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Trail blazer or trail fail: How to make the ultimate trailer for your indie game

Full Indie UK's Trevor Klein gives his tips and tricks

Trail blazer or trail fail: How to make the ultimate trailer for your indie game


Trevor Klein is head of development at award-winning content design and creation company Somethin' Else, managing the company's digital slate and working to bring projects from idea to production.


As indie mobile developers, we can't command AAA marketing campaigns, but one area where you can make an immediate impact, however, is through your video trailers.

YouTube isn't exactly a level playing field, but your studio can manage its own channel in just the same way as Rockstar, and your trailers will be played in an identical video player to those from the big budget publishers.

Indeed, in this respect, we need to think like Putterfish. We need to make ourselves look big.

Promo-phobia

Every spare second we have when we're working on a game tends to be sucked up by the actual development, leaving little leftover brain-space to make videos.

This is probably the reason why so many indie game teasers uploaded to the web are lacking in focus, concept, and/or quality. They can feel rushed, like an afterthought: "oh Google Play metadata says I can have a video - better make one quick".

Given that, for many cases, that rushed video will represent the first experience a lot of people will ever have with your game – especially if it's a paid release – such videos can be a huge problem if they don't reflect the care and quality of the final product.

Even before spending 69p or 99c, many potential customers will want to watch the game's official trailer. If it's clearly a laggy screen-capture from a simulator with some generic library music slapped on top, it's likely plenty will wonder whether that represents the level of neglect than can expect from the game itself.

As a result, that 69p will likely be pushed back into their digital wallets, put towards one fifth of a coffee instead.

Focus

It's important, therefore, that we make sure all elements of the trailer are top notch, starting with the video's focus.

Focus for us means thinking about who our audience is for the game - which slice of the game market we think the title will appeal to. As such, you need to ask yourself, how have similar games advertised themselves? Are there common tropes we should adopt, subvert, or avoid? How can we delight, surprise or scare?

Focus also means thinking carefully about the game - identifying what makes it unique or distinctive, and listing in priority order the main selling points to our audience.

For our upcoming game Papa Sangre II, we put together eight slides to summarise this, each starting with "Papa Sangre II is…" - an easy digest for anyone on the team to review, discuss and argue about.

Concept

For the concept, we've been thinking about how best to present our unique selling points to our target audience in a way that would provoke a reaction – whether that reaction is a sale, promoting the game via word-of-mouth or gaining press attention.

The risk here is creating a confusing or bland trailer by trying to do too much at once.

If your selling points are quite vague, or encapsulate the whole game experience ("you just need to SEE it"), you'll probably need to show in-game footage.

However, that requires a time commitment from the viewer, so ideally you also need a hook within the first 10-20 seconds (or sooner) that suggests it's worthwhile to keep watching and not wander off and make a cup of tea.
Thomas Was Alone, for instance, used two hooks - a celebrity voiceover in the video name, and whimsical copywriting ("a game about friendship, and jumping").



I'm a fan of all three of those things and that kept me watching long enough to have Mike Bithell show (not tell) me that there's also something quite special about the atmosphere, graphics and story.

Quality

When it comes to quality, we find ourselves returning to my (slightly awkward) metaphor of the Pufferfish.

There is no excuse for using in-game footage that isn't high quality, or having production values suffer in any other way. It's never been easier to capture high definition in-game footage - we use a Black Magic Intensity Pro capture card set to 720p and 30fps, outputting from an iPad through a thunderbolt-to-HDMI connector.

Audio levels, video editing, keeping it short - there are tutorials and cheap/free software that can get you quickly trained up to a level good enough to produce punchy, well edited trailers.

If that's too daunting/time-consuming, seriously consider outsourcing to a specialist.

Trying something new

For our earliest projects, I was a one-man-band putting together simple trailers for our apps and games (see video below), but for our latest effort we worked with the expert in-house video team at Somethin' Else.



The video team took those "Papa Sangre II is…" principle slides and used it as the basis of their video treatment, which went through several revisions before being shot.

We also brought in an art director with a background in music videos - that outside perspective and expertise was hugely helpful.

We're editing it into a shorter teaser (with the hook of 'You are dead'), followed by a longer trailer closer to release (leading instead with the voice of Papa Sangre II being Sean "Game of Thrones" Bean).



It's a marked departure from our previous promos, and we're excited (and a little nervous) to see how it performs. At the very least we're confident that its quality matches that of the game itself, and that we'll learn a lot whatever happens.

But lets get back to you. How do you approach making promo videos for your games? Or if you don't make trailers, why not? Is there perhaps an argument that part of the authentic charm of indie games is a slightly shonky, overlong video?

Let me know in the comments section below.

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