At a time when hundreds of new games are hitting the Steam shelves, the Switch eShop, and the
PlayStation Store every single month, the most difficult thing about making games, might
actually be just getting people to know that your game exists.
Now, there’s so much involved in a strong marketing campaign.
But one of the key components is a good trailer.
This is about 90-odd seconds of uninterrupted footage of your game, beamed directly into
your potential player’s eyeballs.
So, you better not waste this opportunity - and it’s a good time to ask the question:
what makes a good trailer?
So, it’s important to know what a trailer is actually for.
A trailer is not a random montage of gameplay clips.
It’s not a dry rundown of features.
It’s not your opening cutscene.
And it’s definitely not a sales pitch.
TRAILER VO: “Hey you, looking at the screen. Lemme ask you a question.
Do you like awesome things that are awesome? Then you gotta play this game, dude.
It’s frigging cool. And crazy addictive".
Yugh. Instead, the primary purpose of a trailer is to tell players what makes your game unique.
You see, every popular indie game has a hook, which Crypt of the Necrodancer developer Ryan
Clark describes as “some interesting bit of information about the game that compels
people to try it, or to discuss it”.
It could be a clever game mechanic, like a dungeon crawler where you move to the beat
of the music.
Or an RPG where you can talk enemies out of fighting.
It could be an exciting mash-up of genres, like a deck-building roguelike, or a stealth platformer.
It could be a unique setting or story that we haven’t seen before.
Or a particularly strong art style.
The trailer is a chance to explain your hook to the player, and the press.
Both of which will then share that idea in conversations, tweets, headlines and so on.
Derek Lieu is one of the most prolific trailer makers around, and says “I think it's important
to consider how someone will talk about a game after seeing the trailer; I think the
simpler you make an idea to share, the more it will get shared”.
Now, a beautiful game like GRIS practically sells itself.
But if your hook is a clever game mechanic, you’re going to need to explain it.
If the idea is particularly complex and can’t be easily communicated through visuals alone
- like branching narratives and procedural generation - then maybe explicit communication is
the way to go.
That might be through pop-up text-based title cards.
Or, a voice over track.
For example, listen to this trailer for Heaven’s Vault.
ALIYA: “I’m an archeologist. I dig stuff up.
Every inscription I decipher is a piece of the puzzle.
Every moon I sail to, reveals a new path to explore.
And every new discovery, can change the story, entirely”.
These few words neatly describe the core of this game.
You’re an archeologist. You translate inscriptions. You travel through space.
And the story changes based on your actions.
It’s not just random scraps of dialogue, but a clear description of the game’s idea.
And best of all, the devs got the actress for the game’s main character, to read the
script - which feels more natural, less like a sales pitch, and also introduces us to one
of the characters in the game.
But if the game can speak for itself, it’s best to just let it.
I think viewers end up watching the trailer more actively when they’re forced to figure
out what’s going on for themselves - which is more engaging.
This can achieved by clearly and simply showing how the game is played.
In this trailer for the bonkers rule-changing puzzle game Baba is You, we start by seeing
the sentence “Baba is You” change to “Rock is You”, and then the rock starts moving around.
That elegantly sums up the way players get to fiddle with the game’s most fundamental rules.
Here’s another game: Way of the Passive Fist, which is about parrying attacks until
the enemy is knackered - and then knocking them out with a single touch.
To show this, the trailer begins with the main character fending off attacks for 10 seconds.
Then, the action slows, the music stops, and the hero pokes an exhausted enemy to send
them flying across the screen.
And then in the trailer for Return of the Obra Dinn, we see a corpse, the pocket watch,
some death vignettes, and - finally - recording information about the corpse’s death in
the log book.
You don’t need to turn your trailer into a full tutorial, but players shouldn’t be
left confused by what they actually do in the game.
Trailer maker M Joshua says “consider this your first major hurdle: players can’t imagine
themselves inside of a game they don’t understand”.
Now, there’s no point explaining your game if you’ve already lost your viewer’s attention.
Pacing is critical, and if you don’t get it right your viewer will click off your trailer
quicker than players abandoned Fallout 76.
And to get this right, you could do a lot worse than cribbing from Derek Lieu’s graph
of rising intensity, which looks like this…
So step one is the cold open.
The beginning of the trailer is crucial to get right, so Derek often starts strong with
an intense action moment, a slice of gameplay, or even a joke -
DELILAH: Manifest tells people not to go too far in there - it’s pretty dangerous. You’re in it, aren’t you?
HENRY: It doesn’t seem that dangerous - woah, ah!
DELILAH: Henry!
HENRY: Seriously, it’s completely fine in here.
DELILAH: Damnit!”
Don’t bore your viewers with exposition right out of the gate.
And unless you’ve got some serious clout, hold back on the studio logos, as well.
“From the makers of FTL” is a hook in of itself.
But Constipated Gorilla Studios doesn’t mean anything because I just made it up.
Now, you can’t keep that level of intensity going throughout the whole trailer.
Non-stop action is exhausting, and viewers will start to zone out and stop paying attention.
So it’s time for step two - introduction.
At this point, Derek takes a moment to slow down and turn the viewer’s attention to
something less intense.
This is a good time to set up the story, introduce the world, or - as before - explain the main
game mechanic.
With the viewer’s attention secured by the cold open, and their basic understanding of
what’s happening achieved in the exposition, we can move onto step three: escalation.
Here, we can build on things.
We can slowly increase the intensity, add in more mechanics, ramp up the action, show
more explosions, and reduce the time between cuts.
It’s really important to have lots of variety here.
If you’re always seeing the same type of enemy, or the same location, the viewer will
start to think “is that all there is?”.
Make a point to show different things with every cut.
There’s a cute trick that a lot of trailer makers use where the main character doesn’t
move, but the backgrounds or enemies or costumes do, to indicate oodles of content.
It’s a bit played out, but still better than a title card that says “60 levels”.
Step four is the climax.
This is where the action builds up to its most intense point - and then stops.
We don’t want to show everything, and ideally we want to leave lingering questions in the
viewer’s mind.
This Hyper Light Drifter trailer ends with an eeery boss fight.
And this Firewatch trailer expertly sets up a mystery that makes you want to play the
game and see what happens next.
DELILAH: “Wait, you’re already there? You’re not in your tower?
HENRY: No, I’m not.
DELILAH: Then who is?”.
It’s here that we finally reveal the game’s name or logo, and relevant information like
platforms and the release date.
And maybe a call to action - just, don’t give your viewer decision paralysis: ask them
to do just one thing.
And, sometimes, there’s step five.
The button.
a cute extra joke, or bit of action, or a tease after the end of the trailer.
You want to end on a high note, after all.
Presentation for trailers is particularly important.
With so little time, so many fast cuts, and with first impressions being literally all
you have right now, it’s more critical than ever that you make every frame count.
The most crucial thing is making the trailer readable.
This means reducing clutter to only focus the viewer’s attention on the most important stuff.
Lucas Pope could have shown Papers, Please like this: this is how it appears in the game,
after all: three different windows, all vying for your attention with loads of noisy information.
But, instead, Lucas crops the viewpoint down to only what he wants to show - the line of immigrants.
The faces. The documents. The stamp. The rule book. The photos.
It’s generally a good idea to hide interface elements like the HUD and mouse cursors.
And use crops, close-ups, or even custom-made areas to highlight the important bits.
Don’t let noise compete for attention.
Clarity between clips is important, too.
The viewer will try to focus on something on screen - usually the player character.
But when the video cuts, they’ve got to find that point of focus again - which is
tiring and wastes time.
Instead, try to keep the focus point in generally the same place between cuts.
Beyond readability, we want trailers to look attractive.
So think about composition, and use tricks like the rule of thirds, scenic landscape shots,
tracking cameras, and heroic character portraits, to make the game look great.
And remember that as the trailer maker you’re not just the director and editor, but also
the actor: and so you want to show off gameplay that looks super slick.
Derek records dozens of takes of the same action, like throwing this bottle in Firewatch,
to get one that looks perfect.
And unless you’re making a point about permadeath, you don’t really want to be taking damage
or dying in your gameplay footage.
Sound is super important, too.
Music should ideally match the intensity of what’s happening on screen.
So, sometimes the composer will write a specific song for the trailer.
Other times the OST can get chopped up to fit the marketing.
And sometimes the trailer gets cut around a song.
Putting cuts on the beat is fun, and so is putting actions on the beat.
Don’t forget sound effects, though.
M Joshua says “your players feel the game through the sounds, though they might not
realize it.
If you’re showing a trailer with just music and no sound effects, more than likely, it
feels dry and lifeless.”
You know how important sound effects are in the games themselves, so maybe don’t mute
them for the trailer.
So let’s look at it all of this stuff in action.
Here’s the trailer for Subnautica, made by Derek Lieu
We start with 12 seconds of high intensity action.
Explosions. Fire. A disintegrating ship.
The music is high tempo and the cuts are fast.
Then we change gears for the introduction.
Things are calmer now.
And we see what we’re actually going to do when we play the game.
We’ll jump into the ocean, swim around, stab stuff, craft things.
After a while there’s a voice over, which sounds like an AI voice from our drop pod.
And it elegantly explains the core loop of the game:
AI: “Utilising alien resources is a proven survival strategy.
Explore. Study. Catalogue new species.
Secure food and energy. And gather data on unusual phenomenon”.
Things get more intense with the escalation.
The music swells as we see just how much stuff we can do in this game.
All the things we can build.
All the animals that are trying to murder us.
Bones in the deep.
Plus: review quotes!
If you’ve got ‘em, flaunt ‘em.
And then the climax, an ominous line...
TRAILER GUY: "We shouldn’t have gone so deep”.
... a mysterious chamber. And then the game name and logo.
Oof! This is a really well paced trailer which explains how the game plays, and leaves unanswered
questions that encourage you to play for yourself.
It shows loads of variety, suggesting that there’s a lot to uncover in this game.
And Subnautica’s hook - that it’s a game about crafting huge structures to survive
in an underwater alien world - is expressed really clearly.
Top marks for this trailer.
I guess the only thing left to consider is, if you follow these rules too closely, your
trailer will start to look like all of the other trailers.
And you’re back to your first problem: standing out from the crowd.
So it’s important to be creative and different.
Use these ideas as guidelines, but not as a template.
So, for example, take this amazing trailer for Factorio.
It still shows off the game’s hook, tells you how the game works, and ramps up the intensity
over time - but it does so in a single, continuous shot.
And if in doubt, hire a professional.
I’ve put links to the websites for all the best trailer makers in the description, plus
additional resources for things like capturing high quality footage, using ESRB and PEGI
logos, and more.
Hey! Thanks for watching!
Obviously this one isn’t about game design, per se, but it’s still super important for
those wading into the scary world of indie game development.
I guess I should take my own advice now and do just one call to action.
Okay, this time I want you to… just have a really lovely day.
Okay bye.