Desta: The Memories Between - Gameplay Trailer
How do you make a trailer for a tactical dodgeball game about coming to terms with your feelings?
It was such an honor to work with ustwo games on this trailer for Desta: The Memories Between. I absolutely love the Monument Valley games, Assemble With Care, and Alba: A Wildlife Adventure. Desta is pretty much the definition of a game which takes some familiar things and then adds a unique spin. The key messages we wanted to convey were:
Tactical game played by throwing a dodgeball
The game is approachable like previous ustwo games, but has a lot more gameplay depth
Desta is a coming home for the first time in a while and in their dreams gathers their strength to face family and friends.
There's a diverse cast of characters who are both antagonists and teammates
The dodgeball is a metaphor for conversations and relationships, not just a random mechanic added to a story
I always start with the script when making trailers for narrative games because I use it as a guide for the gameplay. Since games possess infinite possibilities for trailer footage, using the story as the backbone helps me form the structure. It's much harder for me to start with gameplay and add on the story.
The first shot of the trailer is gameplay because I wanted to make it clear this is a tactical game. What I wanted to avoid was showing a bunch of animated cutscenes and risking people feeling blindsided when they learned it's an isometric tactical game. This was especially so because ustwo games is known for very approachable game designs that aren't thought of as "hardcore" (which is a category tactical games tend to fall into). I wanted the thinking to go: "Hmm, tactical game... made by ustwo games! Ooo, cool!" rather than "Ooo, ustwo games! More Monument Valley-like stuff!? Oh, tactical game? hmm."
I kept the grid-based movement UI on so it's clear it's a tactical game, but turned off the other UI so it wouldn't distract.
Also, a lot of trailers for games with similar camera angles tend to show as little gameplay as possible in lieu of CG cinematics like in this trailer for Aliens: Dark Descent which features nearly two and a half minutes of CG cutscenes followed by five seconds of isometric tactical-looking gameplay. It's almost as if they're trying to hide the game because they think people won't like it unless it's dressed up.
This is why I started with one gameplay clip before the animated cutscenes. That said, I staged the opening shot so it could feel like a story scene. This is the first trailer where I captured footage out of the Unity game engine, which I used to lightly customize some levels. I'm not a game developer by trade, but looking at a Unity project to me is like opening the guts a machine with a million switches. Sure, I can use it to create very custom stuff, but it's incredibly intimidating and disorienting.
In the game, this opening shot is tutorial level, but I removed some parts and added two enemy characters to make them look like they're waiting for a bus. I thought this would fit with the dialogue: "I keep having the weirdest dreams about my hometown." I also used this shot to just show how you walk around a level. The progression of gameplay ideas is intentionally very gradual so it's easy to understand.
After a couple animated bits, the trailer goes back to gameplay for the dialogue: "Not since dad's memorial." The shot for this moment is Desta throwing a ball at a crystal. This scene isn't actually Desta's father's memorial, but I chose this level and customized the crystal's position so it could look like it could be. If people don't read it that way I'm okay with it. My hope was it would connect just enough so people would see the gameplay clips are part of the story, not random cutaways. I talk about this technique more in-depth in this post about intercutting dialogue and gameplay.
I showed some basic tactical things like doing trickshots off the environment, but shied away from anything much more complicated so things wouldn't get too confusing.
After this is dialogue about Desta failing to connect, is followed by a shot of Desta missing a throw at their mum. I originally had a shot of Desta's mum throwing the ball at them, and Desta falling to their knees. The team was worried this made Desta look weak, so I then changed it to Desta throwing the ball at their mum. But towards the end of production, it was suggested by Creative Officer Danny Gray to show Desta missing their shot to match the dialogue more literally. My only hesitation was it might make it look like it's difficult to aim the ball in the game, but decided fitting the story was more important.
This is followed by a line about throwing the ball to work out their problems. I often say trailer editing is not a subtle art and this is a perfect example of just spelling out a key message so the audience will receive it. About 30 seconds in, hopefully people understand the basic mechanic of throwing the ball, and its story significance.
One of the most difficult parts of making a story trailer for a game about FEELINGS is it sounding self-important. As if the game is coming out to say: "This is a game about feelings which are important! Look at us tackling this difficult subject about EMOTIONS!" This pitfall is something I desperately tried to avoid by using dialogue that showed difficult situations, rather than telling the audience: "My name is Desta and I'm having trouble with my feelings!" But because Desta's voiceover is largely a monologue, it wasn't entirely possible to avoid. My hope is it the story comes off as sincere and not super in-your-face.
This is one screen with full HUD/UI just to make it extra clear what sort of game this is. Hopefully the lack of camera movement makes this pretty easy to digest.
After the intro I used dialogue from a handful of different characters confronting Desta. In the game each friend first appears as a version of themselves that embodies Desta's worst fears. For example, friends being angry at never receiving texts and wanting nothing to do with Desta. But through playing the ball game, they end up being friends as they always were. I used dialogue to reflect this story arc where they start as antagonists, but end up as teammates.
Meanwhile, the bulk of the trailer is almost entirely gameplay. For each line I'm trying to match the feeling of the dialogue, gradually flesh out the game mechanics, and show nuances. For example, when Fran says "You can't just show up and expect everything to be normal" I show Fran throwing at Desta to show this anger. When Desta apologizes I show them running away rather than fighting back.
Not all gameplay clips match the dialogue in this way, the shots which follow Desta's battle with Fran are purely to show new mechanics and match nicely with the music. These shots act more like trailer accents. Speaking of music, this music edit was made by Dan Pugsley using existing tracks composed by Mansur Brown for the game.
This is one of the few shots I customized in Unity by moving the camera so the main subjects were closer to the center of the frame.
The next section about Desta imagining the conversations in their head was another late addition. I originally used this section to show some positioning gameplay which was sort of like chess pieces moving about the board. But Danny's suggestion was again to visualize the metaphor more literally by showing the character pass the ball between each other, which triggers short little quips in dialogue bubbles. This is also the only part of the game where I showed full game HUD/UI. This is for the folks who like seeing HUD/UI to understand how the game is played. I think it avoids being too visually overwhelming because the camera doesn't move at all.
This is followed by some character leveling-up progression screens to go with the line: "I think I'm working my way through it." Then Desta's teacher shows up as another antagonist character. If you pay close attention you see she has a special support ability. Then Fran changes from antagonist to team mate after Desta throws a ball at her which is paired with the line "You look like you could use a friend right now" which segues into a team mate selection screen.
The last literal line is Desta saying they can't keep running, which I cut to Desta using a crystal ability and then retreating. The last few shots are just an assortment of other abilities since "all these dreams, let's see how far they take us" doesn't point to any particular game mechanic.
I tried to match dialogue to gameplay as literally as possible, but without being boring.
This trailer was an intimidating challenge which I might've not taken on were the game not made by ustwo games, but I'd so longed to work one of of their games! I was pretty pleased to see people leaving comments indicating we succeeded in communicating the core message. The only thing we might've sacrificed was some gameplay depth, because none of the gameplay gets into very deep tactics.
After working on this project I'm slightly less intimidated by Unity, but still more comfortable working from debug builds. I ended up still using Nvidia Shadowplay to capture footage rather than the Unity Recorder which has major performance slowdown issues. My one tip to a past version of myself is to check what resolution Unity is playing back in. I initially captured at a low resolution and had to redo the whole thing, oops.
Thanks again to the folks at ustwo games for having me along, it was an absolute pleasure working on this trailer!
