Tunic Release Trailer
I first saw Tunic at PAX East (or West?) several years ago and I've wanted to play it ever since. I’m so lucky to have received the opportunity to work on the release date/launch trailer! I got this gig because I’d previously with Bekah Saltsman of Finji and I’m friends with Felix Kramer who’s worked as a producer on Tunic for many years, so thank you everyone for bringing me along!
Tunic is a beautiful adventure game where you play a fox who wakes up on an island full of secrets and monsters. The game wears its influences on its sleeve, The Legend of Zelda being the most obvious one with the fox's green tunic, sword, and blue/red shield. It is also heavily influenced by Dark Souls, as made apparent from its combat encounters, bonfire-like save points, retrieving your lost currency after getting killed, and the secrets and shortcuts which get revealed as you play.
As someone who closely followed the development of Tunic since its first reveal, I was pretty familiar with what had been shown in the previous trailers. But as always, I talked to the developers to discuss what was most important to show in the new trailer. The first trailer came out in E3 2017 and doesn’t show a whole lot. We saw the fox waking up, the beautiful art style, the fox cut some grass and ran onto the island, they fought some enemies and then encountered a boss.
This is a nice reveal, but we definitely needed to really broaden people's expectations of how big the scope of the game really is!
The trailer released the following year showed a bit more. It also began with the fox waking up on the island and it featured the game's mysterious language as its title cards. It also showed the fox finding their sword, unlocking some doors, battles with an assortment of new and previously seen enemies (including the stone boss from the previous trailer), and it culminated with the fox reaching the top of a tower stretching above the clouds to reveal an intimidating Boss with dark and distorted wings.
When I first got started, we discussed some key points. First was the game's difficulty, which seems at odds with the cute art design. We didn’t want to chase off people drawn in by the cuteness by emphasizing the difficult combat, but we also didn’t want them to feel blindsided by expecting a breezy game (there are no-fail and infinite stamina accessibility options, though!) At the same time we didn’t want people who enjoy difficult combat but don’t typically like cute games to be chased off either. The other key pillar of the game is its many secrets. We wanted the trailer to show the game has mysteries, a living world, scope, and many layers of secrets to uncover. It’s another tricky line to walk because how do you indicate there are secrets without spoiling any of them?
I started by capturing a playthrough of most the game (I later found out there was a large section I entirely missed because I was playing with cheats :P) Tunic has a nice variety of environments which had never been seen in the previous trailers or demo. Some areas in the late game looked so strikingly different I knew I should hold back (for fear of looking like the trailer had significant spoilers). There were even mid-game areas I thought might look like spoilers simply because of the color contrast with early game levels.
I like how the Fox looks up in this shot, as if to say: "Wow, there's so much to look at!" Looking back at this shot, I should’ve asked Andrew to have the fox walk into the skulls so people could see how they’d move aside
After playing the game there were a few things I knew for sure I wanted to communicate:
This is a large, living, breathing world
You unlock and uncover secrets
An assortment of items and tools
More enemy varieties
More bosses
There’s a really cool old-school Nintendo style manual
On paper, none of this sounds terribly ground breaking. In fact, this list is precisely the stuff I tell people NOT to spell out in trailers. Well, that's not precisely true. It's ok to SHOW this stuff in your trailer. What you don't want to do is TELL the audience about this stuff via narration and title cards. In another universe, there's a version of this trailer which has gameplay intercut with title cards like:
UPGRADES AND A VARIETY OF TOOLS!
BOSS BATTLES!
A WORLD FULL OF SECRETS!
FIERCE ENEMIES TO FIGHT!
Instead, my approach is to list these ideas out during pre-production, and then consider how to SHOW them in the trailer, ideally, without use of title cards or narration. More than anything, I wanted to make the game look and feel rich and big in scope, especially since this trailer was coming out many years since the previous trailer. I think it’s very important for game trailers to show a bunch of new stuff if it's been a long time since the last marketing beat. Had the trailer included a lot of the same areas from the first trailers, it would’ve made the game look small in scope and make people wonder why development took so long.
I always love in games where it looks like the world is alive and functioning in spite of the player (and not a level with characters placed in space for you to interact with).
Tunic is a game which shows a lot and tells very little; there's no dialogue, and most written text is in the game's invented language. This worked well with my philosophy of trailer editing which is to achieve as much as possible through visuals before even considering adding any words or title cards. Making a trailer for a game which is easy to comprehend is kind of a double-edged sword. On one hand, it's less work because you don't have to worry about whether or not the audience will understand what's happening in each shot, but because it's so easy to comprehend, it's at risk of looking too basic and rote. The last thing I wanted people to think is the game is The Legend of Zelda, but with different graphics.
The trick was to convey a feeling of what the journey of playing Tunic using a mix of familiar and unique ideas and to hint at secrets through game mechanics and shots of things being unlocked and opened. The other trick is to not linger too long on any one idea. The order of events ended up in largely the same chronological order as they occur in Tunic, (which is a testament to the nice sense of progression built into the game's visuals and colors which start idyllic and peaceful, then get more mysterious).
The cold open’s purpose was to firmly re-establish this as the same Tunic people saw years ago. We did this by showing the beautiful blues, cute fox waving at the camera, and then we livened things up with a new boss reveal. After the logo, I wanted to show basic exploration with the fox opening bridges and lifting large switches. I don’t know about you, but doors being opened by switches indicates a specific style of adventure game like The Legend of Zelda.
I chose this specific treasure chest just so you could see how the money falls into the space, before it's then pulled towards you. Anything which screams polish and quality gets used!
I’m never content to have a strictly linear profession of gameplay ideas, so in between sections about specific mechanics, I have a shot or two for added "spice." For example, between exploration and combat mini montages, I showed the fox stumbling upon what looks like a church gathering of frogs in robes. For me, this scene exemplified the idea the creatures in Tunic have a life which is happening in spite of the fox who shows up and disrupts things.
or the combat sections I decided it would be good to show HUD/UI to build upon the completely cinematic presentation of the previous trailers. The health/stamina/magic bars on the bottom left signal Tunic's similarity to Dark Souls, and the item menu on the top right was a good place to show items for people to speculate about. For the most part, the HUD/UI is off in this trailer for the sake of clarity and cinematic presentation. I only kept it on during for combat encounters where it could function as a second read for people who want to freeze frame and search for details.
The combat is intercut with more unlocking moments like the key, and a mysterious glowing obelisk. There’s also a scene where the fox walks over some leaking pink liquid which causes the screen to blur and turn pink before cutting to black. I'm not sure if this was understood as happening in-game instead of a video effect, but this was another mystery I wanted to tease.
The following wide shot with the fox running across a bridge is the big ADVENTURE shot which coincides with an epic music break from Lifeformed (Terence Chan and Janice Kwan). This shot features a completely new area with a different color palette. My hope was this shot would expand the possibility space of Tunic in people's minds since it looks so much bigger in scope than any of the previous shots. This is the "We're going on an adventure!" shot.
I always put an extra item in the top right so people could speculate about it. This shot also shows new enemies, and the fox appears to be wearing something on its head (me teasing game systems)
This is also when I introduced some darker areas like the fox fighting skeletons (who are then destroyed by spike traps), some new gameplay ideas like the whip/hookshot item (to show some gameplay depth), an encounter with two enemies, one which tries to snipe the fox who appears to be wearing a gas mask, and then a quick boss montage followed by a smattering of scenes picked to look as different from anything else you r seen so far in terms of: color palette, gameplay ideas, tone, and environment.
Andrew Shouldice created the motion graphics for the trailer and made the cold open shots. One key thing I really wanted in the opening shot was to see the fox cut some bushes cause it looks so darn good in the game; the way the bushes fall after being cut are a nice indicator of quality and polish. He also made the shot for the boss reveal. I asked Andrew to make the boss to really thrust its head forward to match the strength of the sound design. By the way, huge thanks to Kevin Regameyfrom Power Up Audio for the trailer's sound design!
Andrew created some custom camera tools, too! The main one let me set two camera positions (closer or further from the fox) and a time interval. When I resumed gameplay, the camera moved between the two positions in the amount of time specified. I used this for the wide shot after the logo which is followed by the fox opening the instruction manual. This camera tool also allowed me to orbit the camera between two positions (which it would perform over and over again until I told it to stop). I used this in the church scene with the frogs. Other than that, the ways any shots were modified were some which are zoomed in, and most of the rest have the HUD/UI turned off.
The instruction manual gave me a bit of trouble. An early cut featured it in the mid to late section of the trailer, but I moved it to the intro after a suggestion from my friend Sebastian Santiago (who worked as an assistant on this trailer). This worked much better, because it's almost like the fox is checking their map before going on their journey. I asked Andrew to hide some parts of the instruction manual for the sake of readability.
If you have a shot in the montage which doesn't look like anything else in the rest of the trailer, I think it automatically increase the scope of the game or movie. It’s like saying: “There’s so much more in this game, but we only have time to show a little bit of it.”
I feel like I owe most of the success to the music (this is pretty much always the case), because the music defines the feel of the game. If you imagine this gameplay with the soaring, epic orchestral music of The Legend of Zelda, it would feel entirely different and not nearly as mysterious. The visuals certainly lend themselves to some of this mystery, but the music is really what seals the deal. I mostly cut this trailer with placeholder music from the game, and Lifeformed made this custom piece which makes the trailer feel so much more nuanced than I think anything I could do through combination of picture and sound.
I love how this trailer came out, I hope people are intrigued by it and rush out to play Tunic, because it's a truly special game which I didn't hesitate to start playing again once it was officially released. Even though I know a lot of the secrets, it's still so much fun and easy to get immersed in!
