Making a Trailer Before the Game
Why wait to make the trailer for your game until later, when you can work on the trailer BEFORE the game?
I think marketing gets a bad rap because it's assumed artistry goes out the window when you're focused on whether a game is marketable. I think it doesn't give enough credit to artists and designers to assume they can't make something which is both artistic AND marketable. When you need to build a sustainable business making games you absolutely have to consider the viability of your game's genre and how you will market it. Thinking of your game's trailer as soon as possible is just one tool which can help you do this.
Game developer Lucas Pope, (who made "Papers, Please") said in an interview with Noclip that he thinks of a game's trailer when vetting ideas. In this tweet thread are a number of other developers who said they also think of trailers very early in their games' development. I'm currently conducting interviews with game developers for a GDC talk about this topic and I wanted to share some insights I've learned thus far.
How do you think of trailers before you've started making the game and what are the advantages and disadvantages?
This trailer for the game I Am Jesus Christ was controversial because its publisher Playway Games would make faked gameplay trailers, and put them on Steam to gauge interest and then decide which game to develop based on wishlist numbers. Steam later changed their rules so you were required to be able to upload a build of the game to make a Store page. In this article I’m NOT encouraging this type of business practice.
Story & Theme
One of the biggest advantages to making a trailer at the prototyping stage is setting a target to create a goal and align your team members. Check out this "Tone Video" for Supergiant Games' Transistor. There's no gameplay, just setting, genre, story, characters, themes, and vibes. If you've played Transistor you can see how much of this made it into the final game (quite a bit!) In my interview with Chandana Ekanayake of Outerloop Games, he said gameplay mechanics may change during development, but it's far less likely for the same to happen to broader things like story and theme. For this reason, games with a strong focus on narrative, characters, and theme stand to benefit most from a trailer-first process.
As evidenced by this Transistor example, it's great to work with an artist and writer to prototype ideas into a trailer. A storyboard artist, composer, and voice actor can also work wonders and all without a game engine or the smallest bit of code.
When you have such top notch artists, writers, actors, and composers on your team, you can make very attractive trailers O_O
Some prompts for developing a story-focused trailer prototype:
What is the setting? Time period? Genre?
Who are the characters and what are their problems, wants, hopes, and needs?
What themes will this story explore?
What fantasy will the player experience?
What happens during the story?
What are the key scenes and set pieces?
The more specific your answers, the stronger your ideas will be. For example, this would not be a strong and unique pitch: "It's a high fantasy game during medieval times with humans and elves fighting a dark super powerful enemy emerging after thousands of years."
Starting with 1-4 will lay the most groundwork for the game because they're less specific. In my interview with game designer Doc Burford, he put great significance on the fantasy you're selling. For example: "You're a suave and sexy art thief" is specific and interesting, but "This is a game where you have 5 weapons and a variety of upgrades and power-ups" doesn't conjure a player fantasy.
Prompts 5-6 are for when you're ready to think of "trailer moments" or set pieces. I often have to think this way even for fully realized games. For example, for Among Us VR trailer I had to consider: What are the behaviors of different player types and what scenarios would they find themselves in while playing? I made this trailer about the sort of player who just wants to do tasks and would rather not get involved with the discussion of who the impostor is. This leads into using a trailer to help conceive of gameplay ideas because...
Seeing is Believing
A common problem I see in trailers are game mechanics in search of purpose. I call these fidget cube trailers because it's like showing a bunch of switches and buttons being pressed to the service of no end goal. A trailer which has even the most basic story framing can make those mechanics more meaningful. How a story unfolds via the player's controls can affect how enticing the game idea is. The story of a ninja will unfold very differently if the gameplay is based on: Devil May Cry style action, turn-based tactics on a grid, first person shooter, visual novel, 2D-platformer.
When in the early stages of development, try thinking of your game's trailer set pieces and key scenes via the player verbs. For example, in the game Mark of the Ninja:
Killing a guard and hiding their body
Killing a guard and stringing them up on a light pole
A guard finding a dead body then going crazy with fear
The ninja jumping off a ledge and gliding silently to the ground
The ninja hiding behind a vase then dashing to another one
The ninja running into a vent to sneak behind a guard
In a game, player verbs are the means to achieve a goal. Whether it's saving Princess Peach in Super Mario Bros., taking down the head of a ninja organization, or defeating a passive-aggressive AI forcing you through a gauntlet of test chambers.
Thinking of a trailer early on will force you to think of your game's loop. Gwen Foster of Chikon Club designed the prototype for Soup Pot with a trailer in mind. The thinking was: "What are the parts of the game loop we need to make a 1 minute trailer?" This turned into a vertical slice with precisely the pieces needed to capture footage for the trailer with art and sound. A lot of game development processes are about spending a very long time "finding the fun" but making a trailer that looks finished and tangible can not only set goals, but test player interest.
The other thing a trailer will reveal about your game is how well it works for someone who is watching it being played. If your character has a special attack, but the only difference from a basic attack is it inflicts more damage, that won’t be as strong as if the special attack has a unique animation. If your story is told strictly through audio logs or voiceover, you have fewer tools for telling the story through visuals you capture. There are a lot of parts of games which can be “felt” by the player, but cannot be seen by the audience watching. The better it works for both the player and the audience, the stronger the trailer will be.
Assemble and Align the Team
Another reason to think of trailers well before you make an announce trailer is if you need to pitch your game idea to publishers, investors, and creative collaborators. This is especially important when the game's mechanics are not easily described using words.
This is a problem the Viewfinder team had early in development. In the first person game, you take photos of the world, hold the photo up, then at the press of a button, that photo turns into the 3D space in front of you. If you haven't seen Viewfinder at work, it's hard to wrap your head around what you just read. But if you look at a single GIF, you'll get it right away. Cutting together a rudimentary trailer helped them get creative partners and pitch the game to publishers and investors.
A trailer can also act like a North Star for the team during development. Assuming it's an agreed upon vision, people can look to it to determine if their work is aligning, or if something is veering off and needs course correcting. For example, if the game is a comedic 2D platformer game. Art that looks borderline horrific would probably not be a good fit. Or it might just need some writing which fits it into the comedic tone. It's much easier to argue for or against something if everyone is aligned on a vision.
How to Make a Prototype Trailer
Whether you're a trailer editor or a game developer, there are several ways you can help make or concept a trailer for a game.
Written pitch
Storyboards
Animatic/Ripomatic
Vertical slice
Doc Burford said he'll write out the script for a trailer at the design phase like this one for his game ADIOS. In this example you can see how he's thinking of the game in terms of the shots and scenes. This could naturally lead to thinking of how these shots would be created in the game and what the player is doing in each shot. Ideally, the player is actively involved as much as possible (otherwise it's just a series of non-interactive cutscenes).
A step up from a written script is storyboards. The best thing about storyboards are how they reveal when your script doesn't lend itself to visuals related to gameplay. For example, you can't capture a shot for the trailer if the narrator says: "ten thousand years ago, great fireballs fell from the sky..." but your game takes place in the present where no fireballs ever fall from the sky. This is why trailers based on backstory and lore are usually CG cinematics or motion comic style cutscenes.
Storyboards can then be turned into animatics like the Transistor tone video. Making animatics can be as simple as adding music and a bit of motion to the storyboard frames or just cutting them into a sequence with no music. The benefit of this technique is it doesn't require any game engine or code. At this stage you should still be at least considering who the player is and what they do to advance the story.
"Ripomatic" is a movie industry term for a video made by cutting together footage ripped from movies and TV shows. It's like a mood board in video form. A lot of fan trailers inadvertently do exactly this by making concept trailers for shows or movies that don't exist yet. For example, before the Disney+ Obi-Wan Kenobi series, this fake trailer got MILLIONS of views by cutting together footage from a Ewan McGregor film "Last Days in the Desert" combined with some Star Wars visuals and audio.
The last way is to make actual pieces of the game to capture and cut into a trailer. This will be more or less labor intensive depending on the people who are helping make the trailer prototype. This can be a "vertical slice" of the game which has just enough playable parts to put into a trailer. Or it could even be small pieces of the game which are just functional enough to create the shot needed to put into the trailer.
This reveal trailer for Firewatch features dialogue made just for the trailer, and animations which are in the game, but which don’t appear in this way at all.
Tips & Final Thoughts
It's not enough to just think of how your game would look in a trailer. You have to put together the ideas and make sure your game idea stands out and has something unique. Or in marketing speak, you need to make sure you have unique selling points. For example, if you're making a game inspired by classic Legend of Zelda games could include shots of the player:
Finding a sword
Fighting monsters
Collecting hearts and money
Exploring a town & talking to the people
Buying new items at the store
Going back into the world and finding a dungeon
Solving puzzles in the dungeon
Fighting a boss monster in the dungeon and getting a new item
These shots could easily fill an entire trailer, but it might not have anything new except different art. This could at worse bring on accusations of a "re-skin" game where it's almost the same as another game but with different art (which may or may not be of the same caliber as the inspiration). Somewhere in the trailer has to be SOMETHING which changes the formula in a way which justifies a player trying it out. Why would someone play a game which is mostly the same, but has less compelling art and story? A game being a new version of something isn't reason enough to purchase. If you find in this case where your game has no unique mechanics, you better hope your art direction is enough of a hook on its own.
If you need a simple way to start a trailer before you have any footage or game to capture, I recommend my post about how to start a trailer timeline. It's a very different experience writing out ideas on paper and seeing them play out in realtime on a video editing timeline (even if it's just text describing what is happening in each shot)
If you've worked trailers into your game development workflow and prototyping phases, I'd LOVE to hear from you so I can strengthen my GDC talk on the subject. Please contact me if you have any experience which you think would be helpful to other developers!
