My biggest recommendation, if you’re looking to make a trailer yourself for your game because you don’t have the budget for a marketing team, is to check through Derek Lieu’s social media output. The man is an institution in making trailers for video games and he happily shares a lot of his knowledge for free. Not all his tips are applicable to all game, and I figure most of you already know about him but, if you don’t, I heavily would recommend his stuff.
The first shot
Lieu’s first and most common advice is simply to show gameplay quickly. Most trailers will be seen on phone or randomly on Steam pages and it is fair to assume most viewers won’t watch the whole thing. You want to catch their attention quickly and show what your game is about in the first few seconds.
Problem is, Camille and Laura doesn’t really have “showable” gameplay. It is a video game, mind you, the problem is simply that, like a lot of point and click adventure games, the gameplay and the cinematics portion of the game bleed in into each other and they kind of look the same. The gameplay of my game is not something I can show easily because it’s not necessarily discernible from the unplayable portions of the game.
I must accept that, but Lieu’s advice was still behind my decision of what I would open my trailer with. My goal with this trailer was to show what my game was about the quickest way possible.
The “next big thing” I figured I’d have to catch the viewers’ attention was a simple gag. I guess, on the level of development I am, getting attention by being unassumingly funny has been my forte. My games are low budget, single dev affairs, they have a “from the heart” quality. They tend to look silly and funny at first, but as you play them the layer of irony is slowly being peeled off to show that under their silly exteriors, they are honest and vulnerable looks at daily life. Camille and Laura is my first real commercial game, but it still follow the template I made for myself with A Game About, years prior, and the most common reaction to that game was people playing it because it looked silly and being surprised by how much they related to it.
So, the ball playing gag was the perfect opening for my trailer: it’s quick and simple, it showcases the special graphical style of my game, and it has the two main characters being prominently involved. It’s also an indicative tone piece of the game: the child happily playing and being silly while the mom in the background looks worried.
It’s probably not the best opening I could’ve had, but I think it works well for what I intended. I still wanted to give an idea of the gameplay of the game quickly, hence why the text state the “point-and-click” genre in the first full slide. Those were the solutions I came up with to the “show gameplay quickly” side of thing for a game where showing gameplay is somewhat impossible.
The next steps
The first idea I had for the trailer was to make a play on the Peppa Pig intro. My game is meant as kind of a subversion of children cartoons, so playing on that iconic intro made sense.
Peppa Pig has one of the most iconic opening theme of any children shows
I had to change my mind quickly because I didn’t have the money to find a composition similarly iconic but, looking around for music I could use online, I found the great Happy Boy Theme on Incompetech. If you’ve never heard of Incompetech, it’s a bunch of small musical compositions from Kevin MacLeod that are Royalty Free and that you can use in your games or in your trailers as long as you properly credit them. You will never find something as good as a discrete composition that you would pay a musician to do, but it’s great stuff still, I can’t thank Kevin MacLeod enough.
The Happy Boy Theme had this perfect “childish” vibe to it that served the aesthetic of my game wonderfully and was close to the vibe I was looking for with the iconic Peppa Pig theme. I modified the song slightly (I mixed two versions of it that are available together to give it a progression that fit my trailer) and edited the whole trailer around it.
The idea there was to get the concept of the game across. It’s a game about daily life, routine, both the toll they can take on us and the reason why we put ourselves through them. It’s not the most appealing thing to have a trailer tells you the game you will be playing will replicate the “unfun” part of your life – the work and the chores – but being dishonest about what my game is about wouldn’t help either. Hopefully, the humour will be enough to bring a few players in. I always knew my game would have a nice audience anyway.
The final touch was having the discussion where Camille asks her mother why she is sad. It’s early in the game but serves as an encapsulation that the game is not just a funny joke about how miserable being a single parent is but is an ongoing conversation that happens with your child. Editing that bit in before the title in the trailer, I wanted to show that the game was gesturing for something deeper that the funny music and the jokes. Maybe, if I work well and am lucky, I’ll succeed in making a game about those deeper topics! We’ll see!
A few issues
Ideally, we’d have all a marketing team to do our trailer for us. I did not give myself that much time to work on my trailer because it takes time from working on the actual game. I explained in a different post that I only have a year to make the whole thing. I thought it was important to make a trailer to show off the game but realistically I could not make the best trailer in the world.
Nothing’s perfect.
Watching it now, here’s a few things I wish I would’ve made better:
Sound effects! Sound effects make anything you show more lived-in. Even if your whole trailer has music over it (like mine), having the underlying sound effect will help it. The issue for me here is that the sound of my game is still being worked on and is not complete. I tried to skirt the issue by opening and ending with sound effects, but I think it would’ve been better with sound on the whole thing. It’s a mistake a lot of small devs do because sound tends to be an afterthought. It should not be, not for your game, not for your trailer.
The text bubbles! I’m not even sure anymore of why they’re there most of the time. I think I wanted to show that the game was working with dialogues – in a “show the gameplay” mindset – but I didn’t want the viewers to read them most of the time, so I cut them too short. It doesn’t work methinks, I should’ve just removed most of them because they feel wrong, just something that you see for a split-second that you don’t have the time to understand. It also diminishes the interest of the ones I want the viewer to read. In insight, that was just a bad idea. Oh well.
I’m still working on some of the graphical elements. I did not have that much “content” to work with, but I know the visibility of certain elements is not perfect. It become even more of a problem considering that the trailer will rarely be seen on a perfect screen. That was a time issue, I would’ve taken all the time to work on the graphical assets and make their contrast interact better with each other if I had the time. I didn’t.
Date! The game will be out next year, I was so committed to the “Wishlist on Steam” part that I completely omitted to mention that the game will be out in 2025.
I could nitpick it all day long, but those are my main issues with it upon rewatching it a hundred times. Being an indie that is short of time, it means that I need to accept that I have to go forward with imperfection. Anyway, there’s going to be other trailers to work on in the very close future for the game, I will have to overthink about those too!