How this year’s best video game trailer was made

Over 100 games were showcased during this year’s Summer Game Fest. After a few days, big publishers like Microsoft created games and trailers as well as indie devs showing off the same projects and everything in between. It’s not easy to stand out in such a crowd, even if you have a lot of tools to make a trailer. What is an independent studio with all the limitations associated with it? For Unfailing developer Indonesia D-Cell, it meant having a plan.

“There are two things about how your trailer sits at the show that it’s impossible to know before the show – what game is playing right before yours, and that how do people react to it,” Unfailing co-director Andrew Tsai told Polygon. “We needed to make sure we could adapt regardless of what the next game was, which led us to implement islands within trailer – what we called, internally, ‘sit down and shut up’ time.”

Tsai gave an example: What if the trailer for the highly anticipated game, almost like a fairy tale. Hollow Knight: Silksong Premiered before your game trailer? You can be sure that the hype will seep into the pieces of the next game. “You need to alert them that something’s going on, and as soon as they go ‘Oh, wait, hey there’s something on the screen that looks interesting’ you turn the volume up to eleven one and everyone sits down and closes,” said Tsai.

And that’s exactly it Unfailing the trailer did. It begins slowly and gently, a literal and figurative petal in the air. Cdirector RJ Lake told Polygon that the goal was to make the trailer fun to begin with — even if the game isn’t. The rhythm game is set in a world where music is illegal… and “commits crimes,” according to the developer.

“It’s kind of Skinamark thing, where the film is deliberately bleak as rocks at first, which forces you to pay attention to anything because it makes even the smallest moments of ANYTHING PAST feel huge, meaning that if you give people something that’s really big after that, that sounds a lot cooler, hits harder because of that,” Lake said. And in the sense that ‘everyone throws you the sweetest thing’, the only way to force a complete recovery is to remain silent.

And now Unfailing the trailer honks, and the music begins; a woman with pink hair sings to the mic. There are a few places as the song builds up where you think it hits strength get off and the action will start, but it doesn’t – until it does. The music drops and the fight begins: The band mates start a big brawl with the policeman.

“We were keeping the island with the intention of starting the “action” often confused by the different parts of the things that are happening. [and] building over time,” said Lake. “You have the cold open, then you have the logo cards, then you have the song, and then, hopefully, you’ve stopped thinking about whatever you were thinking, and the question yours is just ‘what the hell do i want, and when you ask that question, that’s when the beat hits the ground and the boats finally start.’ each one feels stronger in a way that it never could if you started with, say, a double part of the song.”

D-Cell began thinking about the trailer at least two years before its launch – an experience Lake detailed in X in June. (The game was first revealed in 2021 when a Kickstarter campaign began; it raised $267,402 and released a demo.) Several other D-Cell developers have created X threads to discuss this method, as the designer and sound designer Vas, who told Polygon it. it was cathartic to finally be able to talk about the trailer and how much care went into it. “You can’t screw up too hard with a game or you end up screwing it up for everyone but not being able to talk about anything *can* feel isolating,” he said.

That kind of process — spending a lot of time and effort on a trailer — isn’t the norm in the video game industry, several D-Cell developers said. But it is the main part of Unfailing‘s development.

“From the boards to the final stage, then, it’s all over the place, because we don’t just make a live trailer; those are all part of the thing, which means we build things [inside the game] really close to it,” Lake said. “The actual footage that we used changed, very quickly, as this trailer was being built, because of the nature of the development of the game and the fact that other things they are fixed sooner or later than we expected it to be, therefore, the attraction of the game becomes a constant set of spinning plates to find out exactly what the guns are what are those.”

It’s a lot of work, but it’s important not only to coordinate the look of the trailer, but also to set the tone of the game. “And if you have it [the game’s voice] as a key, it really helps you focus on what’s important when you’re doing it,” co-founder Jeffrey Chiao told Polygon. “Of course, knowing how to advocate for the game, and how the game should speak for itself how, is the key to standing out from the crowd – our trailer was meant to reinforce that message to everyone listening.”

Everything from the trailer is straight from the game, which helped justify the work it took to make the trailer, apart from the hype it would build. Tsai said: “If we were making something like a ‘cinema trailer’, there would be no way this would have fit into our production schedule.

Well, except for one thing: Remember that tree from the beginning? Richard Gung, programmer and VFX artist at Unfailing, told Polygon that the pink tree was originally designed specifically for the trailer — “a fun last-minute team effort.” Tsai pulled up the tree quickly after “getting inside [a] a voice shouted,” and Gung animates the tree to look like it’s blowing gently: “The lap is so fast you can’t tell,” Gung said. Tsai said D-Cell is making changes to the shots, timing and music “right up to the day of production.”

Image: D-Cell Games

Unfailing‘s marketing, so far, has worked. Lake said the game is the publisher’s top-listed game on Playstack; it also set a record for a publisher in single-day wishlist numbers. There is a group of PlayStation users who have rewritten the game, he said.

Lake Lake said: “But that kind of thing doesn’t get a real answer, which is important to us, because it was important to find something that clarifies something that we do. to go out into the world and show that which can be for everyone and what is the view of the thing in a very clear way.”

He continued: “It’s almost impossible to do that in writing when you’re trying to get an idea and a perspective that isn’t something you can put into words, but hopefully something that’s easy to understand even though like that. And the marketing part of it after the fact hopefully comes naturally from people seeing that and responding to it. But I want that to happen because people are really excited about it. ”