Chunking Out Confusion

How do you make a good trailer for a realtime strategy game? 

To be perfectly honest, this question is my white whale, except in this case I don't find myself caring enough to go out and find it. The reason is realtime strategy games hit the trifecta of factors which make games difficult to capture.

Firstly, the camera is typically far away, thus making it more difficult to see individual objects. Second, there are usually A LOT of objects on screen all the time, making it difficult to know where to look. And third, a lot of realtime strategy games do not feature objects which are familiar to us from prior experience (even if you've played realtime strategy games).

Now imagine seeing this in a video, and wondering where to look.

I don't have a grand solution for this problem yet, but I do have a tip which I thought of when watching the excellent launch trailer for Klei Entertainment's Oxygen Not Included!

Oxygen Not Included is the sort of game which like realtime strategy games, can have a LOT of things going on at any given time. As the player you're tasked with managing all the things going on simultaneously, so you're going to be constantly looking around and checking in on things. 

So what did Klei do to help mitigate the visual noise? They used a combination of techniques like zooming in closer, making custom animations, having highlighted characters moving in sync to the camera movement, and just reducing the number of objects on screen. 

I've talked about things like this before in my GDC talk about game capture, but one thing I want to highlight is how they chunked up the compositions to make them more readable; this is a technique which can be applied to other games which can have a lot of visual noise.

Put simply, chunking up a composition means sorting out the similar things into chunks so they form distinct shapes rather than be mixed in with everything else on screen. This can potentially reduce things you're asking the audience to look at numbering in the dozens or hundreds down to just a few things. Take a look at this composition.

This image has over a dozen things the eye can potentially focus on, but on the bottom left and right there are three bathrooms and three showers. Six objects, but since they've been chunked together, the eye only has to process two ideas: a group of bathrooms and a group of showers. Had the bathrooms or showers been mixed up and/or put on the top left and right, it would've been much harder to understand.

Taken to an even more extreme is the above image which has 19 copies of a single object. But because almost everywhere we look it's the same thing, it's not as confusing as if there were 19 distinct objects.

This one above is a bit more confusing than the others because the camera is further away, but there are still three distinct groupings of objects and then a big empty space on the bottom. Effectively reducing those groups of objects from 20 to 3.

This one here isn't chunked up in the same was as the others, but the use of contrast for the highlighted item does take the idea of something duplicated all over the screen, and helps us process it as one idea. 

So if you have to make a trailer for a game with potentially a lot of visual noise, find a way to organize and chunk up the composition to make it easier to understand. Match things up either into groups of similar colors or function. Whatever it takes to guide the eye through, because it's very disorienting to not have your eye directed.

If you are creating a shot which is designed to have no apparent focus, then simply have it on screen for less time. If there's a very busy image on screen for a long period of time, the audience is going to start thinking they're intended to find something in there, but if it's only on for a moment, they won't have time to get frustrated!

Now you know why so many realtime strategy games, MOBAs and MMOs make fancy 2.5D or full CG trailers for their games rather than traditional gameplay trailers. Even THEY know they're hard to make trailers for.