Indies, Videos Need to Tell Me, Not Just Show Me
Why your indie game needs to have a promo video that actually shows me the game.
Let’s put it on the line, upfront, in front of every single reader:
I love indie video games. I always have, and I always will. There’s something about the idea of a single creator or small team working, twiddling, and trying to put a dream together in bits and bytes and long nights, slaving away under hot lights (probably used to keep McDonald’s fries warm). I love that image, not just as a romantic dream but as the harsh and dirty reality of people who don’t know exactly how their projects are going to turn out or whether there will be an audience waiting for them at the end of the rainbow.
I love that stuff. I love indie games. I love original thoughts.
But for the love of everything unholy, indie game developers have got to start realizing that their promotional videos — the ones that will go out into the world, grab the eyeballs of the unwary, and drag those eyeballs into their bosoms — must show me how the game is played. Must. I should never walk away from a promotional video wondering, “how does this game actually work?”
Some of the worst offenders in this field are the games being promoted by services like The Humble Bundle, Indie Game Stand, Indie Royale, Bundle Stars, and the one that pushed me over the edge to actually write something about it — The Indie Gala. These are good promotions; they provide a platform for independent game developers to put potentially unknown games into low-cost bundles, making them almost no-brainers when it comes to “what do I feel like spending my money on this month?” This shouldn't be a problem. These promotions should be picking the best, most revealing videos about the games in question and putting them in front of people to really hook their interest.
That’s a great theory. Let’s see what the reality actually is. And let’s be clear, I am not picking on The Indie Gala here; I love what they’re doing. I love these guys. But if they’re getting it wrong, and the games that they’re promoting are getting it wrong, there has got to be something better we can do.
Let’s go through the games on the current Indie Gala Capsule Computers Sale, one at a time, and check out their videos.
Dracula 4: Shadow of the Dragon
This is actually not the most egregious example, if you can believe that.
Look at what actually happens in the course of this video. Up until the 1:25 mark, all we have are awkwardly rendered cut scenes, an attempted forging of the basis of some kind of supernatural narrative, a pitch to Dracula, and overall the implication that the game is going to be about storytelling, travel, and maybe some sort of first-person exploration given the amount of watercolor art (actually quite good watercolor art).
Then we get to what, one assumes, is the actual gameplay — and I say assumes only because there really aren't a lot of hints and things get complicated very quickly. First there’s some sort of image hunt, 2-D thing going on, and then a very obvious 2-D-style puzzle, a gear placement game, a pattern matching game, and in a circuit building/Pipes-style game. Oh, yes, and in total there is probably less than eight seconds of actual gameplay in this gameplay trailer.
Remember, I said that this was one of the better trailers in this pile. The trailer opens with the actual interesting parts of what they have to put in front of you, the idea that there is some sort of story in mystery to be solved. And then when we get down to the gameplay, it doesn't seem to mesh at all — visually or otherwise — with what we've become interested in for over a minute.
Beyond the bait and switch, that’s just a bad trailer. The only people who will be interested in buying a game based on this trailer are people who are already invested in the Dracula series and since the rest of the series isn't included in this bundle — it’s more an impediment than an aide.
Always Remember Me
If you’re not into otome dating sims, you probably don’t even have a starting point to understand what you’ve just seen after you look at this trailer. So, a quick background:
Otome games are essentially life simulators; the most popular example for U.S. gamers is probably Princess Maker. In otome games you have a character whose life you guide, generally through the process of scheduling — picking when they practice skills, when they go to school, what classes they take, what their job is, etc. This is the “pretty, pretty princess dress-up” equivalent of the turn-based strategy “just one more turn” game structure — and it works.
Always Remember Me is an otome dating sim, which appears to put together all the scheduling fun of a traditional otome game with all the fun of a Japanese dating sim.
Judging from the trailer, that will consist of 1:30 of still images of the main characters moving very slowly and deliberately across the screen to the accompaniment of what is surprisingly not-terrible American-rendered J-pop. And then you’ll get almost 20 seconds of a still frame of a bench (unoccupied) with the unadorned text which describes a few of the “Game Features,” which, at least, to its benefit are accurate and clear if you know anything about the genre even roughly.
Detailed life simulation: take control of Amy’s action, traveling in different locations to perform several tasks.
How could you possibly want something to be clearer than that?
The quick eight seconds to look at the Endings Gallery, which may be one of the most informative things that we’ve seen so far this trailer, reiterating that there are multiple endings with multiple characters being romanced and different milestone events along the way. Unfortunately, the creators couldn’t be bothered to actually tell us about any of this, they just mouse over the things on their Endings Gallery and assume everything will be fine. Ironically, they only have one Endings Gallery heart unlocked — and it’s not an ending.
A quick look at the overworld map, which is actually useful for understanding that you will spend a lot of time on this map moving the main character around from place to place in choosing activities, followed by a few examples of the conversation system in play, which shows off where you’ll be spending the other half of your gametime.
At no point do they show how these disparate parts hang together or how gameplay is supposed to or intended to flow between them, but at least the J-pop is catchy.
Again, this is not a good way to promote a game to people who are not already fascinated/interested in the genre.
Raiden Legacy: The Return
And now let’s go to the absolutely opposite extreme on pretty much every level.
Raiden Legacy gives us 54 seconds — 54 seconds! — of exactly what the game is about, how it plays, what your expectations should be, why this is better than previous releases, and then lets you go to go make your own decisions. It’s hard to complain about something so straightforward.
Let me summarize: you fly a plane. It shoots a lot of bullets and sometimes lasers. There are enemies; they fly around. Eventually you will run into a boss, and it will be large. If you shoot it enough times in the right places it will explode. Then you fly on to blow up some more stuff.
No joke, that is a great trailer for a game with an extremely tight focus that knows exactly what it is. During the trailer they even manage to tell you that you can have two player co-op, multiple screen orientations, that it actually includes the entire Raiden series, that it has an entirely new HD/remastered soundtrack, and it lets you listen to it. Then it manages to go ahead and get the Hell out of the way so you can go on to doing things that you really want to be doing.
I reiterate: that’s a great trailer.
Hero of the Kingdom
What can I say about Hero of the Kingdom that this trailer has not already said?
Right — so I’m done.
I want to try not to actually speak about the implied quality of the game in the course of talking about these trailers. Just as I try not to talk about whether or not a film is inherently good or not in the course of doing movie trailer reviews for Operation BSU, I want to avoid painting the fans of a game that this trailer would appeal to in a negative light. There’s no benefit there. There’s nothing good to be said there.
Sometimes it’s difficult.
This trailer shows a lot of gameplay — or what I assume is “gameplay.” You get the setup for the story, such as it is, in a series of small pop-up text lines of dialogue. I can’t really tell if your character actually moves around on the map or whether there are a limited number of places that you can click and automatically move to in order to progress the story. I can say without question that if you click on a handsaw, you will get +3 wood. I can most certainly say:
Malicious bandits raided your house and burnt it to ashes.
Then follow some map view stuff, the most noteworthy of which seems to be shopping in a grocery — which given the relative lavish treatment of the menu for barter, is absolutely the focus of this game. When you’re not picking flowers from fruit trees in what is transparently a fetch quest. And then some combat happens, but unlike bartering in the market there don’t appear to be any reasonable decisions that you can make about the deployment of your troops, what kind you bring, what spells you throw, or anything other than clicking on a location and getting some sort of acknowledgment — and even that’s somewhat questionable.
But don’t worry, because the end of the trailer tells us that you find your father, save the kingdom, and end up acclaimed by all and sundry. So that’s good!
Well, it’s good in the sense that it keeps us from actually having to play this game in order to find out what kind of endings are available. It’s probably not so good in the sense of actually wanting to play this game, which I pointedly do not and I’m not exactly sure who would given the content of this trailer.
This trailer could have used anything to help tie things together and drive some excitement; even a half-assed voice over would’ve gone a long way toward injecting some cohesion. It did show us a lot of gameplay, which is one of my critiques for today, but that gameplay has to look like it’s part of a game not some sort of strange tech demo for a platform that came out in the early 80s.
Does this game help sell not only itself but the bundle? I don’t think so.
Dead Sky
Like the Raiden Legacy trailer, Dead Sky gives us a solid 58 seconds of everything you need to know about the game in order to make a decision on whether it’s the sort of thing that interest you or whether you can let it go. It gets you right into the combat, right into the game experience, and there’s no question that what you see on the screen is exactly the game experience that you’re going to have.
In fact, when the action per trade on the screen turns into gunning down zombies from a circling helicopter or aircraft with a heavy machine gun and attacking a giant worm which is burrowing through the city, the game has not only shown you what it is that you are expected to do most of the game but shown you something more exciting, something outside the norm, for traditional twin stick style zombie arena shooters.
It shows you what you do and then it shows you some of the different things you can do. It shows you a variety of environments that you will be doing these things in. It shows you that there are other players on the same map simultaneously as you, saying pretty clearly that this is a multiplayer-enabled title. It shows you that there are some bonuses that you can pick up through the course of play that do things like bonus damage or give you damage reduction — and it shows you this by literally showing you do it.
Maybe this trailer would’ve been improved by one of the developers talking about what’s going on right there on the screen and being excited about it, but that’s really a marginal criticism. Like Raiden Legacy, Dead Sky knows what it is and it has a pretty good idea of what audience it wants.
That’s a recipe for good trailer.
Cubetractor
And then there’s the other side of an action oriented game and building a trailer for it.
Sometimes — even often — there are a lot of things going on while playing an action puzzler. Part of the challenge of playing such a game is recognizing what’s going on in front of you, choosing the proper course of action, executing that response, and doing so in a timely manner that allows you to continue playing because the goal is to continue playing and enjoying the gameplay. That’s what you’re there for, that’s what the game’s there for, and it’s that loop of behaviors and observations that make the gameplay compelling. There’s a side effect, however: it can be difficult to present gameplay to an observer in a way that allows them to understand enough of what’s going on to be intrigued with where it’s going.
That’s what I think is going on here in this trailer.
It’s a great length for an action game trailer; at 48 seconds, it’s right in the sweet spot of holding attention and portraying the action without beating a dead horse. It’s colorful in that not-quite-subdued 8-bit palette that we've come to expect from indie games. It involves cubes, and as we all know cubes are big right now.
All that said and happily so, I had pretty much no idea what was going on in the context of the game at any point on screen. I wasn't even exactly sure what the agent of the player was or where they were during gameplay. I got a little bit of a tower defense vibe from a few fragmentary seconds, but overall — I really couldn't tell. And that’s not good. It’s not good for me to watch the video game trailer and not be able to really have a grasp of how the gameplay works and what I, as player, would be expected to do.
The makers of this trailer clearly had no problem with quick flashes of text; after all, that’s how they were promoting their festival wins and their good blog reviews. Could we maybe have received a few bits here and there focusing on what was happening on screen. “Tow a tower!” “Dodge the bullets!” Maybe with a little subtle focusing on the player agent right after. Anything that lets me get a grip as a viewer on what I should be looking at and concentrating on. If I don’t know where to look, I don’t know where the cool things are happening. Or even if cool things are happening.
Definitely not the worst trailer in this bunch, but it’s so close to good it’s painful to note that it’s not.
Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to Manage Chaos
This is the first time during working on a series of trailer critiques that I have truly and completely run into a WTF moment. You would have thought that it would’ve occurred long before now with the sheer number of trailers of various sorts that I’ve looked at in my career.
This one takes the cake.
I don’t think that I have seen a more aggressively oblique presentation since I watched a propaganda film from North Korea. I don’t think I’ve seen anything that more completely avoidant since the last time I had the discussion of “where is this going?” with one of my ex-girlfriends. I have watched Thai crime thrillers with more narrative clarity.
What I’m trying to tell you is: WTF, mate?
The only thing that’s good about this trailer is the art. The art is fantastic. The prerendered spaces look amazing — I just don’t have any idea what will be going on inside them. The manga-style art is clearly something that the creator was devoted to on a deep and personal level with consistent characterization and a love of line — but I sure as Hell couldn’t tell you who any of those characters are, what their relationship is, or what they’re doing there.
Is this a game? Is it a dating sim? Is it a light novel? I have no idea and there’s no way for me to have an idea given that trailer.
The sad thing about this is that it almost works. I almost have enough curiosity roused given the art style and the obvious attention to detail that the creators possess to go out and start Googling and dig up information on their project just to know what’s going on. It almost works as a means of getting me to get motivated to learn more about their — game? — and maybe become a consumer of their product.
But it just doesn’t work. It fails. Because I don’t care enough to actually go do that. I just barely care enough to think about doing it. That’s a terrible shame. That should never happen.
When you really, really want something to be good and interesting, and it has all the hallmarks and hooks to be interesting and it just doesn’t make the cut? The disappointment is worse than if the job it been done poorly to begin with.
That’s a shame.
Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart
Did you ever have one of those moments where you knew something was absolutely not meant for you but you understood that it wasn't meant for you, and you accepted that it wasn't meant for you, and you had to sit back and admire the fact that they were honest and upfront about exactly what this thing was and knew that it might not be for you?
That’s where I am on this
You have to admire their production for this trailer. An actual solid voiceover at the beginning, character art which is animated fairly well if extremely lightly, very little dillydallying around trying to present itself as some sort of action-adventure but with enough flavor to give you that sort of air, and then right into the actual gameplay. The actual gameplay appears to be very much like that of Dracula 4 above, that being a 2-D “find the object” Where’s-Waldo-style casual game with the addition of a number of connected mini-games/puzzle games.
I watched this trailer and I know exactly what this game is and what it’s intended to do. And it does that in under a minute. That is actually some fine work.
I know right now that I am not the demographic for this game. I am not even the intended demographic for this game. But I know people who are and I am likely to tell those people that this game exists, because I know enough about it to judge whether they would enjoy it or not. Unlike the Dracula 4 trailer, the experience is not tedious, I feel like it’s something I can share with others and not have them think poorly of me — overall, it’s a really good trailer for a game which I wouldn't necessarily call really good.
That’s a trailer that attains its goals and does what a trailer should.
Hero Siege
This game actually presents something of a problem, because unlike most of these I actually have some knowledge of the game before I watch the trailer. It’s been an extremely popular Let’s Play for some of the biggest game reviewers on YouTube and because of that I can’t come to this trailer without bringing some of that knowledge and honestly some of that excitement with me.
This is the problem with being both active in the fandom for a thing and trying to be an objective critic of that thing.
That aside, the Hero Siege trailer is very much in the mold of the other action game trailers that we've talked about in this article so far. It is a little more than twice as long as they are, which would normally be a significant drawback except for the fact that the producers made use of the action on screen — and there is a lot of action — to overlay text which describes selling points and actual description of what is happening. That coupled with the fact that in game information is presented clearly and frequently avoids many of the problems that we saw in the Cubetractor trailer, where almost nothing that was happening on screen was clear to the viewer.
One day we will get past the use of the Diablo font, and that will be a happy day indeed.
There is not much to say at a critical level about this trailer that we haven’t already covered. The gameplay itself is compelling and focused, keeping the viewer involved and excited because they understand what they’re saying. The producers have made use of overlaid text in order to let potential consumers know the things that are not obvious as part of gameplay: how many classes there are to play, how many kinds of weapon, that there is an in-game level up system with traits and talents, etc. The soundtrack serves the purpose of the trailer, being both an example of the sort of gameplay audio that you will hear while playing the game and an exciting cue to the listener.
This is a good trailer. It hits all the notes that it should in order to sell a game and to let a potential buyer know if it’s the sort of game they would like or the sort of game they should avoid. That’s extremely successful.
Frozen Hearth
Sometimes it’s hard to get a read on how you feel about a piece of work. The gameplay trailer for Frozen Hearth is one of those things for me.
It shouldn’t be. It has all the right elements. The music is rousing and appropriate to the genre, if a little bland. The visual styling of the game is appropriate to the genre, it communicates what kind of game it is (real time strategy), the character design and modeling is more than adequate — even excellent, and overall the visual impression is of a game that the developer put some love into (even if their icon design does make it readily apparent that they play a little bit too much World of Warcraft). The actual gameplay depicted appears to make sense and looks like gameplay that you could experience while in the game itself; it looks like they captured it straight from a play session. There are brief text overs that tell you about things that you probably care about but which aren't immediately obvious in gameplay, like there being a cooperative campaign.
All the right elements are there — but for some reason, for me, this trailer doesn't gel as something that makes me want to buy the game. It does make me curious about the game, and for a game which is part of a much larger bundle that you can get for a low price, that may suffice. Frozen Hearth does not make me actively disinterested in any part of this bundle.
Sometimes, that may be the most that one can hope for from an indie game trailer, that it present the game moderately well, that it give you some positive aspects about the game to talk about with other people, and that it convey accurately what the gameplay will be like. This is a workmanlike effort and it’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s just missing that little something extra that makes things jump out and excite you. Maybe, again, it could use a good voiceover from someone who’s excited about what they’re showing you. That can go a long way to driving some infectious interest and make a game more likely to sell.
I like this one. I want to like it more. I don’t have that feeling of disappointment that I've had in some of the earlier trailers that we've talked about, I’m just not as excited as I want to be.
Restaurant Empire 2
I almost feel like this trailer doesn't need to be spoken about. Which is absolutely wrong; in every way this trailer needs to be spoken about if only to point out all the places where it could have gone so much better.
The problem is that it is not a “bad trailer.” It’s unimaginative, it’s unproduced, it’s sloppy, it’s awkward, and it is surprisingly unrevealing for all the things that it shows us — but it’s not a “bad trailer” because I know exactly what the gameplay in this game is intended to be, how it’s intended to play, what the major elements of gameplay are, and I know what the producers think are the most important features about this game. As a piece of media intended to translate those things from one set of brains into my brain, it’s extremely successful.
It’s totally unimaginative. All that goes into this video are screen captured gameplay pieces and that’s it. There’s no text over in order to point out important features or features that differentiate this game from others in its genre. There’s no voiceover. There only two pieces of music even though there are multiple opportunities to show off other pieces of the soundtrack — if they exist. There just doesn't seem to be even a little bit of thinking outside of the box when it comes to presenting what is obviously a sequel.
It’s unproduced and sloppy. All of the cuts are pretty much straight crash cuts from one piece of gameplay to another. There’s one marginally interesting bit where they fade transition from having a violinist to a white guy with a guitar.
While the video itself is ostensibly 720p, the video capture was obviously at a much lower resolution, making the text — of which there is a lot — almost completely illegible. This is a restaurant management game, one in which detail is the game. That their capture was at such a low resolution and rendered into a video which is supposed to be taken for HD, well — I can only come to one conclusion.
They just didn't care.
Paradox Interactive is the distributor on this game and they have a reputation for well put together, well-designed, very niche gameplay which is extremely specific in its audience. This trailer is way more unprofessional than I expect to find coming out of their studios. We know — know — that they can and have produced far better trailers for games.
This one is just bad. We should and do expect better.
Gemini Wars
And this is just where I reach my limit and go ahead to embrace disappointment. Not because I want to, but because I must. Not because I’m exposed to something inherently bad, but because I’m exposed to something that could be inherently better.
Even more than any of the predecessors in this article, this game trailer has all the pieces that it would take to be outstanding. The visual presentation makes it surprising that this is an indie production. The spaceship models are impeccable, the camera angles are extremely well-chosen, the cut scenes look fabulous. The choice of in game voice over, while mixed a little too low into the trailer, a great idea. I have an excellent feel for the setting and overall where I am as a player, where they are as characters, and what’s going on.
I have absolutely no idea of how I’m expected to play this game.
Is it a real-time strategy game, in the vein of Nexus or Homeworld? I have no idea. Is it a 4X game like a real-time Master of Orion or Sins of a Solar Empire? Even though there are some obvious resource measures in the upper right-hand corner of the screen, I have no idea. Do I take direct control of the ship or am I limited to giving directions to masses of ships? No idea. Can I design my own ships and arm them in accordance with what I expect from the enemy or can I only pick from a pallet of already designed ships? Not a clue. Do I get to make interesting choices that can change the course of the narrative during this game or is it a series of set piece battles which chart the progress of the campaign? Not even the slightest hint.
I think this is the most painful because it is the most appealing as a game to me. I want to like this. I want to go out of my way and like this. If this trailer exposed even a little bit of gameplay that answered the above questions, I would have no hesitation in dropping $6 on picking this bundle up with this as the only game in it I’m really interested in. It would easily be worth it.
The producers of Gemini Wars have, in their turn, gone out of their way to keep me from knowing useful things, compelling things, desirable things about their game that would make me want to buy it. The things I see make me interested in the game, but the things that I want to know would make me want to put money down to acquire it.
There are a lot of ways to fail to make a compelling trailer for your indie game; we’ve talked about a lot of them on the way to this one. The worst, however, is when you have everything to make a really good trailer in your hands:
- A visually appealing game.
- A game where action is clear to the viewer even if they're not playing.
- Production talent to choose representative parts and pieces of nongame assets which are in themselves compelling.
- An idea, a vision, that could make people want your product.
- A game that is fun.
If you have all those things, and it’s obvious that you have all those things, and you just can't bring them together in a trailer — start over. Do it again. Don't settle for just putting some gameplay in a trailer with no consideration as to whether it’s clear, whether it communicates to the viewer, or whether it actually puts the viewer into a space where they are willing and interested in buying your game. Your trailer is your emissary. Your trailer is your ambassador. Your trailer is the first thing your prospective customer will see, long before they bother reading something about what your game is about. That sale, that relationship, is established in the first 20 seconds that you have their eyeballs and their ears.
Don't blow it.
If you take nothing else away from this article, know that you as a consumer can demand better and you should demand better, and moreover you should expect better than most of what we get from indie games’ trailers. If you're an indie developer, realize that just putting your game in front of us is probably not going to suffice to entice us to give you money in exchange for that experience; you need to build the opportunity for us to share your enthusiasm and to share your vision into that trailer. This is your big shot.
Make it count.
Post Scriptum
The opposite problem of many of the above mentioned trailers is sometimes known as “success.” By all measures the Leviathan: Warships trailer achieved exactly that. Excellent content, critical acclaim, award-winning?
Unusual, but not undeserved! Congratulations, Leviathan: Warships!
Who am I?
Alexander “SquidLord” Williams is the producer and host of the multimedia multicast, Operation BSU, which can be found on TalkShoe (audio podcast) as well as YouTube. If you’re interested in ongoing movie and video game reviews, table-top roleplaying games, and other fascinating things both in the world and online join the Operation BSU Google+ Community and receive daily content of interest to most sapient beings.
