How to Make a Trailer for a Realtime Strategy & Building Game
This is not a definitive guide on making realtime strategy game trailers; it’s more a study of how three realtime strategy/building games did a really great job on their trailers. Realtime strategy and tactics games are very difficult to make trailers for because:
There's a lot of stuff on screen at all times
It's difficult to see the player's input and decisions
Changes in the game happen slowly
This includes games like Starcraft, League of Legends, Civilization, and other similar games which have a lot of user interface and a lot of characters being moved one by one or in groups. One approach I've recommended is chunking out confusion which means separating large quantities of similar things into groups so it's easier to keep track of them. The other is making an explainer trailer where the developer does a point by point walkthrough of the game's mechanics.
But I recently saw TWO excellent trailers for strategy building games which I think are great examples of a way to at least make an announce trailer which shows the high level concept of the game even if it doesn't dive deep into the details. These two trailers impressed me by how easy they were to understand while also being very entertaining to watch. The first is the Gamescom trailer for Per Aspera.
The game description is: "From humble beginnings come great things... and this is your beginning. How will you overcome the near-impossible odds to terraform Mars?"
This is an excellent message for the game, and the trailer illustrates it beautifully. The trailer starts with a wide shot of Mars with a small white speck on it which contrasts nicely with the red planet. As the camera flies in we see it's a single structure with some sort of satellite dish. The next shot is a vehicle driving from that building to a small building nearby.
Two core things this trailer does well is introduce ideas gradually, and also cut the shots and sound effects onto the beat of the music. Introducing ideas bit by bit makes it easy to follow along as things increase in complexity, and cutting on the beat adds nice video and audio interest; it's just fun to watch things cut to the beat.
It's ok to start simple, just move onto the next idea quickly.
In the next shots the camera cuts closer to the second building so we can see it get built up. Now that we've seen this building appear, it's easy to understand what we're seeing as the third building is created. With this idea of building structures firmly in our head, the trailer has license to speed up the editing and show many more buildings appearing.
Pretty soon the camera has zoomed out even more and we see larger clusters of buildings connected by roads. There's also some sort of rrid UI which looks like it's for managing these larger clusters. The camera zooms out even further showing many many structures. Had the trailer started on one of these wide shots, it would be visually overwhelming, but by gradually easing us in, we know what information to take from each of these shots rather than struggling to keep up.
After the wide shots, the trailer punches back into closeups which adds some nice visual variety and shows us fun animations of things like rockets and other vehicles. The trailer's end montage zooms back further and further until we're back where we started with a full view of the planet with a vast network of structures across it.
This shot would be overwhelming to start with, but with the gradual build up I know that all I'm expected to take from this shot is: "You can build a network of structures."
The trailer finishes with the title cards:
CITY BUILDER
PLANET BUILDER
Then there's the final end title with studio logos, a call to action of "WISHLIST NOW" and nice high quality key art which shows Mars partially developed with technology. This is a really fantastic announcement trailer with a simple and very clearly communicated idea which sparks the imagination, and leaves a lot of good questions which can be answered in future trailers and marketing videos. The excellent music and cutting on the beat makes it super entertaining to watch, which is a feat considering how slowly these games can move when played in realtime.
The next trailer is the Stronghold: Warlords Free Build Trailer!
This trailer also uses cutting on the beat for entertainment value, and gradual building up of structures to slowly introduce us to the concepts. It also does a great job of leaving us wanting more by the end.
The trailer starts by flying through some clouds to reveal an East Asian landscape and structures. It starts off with some slow environment shots which can be a very dull way to start a trailer, but in this case I think the East Asian setting is a nice hook, and the isometric camera angle hints at the strategy genre. The main reason I generally advise avoiding slow environment shots as an introduction is when they don't help inform the audience of the genre of game they're watching a trailer for, but in this case it works.
The camera flies over to a building surrounded by burned out structures. We see the title cards: DESIGN BUILD BESIEGE which each appear to the beat of the music (quick note, if your trailer starts off by very explicitly cutting to the beat, that usually tells me I can expect the rest of the trailer to do that too, which gets me excited :P)
I love the next shot which uses some sort of graphical effect to make the building look like blueprints complete with some rectangles which demarcate areas of the map with the building types you can make like for military, industry, diplomacy and economy. I think this a simple but brilliant idea because it reveals an underlying system of the game which is normally invisible to the untrained eye.
This shot literally highlights a game mechanic to make it clear and understandable.
Cut to the beat of the music, the destroyed structures disappear. I initially didn't understand why they were disappearing; I think if the sound of them being removed was something like wood being shuffled around that might've made it clearer.
Next up is a montage of individual buildings being created. Like in the Per Asperatrailer, this gives us the time to become accustomed to the game's visual language so when there's a screen with several buildings, we're not overwhelmed. Again these buildings appear to the beat of the music.
There's a time-lapse of the city building up, roads being created, and we get a nice beauty shot of the completed city. Things take a turn when an army shows up. A title card flashes onscreen: INVASION COMING. This is a quick but necessary title card, because otherwise it might be possible we're looking at the city's own army returning home after a mission.
Starting simple sounds boring, but simple means easy to absorb quickly, which means you can cut to bigger and more complex things very soon after.
We get a couple shots of the invading army's equipment before a wide shot of their vast array of forces which sit just outside the gates of the city. This is the trailer showing us a problem which needs to be dealt with. The next logical question is: "What will the city do about it?"
The music gets more intense as we see the city fortifying its walls, building up its army units, weapons and training facilities. Units deploy along the wall and stand across the field from the invading forces. Another key note is the hero characters are red, and the invading ones are blue; this color contrast helps us understand which side we're looking at during the montage. Before we can see how the conflict resolves, the camera pulls out and there's a title card reveal. This is a great example of ending the trailer at the height of the climax in order to leave us wanting more!
This is a nice cinematic shot which I could easily imagine in a movie.
So there are two great examples of strategy games which helped solve the problem of visual confusion, invisible player decisions and gradual change. This sort of philosophy can be applied to many other game types, but since these are very difficult games to make trailers for, I think it makes it extra clear what it can look like to slowly educate the audience about a game's mechanics while also make it entertaining. I think it is not always appropriate to cut to the beat of the music, but in many cases it does make them a lot of fun to watch.
Here’s one last example of a realtime game with base building which also did a great job with its trailer which had a LOT to communicate in a couple minutes. This is the trailer made by Radikal Studio for The Riftbreaker.
This trailer takes a much less subtle and more brute force approach to showing how the game works, but it’s still very effective. The trailer starts with a time-lapse of base building and the action RPG elements with title cards which flat out say:
BASE BUILDING STRATEGY
MEETS INTENSE ACTION RPG
Another thing this trailer has going for it are its motion graphics which are exciting enough to back up the subjective adjectives like “INTENSE.” The shots accompanying these title cards are pretty busy, but still do a good job of concentrating the eye in the center. This is due to a combination of the game’s visual design and the shot composition and execution.
After the six second intro, we get introduced to the main character Ashley and her AI companion. There are title cards letting us know who we’re seeing. The dialogue does a good job of talking about the gameplay in a way which sounds like it fits into the world’s narrative as well. There are more title cards to prime us for what we’re about to see:
EXPLORE AN ALIEN WORLD
Is followed by shots of the mech by itself exploring a variety of biomes. The narration tells us there’s a threat, so the trailer then shows the mech killing enemies. After that they show base building via a combination of in-game footage and cinematic footage. There’s also some HUD/UI in there to show the buttons, but only in select shots. I suspect this satisfied the people who like to see HUD, but it’s used sparingly, so there isn’t much visual confusion. Another thing I really like is how they made the game menus look more interesting by adding a 3D camera and low depth of field.
This trailer has a handful of shots with full HUD on, just enough to hopefully satisfy the hardcore players who want to see it, but not so much that it’s visually distracting throughout the entire trailer.
After the base is built, enemies come to attack. We see the player defending their base and the feature of being able to jump between multiple bases. All of these moments are primed with a simple title card like: JUMP BETWEEN BASES. Then there’s a final title card: SURVIVE, which is followed by a very intense looking battle scene. After that we see what looks like thousands of creatures encroaching on the base. This is a great “Here’s what you can expect” shot which sparks the imagination about how immense the challenges become in the game.
Another is this factory/automation/survival game which uses a great narrator and script to focus on one chain of increasingly complicated things you can set up in a factory while trying to not die. I loved this trailer so much I wrote a full review for it!
And here’s another for T-Minus 30 which is heavily influenced by muted-by-default social media videos to the point where I think it works better when muted. Read my full review of this for more insight into why this trailer works so well!
If I were working on these trailer campaigns I would likely follow up these trailers with developer commentary trailers to answer the lingering questions about the depth of the choices the player can make in the game, and some of the unique mechanics. As someone who's long avoided making trailers for strategy games like these, I feel inspired by this work and might even be more open to them in the future!
