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Make the Trailer Before the Game: A Marketing-First Way to Prototype

The talk's lessons, in short

  1. Ask what the trailer is while prototyping, not at the end. Late in production the question "what do I show?" is a bad sign: the less clear the answer, the less marketable the game. Lucas Pope drops a prototype when he cannot imagine a cool trailer for it, and asks whether it can be pitched without comparing it to other games or letting someone play for hours.
  2. A trailer forces the right questions: what the game looks like while being played, how fast its selling points can be shown, how it looks different from its inspirations, and how hard it is to follow when watching rather than playing.
  3. Order: genre, hook, content. The first five seconds place the game in a genre; most of the trailer shows why it is different; bosses, skins and counts come last, if at all. In his words: "establish a genre. Explain your hook and then get the content if there's time." His longer scene template: opening shot, premise and mechanics, escalation, climax, variety and scope, ending.
  4. Mechanics need visible feedback. Viewers look for what on screen shows the player's action; ask of every mechanic what it looks like in the trailer and what change would make it visible. Design for watchers too: Firewatch's dialogue highlight shows what the player is weighing, a face-button choice (Walking Dead) does not.
  5. Three standout moments. A common AAA prompt; people remember a few moments, not a whole trailer (Half-Life: Alyx's shotgun shells on a shelf). Eastshade's team built quests and a scene for Songs of Glimmerwick because the trailer needed them.
  6. It aligns a team. Supergiant's Transistor was floundering until a month-long tone video (script, music, art, voice) made the world specific; Kasavin: "work just goes slowly if you don't know what you're building when you're building it."
  7. Cheap formats first, timeboxed. A written description (player, fantasy, mood, emotion, loop steps, scenes in order), then a mood board or ripomatic, an animatic, prototype clips, a vertical slice. Two weeks (Soup Pot) to a month (Outerloop) for early trailer concepts; throw the result away once it has made its point. Check it by showing it to someone: you see its problems through their eyes, even if they say nothing.
  8. Q&A: put the store page up as soon as the art style is settled.

What the kit took

What it did not take, and why

Doubts in the transcript

"Noteplip" is Noclip (the documentary channel); "Atreya" is "a trailer"; "Rippomatic" is ripomatic; "Gen Z" is Jen Zee and "Logan" Logan Cunningham (Transistor); "Thirsty Shooters" is Thirsty Suitors; "City Boulder" is city builder. The Soup Pot team's name and Mediatonic's interviewee are uncertain and not relied on.