I Expect You to Die 3 Campaign
I Expect You to Die 3 is now available on Quest and Steam, so now is a good time to walk through the three trailers I made! I got this gig because I made trailers with Schell Games for Among Us VR. It always feels great when people want to work with me for multiple projects. I seriously consider it more validating than any award could ever be.
How do you make multiple trailers for the sequel to a game which essentially has only six levels!?
The announce trailer starts with a cold open with active gameplay which is intended to be easily identifiable as VR. I hope this opening is a satisfying self-contained story which sums up the key hooks of the series: It's a VR game where you interact with lots of stuff, and you die in comedic ways.
When I started this trailer I knew we were going to make three trailers, so I was already trying to figure out how little I could get away with showing (so I would have enough material for the next two trailers) This trailer's story is:
Agent Phoenix is back on the job
There's a robot character
Phoenix runs into a dangerous situation
The events have global implications
This isn't going to be an easy job
The second shot with the car is there to show the returning fans something new (the previous games didn't have levels where you're in motion). The third shot is from a level I was conscious to show very little across all three trailers, but it's a closeup of a complicated panel with lots of switches and worked well for the joke. The explosion there is a composited element (since the in-game explosions aren't as screen-filling and punchy).
The hard hat on the top left is hiding some unfinished assets. Since this was the first trailer, there was plenty more I couldn’t show!
Because the dialogue for the next sections don't reference any specific moments in the game, it gave me free reign to show a variety of little interactions like: the soldering iron, a fire extinguisher, an envelope full of items, a poison trap, a suitcase, switches, ciphers, and more. My intent was to establish a very basic story to give context to these interactions. Hopefully, it gives a sense of how the story progresses via your actions. I always give story context to gameplay to avoid making a fidget cube trailer.
VR games provide lots of hand-acting opportunities. In this trailer there's the opening shot, waving to the robot, being surprised by the poison trap, looking at the envelope cipher, being frustrated by the number pad, and eating the hot dog with the blow torch. These moments do show active gameplay, but I think of them as character moments first, and puzzle interactions second. Because this is a game where it could be easy to spoil solutions, I tried my best to show the beginning or middle of a puzzle, but no actual solutions.
The second trailer is the "Villain Reveal." Of the three, I consider this the full fledged trailer because it spells out the villain and plot. Again, I wanted to start with a humorous cold open to reiterate the key hooks. In this driving scenario the player is free to do whatever they want with the steering wheel, so I thought it would be funny to show some confusion and then throw it out the window. For extra punch, I significantly augmented the window breaking sound effect from the game.
For this trailer Brash Tracks who "trailer-ized" the music from the game for extra impact. The story for this trailer is:
Dr. Roxana Prism is a former member of the agency
She's working to make robot agents superior to humans
Every time Phoenix encounters her robots they get stronger
There's more to come
I tried to show as little game as possible because the game isn't that long and there was still one more trailer to go. The idea was to show the basic framework of Dr. Prism's plot, but without the specifics of what happens in each mission (or the steps of her grand scheme). Hopefully, this makes it feel less spoilery than if I showed the objectives of each mission. Because this trailer has more dialogue there are more opportunities to match it with footage. For example: "Every time we encounter Agent Phoenix we get stronger" followed by the robot saying: "Check it out, we can fly now!"
In this trailer I used the Quest's built-in image stabilization feature. It works pretty well, but in shots with lots of side-to-side motion black bars show up on the left and right of the image. In those cases I zoomed in the footage and applied some light motion to avoid showing the bars. It's not as ideal as Desktop monitor motion smoothing, but it's a huge improvement!
This is another shot from a level I wanted to avoid showing, so I turned around 180° from the default player position and focused on the less flashy parts of the game’s art. I also showed the different gloves to show just a bit of depth.
Because of the punchy music there are many more trailer "accents" like the slide carousel cartridge being inserted, lights turning on above Dr. Prism, the big purple explosion, and the drill lever. This trailer also has my favorite hand-acting moment where Phoenix readies a sandwich and gets surprised by their soda spraying everywhere (which they throw into the desk drawer)
It's a really tricky balance to show a variety of levels and unique interactions within the levels across multiple trailers. One really simple example is, in the announce trailer the robot says: "Oh hey, you must be from the agency! Shout if you need anything. Actually, don't shout (I'll be right here)" and in this trailer the same robot says: "Oh hey, I'm Robutler!" Knowing their name is just a bit of information which wasn't in the first trailer. My intent for including that dialogue was to flesh out the details. My rule of thumb for what to go just bit deeper with each trailer in the campaign (which areas get this treatment depends on the trailer)
This QR code was composited in to give the community a little online mystery game to solve
What really helped me edit the 2nd and 3rd trailers were the quick jokes from the robots. Not only could I show you operating a giant drill, but the robot makes the quip: "Hey, you found some nickel! Do it again and you'll have ten cents."
The second to last tease is of a giant squid which we debated showing for spoiler reasons, but we left it in to increase the stakes and end on a nice money shot. The last gag with the upside-down robot in the car is basically the same as a lot of the others where one wrong move results in death, but I thought the endearing robot dialogue made it a lot more fun. Once again, this is a 3rd party explosion element composited for extra impact. For this end slate I hired a graphic designer friend to do the layout with all the cogs and I animated it in After Effects.
This third trailer came out for the Steam release about a month after the Meta Quest version. Schell Games came up with the concept of centering it around the robots. This was the most difficult of the three to make because I didn't want to show much more of the game, but I still had to make the trailer feel fresh. I initially struggled a lot with the music because the remaining tracks from the game weren't structured quite right for a trailer. I re-used the announce trailer music and the comedic opening is set to a royalty free track from Premiumbeat.com.
Once again, the trailer starts with a funny moment, this time courtesy of the robot who is the last joke in the second trailer. I enjoyed acting out the shock in this shot followed by the "Oh, you kidder" hand wave. The general idea for this was to show the robots get slightly more irritated as they get antagonized in each level. This doesn't entirely come off because the robots are very jovial through the whole trailer, but their actions towards Agent Phoenix escalate.
The story of this trailer is:
Dr. Prism proposed replacing agents with robots
The robots are going to prove they're better agents
You can see this doesn't have much more story than the previous trailers, but hopefully the focus on the robot jokes makes it feel like a very different trailer. By focusing on the robots' antics I was able to show very few new interactions. Some things like the poison trap (first shown in the announce trailer) were given a bit of additional context. Since this is the last trailer you can see the progression of the robot art (in the earlier trailers their metal sheen was black).
Moments like these are meant for players who want to go back and read little details or see mission objectives. For anyone who doesn’t freeze frame this moment, this is just a quick look at something related to the mission.
These trailers were all sound mixed by Michael Cardillo of Creative Waves, who always adds the last bit of polish that make the trailers feel professional. I very much appreciate little touches he sometimes adds like the metal foley sounds in the third trailer when Agent Phoenix is struggling to find an antidote to the poison.
I quite enjoyed working on these trailers! I love the game's sense of humor, especially because it lets me flex some VR hand-acting muscles. Again, these aren't terribly long games, which makes it more difficult to avoid spoilers, but I enjoyed the challenge. I think even if players watch all three trailers there's still quite a bit of stuff in the game that will be fresh and surprising.
