More Feelings, Fewer Features: Showcasing Your Indie Game Through Messaging and Video

[Music] all right hi um welcome to our talk more feelings fewer features showcasing your indie game through messaging and video i'm dana tribe Ella I'm the founder of spoken wheel strategy I do marketing PR and strategy for game I found it spoken wheel about four and a half years ago but I've been doing marketing and PR for games for the last seven ish years I work on games of all different sizes across all different platforms and these are just some of the games that I've worked with alright and my name is Derek Liu and I'm a game trailer editor I've been doing this for about five years now some in triple-a games but now full time doing trailers for indie games before then I was an editor for about 10 years and these are some of the things that I've worked on alright so we're gonna talk first about what is messaging why

you need a good message some common mistakes that we see a lot things you should do some examples of good messaging some exercises to help you find your message and then finish up with some lessons and takeaways so first reason we're doing this talk is we're often the first people to know that developers just don't know how to talk about their games like especially like late in the development cycle and people frequently hire one of us but not the other and we've also rented situations where we were both hired for one project but we didn't find out we were both on the project until it was over because we were never put in communication which we think it's kind of weird because like PR marketing and trailers they're not separate you should think of them as this thing that go together because when they're really cohesive just the message is much stronger and we solve a lot of the same problems but through different means but first let's talk a little bit about just what is messaging messaging is just the

hook the secret sauce the elevator pitch the sort of one line sentence which describes your game but more importantly messaging is how you talk to people about your game like I said I've had a lot of lots of clients who they come to me for a trailer and I say okay what's special about your game and they're like I'm like you should work on that first but it's really important it really drives how you talk about your game to friends or Twitter press streamers publishers and also how you talk to yourself about your game and if the message is how you talk about your game the trailer is how you show people your game because trailers communicate through visuals sound and music it works together with the messaging to just form what people just know about your game and also how to share it with other people and some key components of your message and your trailer include okay you're thinking

about your message a core component of your message should really be the experience so yes that's like what you do in the game but more importantly that's what do people get from your game that they literally can't get from anywhere else that's kind of why your game is special in the first place similarly we're going to talk about some feelings I love feeling so ultimately people play games for the feelings that they get from them and your game should make people feel something feelings are also what stay with people the longest after they've they played so once you've got this great message that communicates the experience and the feelings you can also communicate it in your trailer so why do you need a good message so we're all hearing about how many games are launching regularly and we all know that it's like really really hard to distinguish yourself in the marketplace today without a good message it's just really hard for people to remember or

find your game or tell people about it so why else your messaging also focuses your marketing so yes it can be kind of complicated to find a really good message but once you find it I promise you it's gonna make your life so much easier and simpler because it serves essentially as the central focus of everything that you put out into the world so like if you're thinking about sending something out you can ask yourself does this align with my message that I want people to know and that can just be an easy clue as to what you should actually be putting out there your message is also your filter for marketing so just like in development constraints are really great that's also can be true for marketing too so again it kind of provides this lens to decide like what you're putting out into the world and all of your marketing material should really help to communicate this message so we touched on this a little bit but your message helps people share and

advocate for your game so players really love to share the games that they find that they're excited about they love to be the first to tell other people about a game but they really need a clear and concise and easy way to do it so if you give them that that's super helpful and if there's no clear message then sometimes either people will like make something up which may or may not be what you want them to say or if it feels really daunting and stressful they just might not talk about your game at all so your message is super important and it affects all of these things and this is just kind of like a basic list but essentially it should be a cohesive cohesive and across all of these different things so people are actually more likely to remember things if they see them over and over again and people are also more likely to like them if they see them over and over again too so it's super important to to do that so Derek's gonna talk a little bit about

some marketing though cause okay yeah so without a clear and unique message your game kind of doesn't sound any different from everything else out there for example all of these games share these things in common and if they wanted to they could have led with these like five bullet points here and but that wouldn't really distinguish them in any way and you know maybe it could've worked in the trailers if because like their art style is very strong but what if we just took away all the art and just left these bullet points this is what it would kind of look like you know like if you look at these would you think yourself oh that game mm-hmm I know exactly what game that is so it's really important the words that you use now fortunately that's not what they did for example like rogue legacy made a really big point of the descendants and they all have kind of different attributes when you when you die and then dead cells went really big on

like this is hard you will die and also just talking about how good it is to play and then also enter the gungeon why it's just really big on like guns and there's bullets and then bullets have guns and they shoot you with bullets and Flint hook went and highlighted it's a grappling hook and the pirate part and looting and then binding of issac what like really heavy on atmosphere and sense of dread and a lot of it's trailers didn't even have gameplay and then just again clarify the strength of good messaging just look at the same style of like boring text but with language for very specific games see when you look at these now these probably all remind you of certain games because it's very very specific and these could only be used with a lot of these games that they're from and now let's get into some common mistakes okay cool so let's talk a little bit about the things that I see all the time so

the first is don't describe your game using other games so the thing that I get most frequently when I ask people to tell me about their game is like my game is if if X&Y had a baby or like the thing me up here is like it's the dark souls of Animal Crossing so here's why this is a bad idea first of all it requires that your audience is familiar with those games if they're not then you've probably already lost them let's say that they are well then they like probably have a preconceived notion associated with it and let's say they love those games right then you're setting the bar pretty like pretty high for what your game needs to live up to also if your game does elicit a comparison then players really like to find that on their own and you're often kind of like robbing them of that Easter

Egg that they can get but most importantly like we're all really used to hearing this in a games context but if you take it out of a games context then it kind of really doesn't make sense so if someone said to you like tell me about yourself hopefully you wouldn't respond and be like I'm my mom and my dad right like I really hope you would give yourself a characteristic so do that with games also so we already hit on this a little bit but a features list it's important but it's a features list it's not your message people ultimately aren't playing games just for this features list and tons of games have really similar features so it's not really differentiated at all don't rely on just game lingo and genres so a lot of times when I ask people tell me about your game I get something like it's an immersive first-person shooter which is

like okay and right like there's a lot of those so yes it can be part of your message but it really should not be the whole thing so with lingo in particular sometimes it can feel really inaccessible people don't necessarily know what those words mean and it also can only kind of box you in to reach a really specific audience that just like may or may not be your target with genre I actually think this is a bit more problematic um because people have really really preconceived notions of what each genre should be like if you think about a roguelike or an RPG or you know any kind of genre people have specific ideas of what that should be and if your game kind of fears outside of that at all then that can make people unhappy and no one likes unhappy people on the Internet it's also just again not differentiated like yes some genres are more popular or had their day in the Sun but there's lots of games in every genre

so should people play yours so let's talk about some dues work on your message early as soon as you've got a viable idea that you're super excited about start putting together a message and a clear way to talk about your game can be a really really good tool to just see if people are getting your game and if they're excited about it and to kind of take the temperature on how the idea is resonating so this is one a lot of people I think don't think about but your message can actually help you guide the design so we've all seen like a steam trailer or something like that and then been like wait this doesn't feel like that game at all like there's a big disparity and how like the screenshots or the trailers are presenting versus what the game actually is but if you think of your message early and you use that to kind of as a checkpoint while you're designing the game then this disparity can be caught early and if you

have a message that you want to share then you can make sure that you're reflecting that in the design or go back and kind of iterate on your message which to the next point iterate on your message so yes you want a cohesive message that goes across all of those things that we showed earlier but ultimately before you get there you want to try some stuff and see what's resonating with people so at conventions with your friends on Twitter nothing super formal but just kind of test it out and see what people are digging describe the games experience so think in terms of like the color the flavor the tone and the feelings ultimately the experience is really the subtext and the heartbeat of what a game is and again most importantly it's like what are people getting from your game that they just literally can't get anywhere else so a lot of times when I ask this question I get the response like it's a horror game or something like very shallow like that but what if

you could answer something like oh it's the hellish nightmare of waking up over and over to discover that it's finals day and you've missed the whole semester or as an example like Boyfriend dungeon they could have just called the game a dungeon crawler but instead they say romance your swords capture the hearts of cuties and level them up in the shack and slash dungeon crawling adventure which is like so much more colourful because you get an idea for the feel of the game the overarching tone and the experience alright and also when you're working your game you should show people video of your game being played and I'm not talking about play testing I'm talking about just taking video and showing to someone their hands aren't under the controllers so they actually can't test things around to see what's going on and then this will really help you find out if your games visual communication is really strong or if it's really weak because if people

watch the video of your game they're like so what do you do then you know oh crap you know it's not coming across and then this is really important down the line for trailers and gifts and YouTube and twitch streaming because like you're really in a lot of trouble if you're posting all these things on social media to hype things up and then no one knows what's going on in any of the footage another tip is just tell the player what they'll do which I'm thinking like bird's eye level of what you're doing in the game like what is the goal or the objective not talking about like oh you double jump and you fireball things it could be something like you're trying to survive in this water planet and build a rocket to escape the planet or you're trying to find out what happened to your family in your creepy Pacific Northwest house or you're a goose and you just want to be a jerk and your trailer will help you flesh this out but having the basic premise established for people

just really helps prime them to know what they're gonna expect from the rest your game the other tip is just keep your description short one deforest sentence is you know brief and colorful is ideal get to the point quickly because if you just kind of drone on for a little bit too long then it can kind of be like if someone's talking to you about their dream that they have and people be like okay anymore and like it just really has to get to the heart of what people care about which is what they would do in the game and why and also the message it doesn't have to be everything about the game and it really really should not be everything because you need to leave people wanting a little bit more just imagine if you're at a convention and you tell them your spiel you want them to be like oh cool I'm gonna wait in line and play the demo but if you tell them like everything then it might be enough information for them to be like huh yeah I think I know exactly what your game is no that's not my thing but you kind of like leave a little bit vague I'm like mmm that sounds

interesting I will wait in line or I'll go read some articles and also these tips are good for your trailer basically the same thing make it short get to the point focus on the hook and once you kind of get past the hook then you can focus on the other things maybe which kind of overlap other games and then of course you want to leave them wanting more so they'll actually buy the game and as an example of how that can kind of translate into a trailers idea of just focusing on the hook is so this is a game I worked on way of the passive fist which is a brawler all about pairing attacks and then you kind of nudge them over when they're tired but more than that for this trailer I just wanted to convey the idea that you're the sort of untouchable kung-fu master who just defends effortlessly and then just completely dawn dominates the enemies and it's kind of like if you've watched like the end of the matrix or there's a tea house scene and crashing Tiger Hidden Dragon where there's kind of fighting people off with one hand I just wanted to show this and then for like the middle of the trailer then I

kind of expand on the gameplay ideas show a little bit of variety and then show like the bosses and then by the end I just kind of wanted to bring it all the way back to the central idea about being this untouchable kung-fu master where we just have this kind of final pairing montage just to show that you're this a movable object and then so yeah this is just one example of going in hard and one idea but next dana has some examples of some messaging that she's worked on okay cool so this is an example for the game old man's journey usually we would just lead with the first sentence which is old jurnee a soul-searching puzzle adventure told the story of life lost precious moments and changed plans I think that this one worked well for us because just in this sentence you get an idea of like the color of the game you can tell that it's probably narrative lead ribbon that there's some emotions and you get a little bit of an idea of like kind of

what you'll do the next couple sentences we would use either like where appropriate or when people wanted more information which were shaped the landscape to create the old man's path forward experience art heartache and hope as you embark on a heartfelt journey through a sun-kissed world so these lines essentially show you a little bit about the mechanics which was really unique for this game it also talks about the art using this word sunkissed which i think is really appropriate and kind of beautiful for the game and you learn a lot just about the experience and how you'll feel in the tone of the game just from really like a couple of sentences so this one hold down a delightful ball bouncing spectacle so this is five words and it's simple it's snappy its succinct and the game was pretty like simple and catchy and snappy so there's really no need to you know make it complicated if it

doesn't need to be but just in these words I think you get an idea for the feeling you should get while playing kind of what you do in the game and the experience of it overall okay and then ice so I worked on the story trailer for this game heavens vault which is a new game by inkle who made eightydaze and so they made the announced trailer by themselves and they brought him in for the story trailer and I asked them what should the new trailer show and the things they mentioned were actually these three things which were what the announced trailer focused on open-world adventure every choice matters and decipher language and I listened to that and I thought okay one of those things sounds interesting to me which was the decipher language because I've never done that in the game so for the story trailer we decided just focus only on that and we kind of expect from there so we have like history as a science you're an archaeologist decipher language and you put together history whereas like open-world adventure and

every choice matters it kind of describes the how and it's like the very videogame II aspect and this trailer we really wanted to focus on the what and the why which is kind of like the higher-level view and I don't know if I could take full credit but the trailer was well-received and a lot of the articles that came out afterwards just really talked a lot about being an archaeologist and translating language and next we just want to share some games we thought that have very strong messages all right sunless skies sail the stars betray or queen murder a son super hot the FPS where time moves only when you move neo cab an emotional survival game Firewatch a mystery set in the Wyoming wilderness where your only emotional lifeline is the person on the other end of a handheld radio minute a peculiar little adventure played in 60 seconds and papers please a dystopian document thriller okay

so we've now told you what to do what not to do we've given you some examples and you're probably like cool but how do I do this so we're gonna walk through some exercises which ultimately or just question that I recommend starting with and really thinking through to help you find your message so the first one is what are the emotions that you want the player to feel so a lot of times when I ask this question I get the answer is fun or nostalgic which are kind of like again really shallow words not really saying much and sort of generic so think of like richer words here some good examples would be words like infuriated alive uncertain of the future skeptical of the people around you you really want to go deep and be super specific to your game how would you describe the experience of playing the game a lot of times for this one I get fun and I get an escape which like I know you're all gonna be shocked but that's a lot of the reason that people play games anyway so

some good examples here would be things like the first feeling of being in love the awkwardness of being a teenager reminded of times in your life and you've had regrets kind of things like that what makes this game different really and I add the really because again I get a lot of like uh like struggles here but if you can't answer this question then it's a really good idea to like go back and potentially either iterate on your game idea or to actually spend some real time thinking about this this is again ultimately why is your game different than everything else out there what did you create that's like totally uniquely yours and how can you describe that in a way to people that's understandable and accessible so these next two are probably my favorite questions which is can you describe your game in three words so this sounds easy but it's hard because I'm gonna challenge you to not use any words that you would like to

like 2d 3d satisfying fun adventure roguelike epic unique anything like that and then that will help you actually kind of get to the heart of what your game really is what are you most proud of about the game that you're making I like this one a lot because it often really reveals like where the soul is of the game and what you've really put a lot of like care and attention into so this can be the sound the music the art the design like anything involving the game and it can often be a really good jumping-off point for what your message should focus on why were you motivated to make this game in the first place so there's so many ideas that you could have made but you picked this one so what told you that this was a game worth making and that you were so excited about it that you just had to see it come to fruition alright in this exercise just keep asking why basically

just be your own inner five-year-old's we just won't stop asking you why you know why is this interesting well because of this why is that interesting well because of this you know why is that interesting just keep on going just see how deep you can go and what you come up with and then Dana mentioned a lot of these purchased a lot of these words you should just avoid them because pretty much everyone uses them which means everyone saying the same thing which if you don't use them then you'll be different from everyone else so yeah just take a picture of that but so then we have your message you have to think about how to corporate incorporate it into a trailer which is a whole topic unto itself but my main tip is just focus on the hook as much as possible and forget everything else which makes your games similar to others and like if there's time then you get to that because I think a lot of people are just afraid of putting the thing that is new first and like oh you know I'll put the

things that they know about but it makes it a lot less interesting to see in the trailer for example and yet also try to show the idea without spelling it out if you have to use text like it's it's probably not as good of an idea just try to have your trailer have no text as much as you can and then people just remember it much more than if they have to kind of read exactly what the game is and the other thing is like in a trailer you have all these sorts of unique tools at your disposal you have Game Capture you have editing you have music all these ways other than words and like if a picture is worth a thousand words then just don't put so many in the trailer okay let's go on to some lessons and takeaways again messaging it's a key part of the process do it early check it often it should be one of the very first things that you do and it's often the first experience that people have with your game just hearing about it messaging simplifies by providing

constraints and focus if you find that clear concise message it just makes the marketing process and design process telling you people about your game a lot less daunting so you won't be kind of caught with your with nothing to say when people say what's your game and you'll also feel more confident on why your game is special which will get people excited and then always refer back to your message it's your guide it's your roadmap for all your marketing all these things the more cohesive the more likely folks are to remember it and repeat it so workshop your message you are at GDC which is a great place to test and try out your message on people but also like other conventions Twitter forums all good places to gauge temperature show people video of your game early so yes of course be strategic with it but again an excellent gauge on if people are understanding what the experience or flavor is of your game and if it's resonating and please coordinate your

messaging in your videos they're much more powerful and impactful if they go together and tell the same story Thanks we have time for questions okay a little time please line up at the microphones got like three minutes talk fast hello something I found really interesting that you're talking about is shaping your message too as concisely a message that you can do you have any recommendations for creating different versions of that message depending on who you're talking to or making it one sentence versus three sentences um yeah I think I mean that's a really good question that's a good thing to do I mean I would say generally with like social media you want to be super short and succinct I would say similarly with

like a website you want to have a one-liner like I think it's always a good idea to have just a one-liner that's easy simple you can always say it out of your mouth and then to have two to three more sentences you can tack on and I also think that certain places like a press kit you can be more verbose but anything that's a first line of defense I'd make super short okay thank you no questions you're all total wizards okay cool coming that Thanks you