Another Wednesday, another blog post!

This one is written by Leene and Oak together :) (AWW SHUCKS <3)

We've been putting off making our gameplay trailer for a while just because we didn't have a lot of our gameplay scenes and sequences fully implemented. Having done some extensive research and looking at other games, both similar and dissimilar, showed that trailers almost exclusively focus on action.

Trailers are an important part of Indie Game Marketing™. But it might be a bit difficult to make one if you don’t have an action-based game with lot of flashy onscreen movement. Death and Taxes is a narrative-heavy-story-based-game (what is UP with those HYPHENS omg) and relies heavily on text and the players' imaginations, this is why we had to take a more creative way to show our gameplay. The gameplay of our game is fairly hard to understand without playing it yourself and there is a lot that is left to the imagination when you first see it.

We've seen some trailers on Twitter/YouTube that are quirky, funny and endearing (such as Frog Detective; Papers, Please also pops to mind), so we thought that trying to compete with games that translate to trailers super-well in a natural manner was an uphill struggle.

We knew that we wanted to make something that isn’t just an advertisement for the game but gives something (amusement?) to the viewer, even if they wouldn’t want to try out the game itself. We also wanted to make something that's still memorable and fast-paced but lacks explosions or any other traditional (or even campy?) trailer techniques. What we came up with is what you see in the video.

What we used:

• Eye-catching start to hook the viewer
• Quick-cut montage for pacing (kind of a youtube meme montage)
• Jokes
• A friendly soundtrack contrasting the grim content (visual contrasts as well)
• Music-synced montage to convey on-screen movement better (also, SO SATISFYING)
• Showed every single thing that moves in the game (since there aren't a lot)
• Full voice-over by the voice actor who we have casted in our game as well
• Informative sections also attempting to convey player emotion while playing

Obviously, the last point here is probably the hardest to achieve, because we've had some people play it on their YT/Twitch channels by now and all of them play differently. We ended up with a bit of an exaggerated version of what we could imagine our players would be doing.

Since this is one the first of these kinds of trailers we have made (ever) and it's obviously new territory for us but it just seems such an obvious pitfall to try and hit through with a traditionally shot and cut trailer (bam, action, bam, exposition, etc.).

The main thing we wanted to get across people was: how to play our game and show off some things that are included in it (and do that in one minute) For that we made a mockup of an oldschool VHS tape tutorial. This worked well for us and luckily we had all the assets needed for it (voiceover). 

After all the planning, we just had to record the gameplay videos (removed some text for it) and put it all together in a video program. We used really cheerful elevator music our composer Adam did for the elevator scene. We were lucky that we already had something that worked, otherwise we would’ve had to make a complete new song for the trailer.

And there it is! Our first gameplay trailer!

Has anybody seen some cool non-action focused game trailers? Or maybe you have made your own? Share those with us, we are interested!

And as always: if you haven't yet, wishlist us on Steam and follow us here on itch.io!

Much love!

Death and Taxes