Mask of the Rose Gameplay Trailer
How do you make a trailer for a game where nothing moves and the audience has to read a lot of text? Here's the recent trailer I made for Mask of the Rose by Failbetter Games; it's a romantic gothic visual novel set in their Lovecraftian Fallen London universe. If you're not familiar, Fallen London is a browser based narrative game with the spinoff games Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies (which are RPG games with exploration, combat, and rich stories). Mask of the Rose is the first visual novel in this universe.
It's difficult to make engaging trailers for visual novels because there's virtually no animation, no voice acting, and A LOT OF TEXT. The appeal of visual novels are the stories, the branching narrative, the dialogue choices, and the relationships with the characters. These slowly unfold over hours upon hours of gameplay. One line of dialogue can't have the same impact as a one second clip of a character killing an enemy who explodes into dozens of gems.
Or can it?
One tactic of visual novel trailers is sprucing up the game's art with motion graphics and visual effects, introducing the cast of characters, and cutting to a nice music cue. I'm not steeped in the visual novel community so I don't know how effective these are. I think they do little more than show the character art and designs, albeit in an appealing way. These are all visual, but no novel.
The other common method I see is similar, but uses title cards to summarize the story and what you do in the game. These work better because at least they summarize the story and mechanics. These live or die on the strength of their title cards which depend on the hooks of the story.
The dialogue selections here also serve as a "second read" for anyone who wants to go back and read more about what is going on.
Fortunately for me, Mask of the Rose has impeccable writing set in a unique world. But how do you know a game has good writing and how do you incorporate that into a trailer? What drew me into the Fallen London universe is the fact I've never read or played anything like it. While I can see its narrative influences, so much of the game feels like it belongs exclusively to Fallen London. On top of that, there are countless lines of dialogue which create amazing images and ideas with so few words. My favorite of which is: "Permanent murder" (I'll get back to this later).
For this trailer I worked closely with Hannah Flynn, Failbetter Games' Communications Director. Fallen London is over ten years old, so I relied on her to answer my questions about the game and community. They'd already released a lot of information about the game on the official Steam page and the Kickstarter campaign, but this trailer still had a lot to say.
We wanted to appeal to:
Fallen London fans who might not play visual novels
Visual novel fans who have never heard of Fallen London
People who haven't heard of either
The first two groups were most important because they're the most likely to be interested, whereas the third group would be a much tougher sell. As they say, if you target everyone, you target no one.
The baseline ideas the trailer needed to communicate were:
Visual novel
Unique cast of characters
Unique setting and premise
The hooks:
The Fallen London universe
Versatile and inclusive character creation
You do NOT have to engage with romance
Storycrafting mechanic
Really good art combined with very specific words can really transport people.
My strategy for visual novel trailers is the same as for any other game:
Hook the audience
Establish the genre and show how the game is played
Show things unique to the game
Use dialogue which says a lot in as few words as possible.
Everything in the first 20 seconds is intended to hook the audience. The first shot is taken from the original Steam trailer, but I changed the layout and fonts. "London" by itself is pretty broad, "1862 London" is pretty darn specific, and "1862 London (Underground)" puts this squarely in the territory of the Fallen London games. Hopefully, this text paired with the cavernous visual full of bats hooks people in only two seconds (or at least convinces them to watch further).
The next shot with the dialogue selection and character art is to establish the visual novel genre. In the game, the text is at least half the size of this (which is fine for the game), so I recreated the dialogue selection and text in After Effects to make the trailer easier to read. The line: "What do you want to know about peoples' love lives?" is to establish a bit of story context, but mostly it's to set up the dialogue which follows after the pedigree card which calls out Sunless Sea and Sunless Skies.
In response to the player, Mr. Pages says: "Just try to convey the taste of their hearts... a toothsome morsel or two." I love this line so much. It's a slight paraphrase from what's in the game for the sake of brevity; I find it delightfully entertaining. How many other games or stories can you think of where a character does a census about peoples' love lives at the command of a demonic being who says they just want to know how the hearts taste!? When I played this part of the game's demo I knew it had to go in the beginning of the trailer.
Previous trailers showed motion graphics versions of the game map, so I thought was time to just show how it looks in the game.
Next is a title card clarifying this as a Fallen London Romance. This is to firmly establish the genre of the game for both Fallen London fans, and anyone else who needs context for what they're about to see in the trailer.
The end of the intro is capped with the character Harjit saying: "There's been a murder," to which Mr. Pages asks: "Permanent murder?" It's rare to receive such a gift of dialogue that generates so many questions in only two words. This is the epitome of what I look for in dialogue when cutting trailers. How can murder be impermanent? Is murder mostly temporary in this world? What is going on!? This must be a fantastical universe. All of that in just TWO WORDS!
When selecting dialogue I look for lines which:
Communicate the premise and details of the world
Indicate what is happening in the plot
Flesh out the personality and roles of the characters
Next, the character creation screens intercut with a line from Milton about the laws of life and death being different. This is to clarify the "Permanent murder" line, and to show Milton, a character Hannah told me fans were interested in seeing.
The character creation shots hit key differentiators which were essential to show. The Failbetter team did a lot of research within their community to know how to make their game more inclusive. The first character creator shot shows some of the gendered and gender-neutral ways the player can be addressed. I first ticked slowly through the expected gendered terms, then quickly shuffled through gender-neutral terms as if to say: "Yup here's what you'd expect... BUT NOW LOOK AT ALL OF THESE YOU DIDN'T!" To my delight, someone in the comments said they liked this touch ^_^
The next shot shows the variety of cameo portraits to choose from. I simplified this screen by cropping out text at the top and leaving only the button which says: "THAT'S ME!" Again, this is to emphasize the versatility of the character creation.
The storycrafting UI is a LOT to take in, but hopefully it at least inspires some curiosity.
The next shot is an important one where you choose whether you're interested in: friendship, attraction, romance, or both romance and attraction. This is to address the spectrum of people from those who want to engage with the romance to those who don't. As far as I know, in most visual novels you MUST engage with the romance to get the full experience. In Mask of the Rose you can get a full experience through only engaging in platonic relationships. We would've been remiss to not highlight this key differentiator. I was pleased to see comments from people excited to play an aromantic/asexual character!
The following shots show how you choose your backstory, and the clothing game mechanic where what you're wearing can in some cases affect how people respond to you. I recreated these screens in After Effects so I could strip out elements and text that would be distracting.
The next section is about the story crafting mechanic which I didn't have as much time as I'd like to try to explain, but I'm also not sure COULD be explained in this form. The intent was to show a few characters asking the player for stories for their specific needs. Then there are a series of shots showing the story crafting in action. Stories are created by selecting characters, settings, and circumstances. It goes by very quickly, and I think the best I can hope for is for people to think: "Hmm, there's something different going on here." Fallen London fans might pick up on it more, because they know stories can act as a sort of currency in that world.
This is a little tease for the Fallen London fans.
The next montage is the "sexy" montage where the backgrounds blur out and the characters are in states of undress. My intent was to go from the most platonic, to the most intense with the: "Imagine biting into a ripe plum. Now imagine being the plum" line. If I've done my job right, the audience should be feeling EMOTIONS during this section.
After this is a line where Mr. Pages compliments the player on their eyes. This is here because parts of the community are very excited to romance one of the "Masters" in the universe. It's also in the trailer because phrases like "obtuscent phosphorence" don't come up often.
The last couple of lines are there to show more characters and give a bit of a tease there's lots more to come. Finally, the trailer ends on a light note with the priest trying to shrug off a giant creature with glowing red eyes as nothing but a bat.
Hannah was always encouraging me to add more roses.
This game was a fun challenge in a completely different way than I'm used to. Firstly, I had to sort through a LOT of text to find the right lines, and game capture was basically non-existent. The shots with characters were sent to me from Failbetter Games because even though I had access to Photoshop files, the game has post-processing effects which affect their lighting and color grading. The most difficult part of the visuals for me were recreating text and UI in After Effects. I also added in some video transitions which I purchased from Video Hive like the bats and the rose petals. I particularly liked the rose petals which I colored to match the key art petals, and I did some masking in Premiere to transition from one shot to another.
Big thanks to the writing team who took my initial script and tightened up a bunch of the lines. For example, the original line about the plum was much longer, but they split it into two lines and made it read better. Another thing which greatly aided readability was when I made the text animate on word by word (as it does in the game). In rough cuts, all of the text would be visible at the start of the shot, which was visually overwhelming.
Music was licensed from APM Music who gave me a selection of music cues based off of this description I sent:
I'm looking for something similar in vibe [to the Kickstarter trailer's music], which is orchestral and somewhat bombastic, and if possible a little sensual without being slow and ethereal heart-tugging strings.
They sent me a couple dozen and I picked this one for its sound and range of feelings, superficial similarity to the game's score, and moods which fit the trailer very nicely.
Final sound mix was done by Michael Cardillo of Creative Waves. There's not much sound design in this trailer, but he was critical in doing things like making the sound of putting clothes on audible (and I'm sure dozens of other little touches I can't even perceive).
Always end on the giant monster if you have one.
I'll admit this trailer moves pretty quickly for something which expects you to read just about every word, but hopefully I succeeded in communicating the core messages. I'm heartened by the positive YouTube comments, and in a recent Twitch stream someone told me they don't play visual novels, but the trailer interested them! Years ago I would've been more worried about a trailer so heavily driven by text, but nowadays reading through videos is the default when it comes to muted social media video and TikTok.
What did you think of the trailer? Did it interest you in the game? Did you not understand a single thing I set out to say? If you have thoughts or comments please reply to this email!
-Derek
