run. This piece is actually something of a Frankenstein’s monster since the first half and the back half are actually different pieces of footage spliced together with some frame perfect editing I did. This GIF might have taken me the longest to create out of all of them!

 

 

One of the hardest features to show off for me was co-op gameplay in Remix! I ended up sourcing this footage from a QA team playthrough, which I loved because it showed off Biu for the very first time! While Biu looks like a badass in the clip, reflecting enemy projectiles back at them, Raff dashing into some obstacles right at the start wasn’t quite as clean!

 

 

Ten GIFs in, I felt like it was very important to show off the game’s boss fights. The only problem is, those boss fights tend to be minutes long encounters that have you ducking behind cover, navigating shield phases, and mowing down spawned enemies. This piece of footage was purposely staged to create this composition. I needed to open enough chests in Storm Mode to find a powerful gun (the super shotgun in this case), but not enough to drive the difficulty out of range that I couldn’t deal with a boss that quickly. Pinkyy was just there so I could use her temporary invulnerability to guarantee I wouldn’t get absolutely wrecked in the process!

 

 

Sourcing this included many tries, but few successes, at finding good and solid grenade shots. What I realized as I was cutting the footage, however, was that there were still strong moments in there worthy of being highlighted. Raff Kill Chain is one such moment!

 

 

Calcium Carbine was another! A relatively rare weapon, the Calcium Carbine was another new addition thanks to the mod communities; so while my focus had been grenades, I jumped at the opportunity to show off this very powerful rifle. It was also nice progressing from Ultra-Kill to Are You Serious in the Bounty multiplier!

 

 

A fan favorite character, Panzer had yet to make her GIF debut, so I specifically hunted for some good footage of that. Unfortunately, Panzer is insanely squishy so I had a very tough time getting into higher levels of Storm Mode with her. When I ran into a zombie Turlek run, though, I realized I was golden for this one. The respawning skeletons meant I could stack up hordes of low health enemies to mow down and showcase with Panzer’s flamethrower. That boss also being there? Sweet bonus!

 

 

Another weapon-focused GIF, Tommy Gun also features some of the first appearances of Kami in our animated assets. These melee-focused enemies really deserved to be shown off, so when I picked up the weapon, I was really looking for a great opportunity to show them off. Engaging three packs all at once seems to have done the job!

 

 

Zombie Turleks ended up making the best of a bad situation. There are plenty of runs exactly like this on the cutting room floor. I enter Storm Mode, activate the boss too quickly, and don’t actually have what I need to take that boss down. I thought the Relic Pistol would be strong enough to take out the boss early in this instance, but the Zombie Turlek boss kept summoning additional zombie Turleks! At that point, I realized the sheer horde of zombies hunting me down was GIF worthy in and of itself!

 

 

By this point in our campaign, our trailer was up and running! Not just that, it also did a fantastic job featuring each of the different characters, which I wanted to capture all in one GIF. Unfortunately, cramming that much content into one asset can really hit its quality. You can see plenty of artifacting on the floor, as well as around the characters and the text, which is something we try very hard to avoid. Being able to have all seven characters showcased in one GIF was just too valuable.

 

 

The Spaceheart GIF served two purposes – it was the first appearance of Ace in GIF form and it also showed folks the hub world for Adventure Mode. Ace, like Red, are tertiary characters in the game, so most of our initial marketing was focused around Jimmy, Pinkyy, and Raff – all of whom are essentially the faces of the Relic Hunters franchise, and particularly for Remix. As we got closer to launch, however, we wanted to thread in a bit of Red and Ace as well, to round out the cast. One surprise I had in making this was how long it ended up being. Since so much of the Spaceheart is just that light blue, I ended up being able to fit in all these extra moments. Picking up relics, shooting the shotgun, then the heavy shotgun before zoning in – you get a really full picture of what the Spaceheart offers all in one go!

 

 

I had shown off the bosses in Storm Mode, but Jimmy Fighting the Commander was built to show the Adventure Mode boss fight against the Ducan Commander. The core story: Jimmy firing a Machine Gun, ducking behind cover, then getting up close to blast with the Heavy Shotgun was almost a tutorial for players. When you’re fighting the Ducan Commander, don’t be afraid to back up, but also make sure you use your windows of opportunity as best as you can.

 

 

Last but not least, here’s our first real introduction to Red! She is able to spawn beasts called Kami to fight alongside her, so it only made sense to showcase that spawning mechanic in her introductory GIF. Within the community, we sometimes joke that Red fights alongside her “Doggos”, which is how the title was conceived.

 

 

Another one coming from the exact same footage, Red and the Doggos focuses more on the behavior of the Kami as they fight with you throughout the level. With multiple enemy packs, they’ll usually focus one group to chomp down on before progressing to the next.

 

 

We used “Bullet Hell” in the marketing leading up to release, so Skin of My Teeth really shows off what it’s like. With dozens of zombie Turleks each shooting blasts that will phase through cover, there was no choice but to just run! Surviving at the end with just 16 HP felt like an accomplishment all on its own.

 

 

As part of all our major game releases (and we’re currently looking back to games in our library), we had one of our animators throw together a custom animation for Relic Hunters Zero: Remix! On our Youtube channel, that animation would be set to the game’s soundtrack, but I also used it to advertise the soundtrack going live for purchase across various platforms, in collaboration with Materia Collective.

 

 

The closer we got to release, the less time I had to sit and record hours of footage for targeted GIF-making. But we had already pushed out the trailer, which gave me some real ammo to make the final seven GIFs for the collection! Cutting Jimmy out of the trailer with its motion graphics ended up allowing me to focus my time in better places, like recording the podcast or running giveaways.

 

 

Here’s the trailer cut piece for Pinkyy. One of my favorite little details in here is that the footage has been mirrored, so you can see the numbers that are popping out of those Turleks are backwards!

 

 

Raff’s trailer cut is one of my favorites, but I always look for the rocket sailing off by her head to explode on those crates.

 

 

Biu’s trailer cut also ends just a few frames before I want it to. We never actually see the Ducan in the corner get hit by his own reflected blaster bolts, even though the blaster bolts are clearly flying right for him!

 

 

The combination of low health, fighting the boss and defeating the enemy on screen makes this my favorite of the trailer gifs.

 

 

By this point in our marketing, Ace had become something of a minor meme among the Relic Hunters community. Since he looks so smug in his splash art, we made a smug Ace emoji in the Relic Hunters Discord that players loved.

 

 

The final GIF we made for the Relic Hunters Zero: Remix marketing campaign was, fittingly, the final of the character GIFs from the trailer. This turned out to be a very difficult one to make because the two phases of Red’s splash art (with and without the Kami) added quite a bit to the file size. But with some insider tips and tricks, I was able to make it without being too overbearing!

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Thanks for taking this journey with me through the GIF aspect of our social media campaign for Relic Hunters Zero: Remix. We hear indies talking about the time and effort that goes into creating strong social media content all the time! If you want to ask any questions about the full campaign, connect with devs behind the game, or see what kind of content we’re putting out for our upcoming releases, make sure to join us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Discord!