Reviewing YOUR GAME TRAILERS

i spent two hours talking to the legendary trailer maker derek liu who has made countless of amazing trailers for high profile indie games like subnautica or has even contributed to some triple a game trailers like the one for half-life alex i'm gonna head inside find a way out got it i asked you to send me some of your indie game trailers so in this video derrick and me will have a look at them just for fun we'll also review the carlson trailer by dany consider this video the ultimate introduction into trailer making for indie games turned out to be a little bit of a longer one so lean back get a cup of tea and enjoy so why should you care about your game trailer if you're asking that question then you need your trailer more than anyone else because if you're asking that that probably means that you're not doing any other marketing and if that's the case then the trailer is probably going to be the bare minimum that you need for your marketing you just need some way of showing people what your game is in a really really short period

of time one thing you also brought up in i think in one of your gdc talks there was where you said that more people will probably see your game footage than play your game so that's another really fun way to look at that right yeah fun fun or sad in a very fruitful world a strawberry tossed from his bush overall i thought was pretty good one thing i'll say about this trailer is that it is optimized for mobile in a way because even though everything is spoken and narrated the the the text is on screen so you can watch this muted which is a good thing so in the beginning here we have the logo game by snuff uh snooty snuffty i don't know i think it's yeah yeah um but because you have it integrated into gameplay you know i'm not going to make a fuss about this so that's good yeah this game trailer feels like it's very narrative focused

but the game itself looks like it's sort of like very gamey his family scattered traveling through the seasons to find his purpose in life you know i'm sure the story has an effect on the game but this isn't like you know gone home where we're more really concerned about the story as opposed to the mechanics purely gameplay wise the only thing i get from this is it's a platformer with a strawberry and that's not a whole lot i will say i do like this transition here it does a pretty good job of showing a little bit of variety of the platforming but i don't know either what the goal is or why the platforming is interesting there at least it's no information overload like all of the shots are pretty pretty clear and simple for the most part right yeah it's it's it's clear which clear is good

i i always say clear is better than having too much because a lot of people just try to cram everything into their game trailer but um just a little bit light on the content and clarity in terms of what you do why you're doing it why that's interesting derek has an entire youtube channel dedicated to the art of making trailers by the way so i was really hoping we could send him some new subscribers he also watches game trailers on twitch every week so this was definitely not your last chance to get some feedback from him hmm

my first impression of this one is uh i think you need to go lighter on the glitching it's really uh uncomfortable to watch i think the messaging in terms of the text is pretty okay there's a little bit of overload in this trailer because there's a lot of text you have to read there's a lot of things going on on the bottom and also sometimes you have hud elements also the no no game audio is your game audio not done yet is it in progress or something like that that whenever you have a game trailer which is music and no sound effects whatsoever um it sort of flattens out the whole trailer it just makes it a little monotonous whereas the game audio you can think of it as like percussions like nice little kind of uh audio like flavor crystals every now and then it's like oh that's cool that sounds good one problem a lot of people run into is that they record their game with music right and then they just have to mute everything i've heard that before and then i tell people

so recapture everything that's that's what you have to do it's making trailers a lot of work so either i have to recapture it all or i'll just take all the raw audio files and just sync it manually oh don't apologize for your game before you showed it to us feels like you're like ah look at look at my game it doesn't look good though it's like yeah show out you know also this this game it's like a pixel art sort of game it's not watch dogs where it's like no no no no it's going to have shinier puddles later on don't people aren't worried about that at this scale of game [Music] [Music]

and then one thing about the your end card you have all your social media no one's gonna follow any of that give them one okay again people like simple they want a wishlist button or something like that i guess you're saying well you can follow me on your thing of choice but it's still just looking at this card it's very overwhelming and i'm thinking to myself well if they're not focusing on any one of these things then they're probably all pretty watered down you know try to give me like one really important one and also for yourself you should probably focus on one maybe two uh avenues for your social media and marketing because just you're a human being and you can only do so much yeah i agree i 100 agree in general what would you recommend for texts and trailers like should you is there any scenario where it makes sense to show gameplay and text at the same time basically if you're gonna have text on screen you should be willing to have the gameplay be ignored

um i think the gameplay should just be really really really simple like an environment or maybe just like one character walking across the screen yeah but if it's like text stuff going on here here here here then then you're gonna run into trouble huge shout out to everybody who was brave enough to send in their trailers by the way that's why i'd ask you to please keep your comments friendly okay we're here to help each other out [Music] [Music]

part of me wishes i didn't see the title of this trailer before going in but i'm gonna gonna pretend that i didn't and my reaction is what do you do in this game the graphics are nice and i can tell that you flip switches and move objects around but i mean it could just be some sort of sandbox game where that's it you know these none of these things seem to be changing anything that's happening in the game so yeah just not enough uh cause and effect in this trailer so you feel like it would help like if you could see the cause effect relationship between solving a puzzle and maybe a door opening or something like that yeah i mean you could literally just have a a switch get flipped and then see something moving that wasn't the player moving it and then we ah you flip that switch and then that thing opened that's that's really all you need you don't need a whole lot of like you know this thing this thing anything and that resulted in this thing you just need one thing flip this

move this and then you know these liquids combine and explode or something like that and also um there's that shot at the end where the glass is like fogged and then it slowly gets clear there wasn't anything on the other side that i thought was interesting so it was a lot of build up for nothing it felt like i was like okay is this going to be the the game's title or something and then it's just like oh just the window's clean now so it was a little bit anti-climactic also there's no game audio i'll hit that uh again because it's again music montage you see all these sort of nicely rendered you know glass tubes and stuff like that but not hearing anything so it's very unsatisfying to not hear that but i mean the the graphics look really cool but i would love some game audio and just really just some cause and effect maybe some obstacles like ah i can't get into this room because of this something in there that makes it seem interesting you know or a challenge something that you're

trying to solve but yeah maybe something that helps you to understand the objective of what you're trying to achieve and the obstacles that are standing in your way to doing that our next trailer starts out a little slowly but i'd suggest you stick with it because it's really quite interesting i'll play this one in its entirety maybe use the time to think about what you would change if this were your trailer so here we go [Music]

do so [Music]

that was really great the sound and the ambience is really good i think the things that could be fixed are some of the the pacing and also some things related to the text i think the text if they could shorten it in some cases uh like i basically had enough time to read everything but it was just a little bit short the thing i get from this is it's a game set in let's just say 1984 because that's in the title and you think it's a text adventure with visuals but there's something else going on when people are watching a game trailer there are in a constant mode of hmm how does this game work what is this game and as soon as the trailer gives them enough of like one thing they will usually think okay this is what the game is i think that once we got into the like text adventure part i think there

wasn't enough of the by the way there's something else going on i started thinking myself okay maybe it is just a text adventure and this trailer is very stylized i think that there needed to be a little bit more reminder during the text adventure of there's something weird going on there's like a another layer to this game other than just this text adventure with this um crt filter over it i like the stylization of the date and the wish list on steam thing but i think if you could have made it shorter you know quicker then more people would see it what do you think about the the opening yeah i think that um it's very long so i worry about people not continuing to watch it if it's part of a live stream event and there's a captive audience then be very suspenseful and i think effective but on the scrolling through social media and youtube whatever might be have a less of a chance of people [Music]

continuing [Music] this trailer similar to the escape room one needs some more cause and effect also it needs to be faster paced i understand it's about growing and maybe that fits the music and the pace might fit that sort of growing grass sort of thing but doesn't it shouldn't feel like you're watching grass grow

i think that a lot of the things that are said in text can be shown rather than using text to show it because we can figure some of these things out we see a blank thing we see things being built upon it we get it and it's also it's it's text for thing that is plainly obvious so that's even more frustrating when you when you point out things in text that we can tell from just looking with our eyes then it feels a little bit like you're saying oh you wouldn't have figured this out if i hadn't told you and then me as the audience i'm like no i would have uh you don't need to like baby me through this as a rule of thumb can you say um you should only put text on the screen to explain stuff that you can't explain with the gameplay footage absolutely editing as much about putting stuff in as it is taking things out and i think a lot of people need to focus more on taking the things out because again we're going for clarity and especially at the very end of the trailer that we just kind of go through a whole bunch of bullet points basically like these are probably bullet points on your steam

page if you have a steam page and that's really not very interesting to read in video form also there needs to be a little bit more incremental progress especially at the beginning because it just went from blank to finished but we don't know how we got there until he showed us later on i think would have been good to uh maybe like a time lapse which is especially popular this sort of game where you're building things maybe zoom in a little bit so that you direct the eye again on the things that are important just having that same exact angle for the entire time with not a lot of movement and change um can get kind of stale you're always a step ahead of me because that was the next thing i was about to ask how do you deal with um like static footage if you have like very static looking game but yeah you already covered that pretty well yeah and if if you're thinking to if you're thinking oh no my r assets don't hold up if i zoom in on the footage um my answer is who cares so basically having a nice interesting shot is more

important than having super crisp and sharp footage at all times quick note for this one i had to replace the music because it got copyright claimed [Music] um that's nice and simple i think this probably could have been even shorter because it seems like mechanically in this game there isn't too much complexity it seems to be avoid the clouds and get the gems i see the clouds do sort of like a poof thing but if there was some sort of negative feedback sound to be like no no you shouldn't hit those then that would tell told me that yes you're avoiding

clouds for this reason i appreciate the the editing on the beat has good energy to it but also the you know the intro could have been a little shorter too because the thing with the intro with all the different planes at different um heights for a second i was thinking oh is this like a multiplayer racing game are we all playing together like asynchronously or something like that and this person's in the lead because again people are trying to figure out the game as soon as the trailer starts but again because this game doesn't have too much mechanically at least from this trailer make it even shorter like if people understood the game but they want to keep watching and can't they just keep watching or what's the disadvantage of having a little bit of a longer trailer having a longer trailer where you repeat content is worse than having a shorter trailer where you don't you might think to yourself oh but if it's really short people think the game is short and the thing i'll say is like well maybe it's actually just a really tightly edited trailer whereas if you have a long trailer where

you repeat a lot of content then people say oh they didn't have enough to fill 60 seconds this this must be a really small game like it seems counterintuitive but you have that plausible deniability if you have a short trailer that's really tight and interesting every step of the way [Music] yeah that's pretty nice so after that initial parking lot comes in uh really nice there's a bit of a lull before we get to the building and the music's still going it's it's still yeah we get it it's parking lot you know there's not a lot in this trailer uh in terms of just like variety we get

that you're building this mall but the thing that you could mix up to make this a little bit more fun to watch especially because you have this you know fun exciting music is just have things drop in not at the exact same speed the entire time have things maybe come in at the rate of music you know did it you can kind of play with think of it like a music also having sound effects would be great you know cars like having little honking sound when they land or something like that you might run into territory where you're thinking look well in the game it doesn't do that which that's a fair point but other than that the concept is fine and you get the point across and everything else i'd say is good yeah i found this trailer especially interesting because it's i feel like you can tell that it's not gameplay footage it's really particularly made for this trailer right but it still kind of gets the gameplay across in a in an interesting way yeah a really good example of a trailer sort of like this is the planet zoo trailer they did a cg trailer um which yes it's not gameplay

and that one i mean that one's a very high production value that they got this nice song and but they have lifestyle sound effects when like the roads being built i would highly recommend uh you check that out and see what they do with that um just for some ideas next up i showed derek the carlson trailer in the hope that it would finally help me to expose and trailer shame danny just so you know danny didn't send this in i picked this for entertainment purposes hello carlson you're my prisoner and test subject hahahaha just kidding not really this is your companion billy your only objective is to get to the milk as fast as you can well good luck and don't die let me introduce you to billy's brother

[Music] [Music] um yeah no that was super good it was is to the point uh you got the the story framing in like within the first six ten seconds and then after that they just flat out said you're just trying to get this milk and then they showed all the things that you need to do to get through that milk and then why those why they're interesting they had a lot of variety they had the the grappling hook and the like shooting the guns and it's

really nicely like cut on the beat [Music] for the most part i think there's maybe like one part of the trailer where they didn't cut on the beat i think towards the end where they should like do like a rocket jump sort of thing before going up i think that shot wasn't on the beat and to have the whole trailer be like really in sync and on the beat and then have one towards the end where it's not it's very unsatisfying after further video analysis i can say it was actually perfectly on beat just the sound was a little late look at that absolutely exposed man like the sound is like two frames late but other than that really really really good great great energy to the whole thing and the really good

um use of like the the game audio and the guns as basically like percussion like that's the sort of thing that you see a lot in like battlefield trailers and call of duty where either the music drops out and then it's like you know it's it's really well done um and yeah and i understand the game the the art it's it's pretty simple but it's very appealing and good really how long was that trailer one minute thirty okay and the end card comes in after one minute or the the title of the game okay yeah uh yeah that felt really tight it felt like nothing was wasted things were repeated just enough to understand what's going on the only other criticism i would have is if you're gonna have that date on that end card have that in as soon as possible not after wishlist on steam for five ten seconds because no one's gonna see that date so just it's okay have it have both of them at the same time because again if you want information to be known don't put it at the end of a youtube video

uh get it in as soon as possible but yeah that was that was really tight well edited uh good music and uh capture is great yeah i also wanted to watch at least one of the trailers derek made so we picked the firewatch switch trailer let's just see how this one looks and then question derek a little bit about it here we go how'd you get fired and wind up in jail all on your first day henry i thought it'd be a good idea to chuck some roman candles into a smoldering fire pit or regular forest burns hello to forex tower um hello whoever this is it's henry right yeah i'm delilah so what should i do now what's next what's next is you sit in that room until september 1st and call me at the first line of smoke [Music] so what's wrong with you excuse me

people take this job to get away from something so what's wrong everything's fine just getting some fresh air well escaping isn't always something bad someone broke in hey what they just they wrecked the place threw my typewriter out the window do you have any idea who would have done this henry i've been at this job for 13 years and nothing like this has ever happened before maybe i'm just losing my mind i need you to feel safe out here well i sure don't know you will i promise one's a lot of fun to watch or fun to edit because i got to use chris remo's music that he made for the the reveal teaser

um which is made for a trailer so that's why it's a really good likes slow burn at the beginning and then you know nice climax at the end yeah this one i really like this cold open because i mean i think it's funny just a shot of him holding fireworks in front of a fire where that instantly sort of sets up a question or at least that was my idea to be like well is he going to do it is he not going to do it and then he does it i usually use that opening as an example of like how you can like act through game capture the first thing i'm trying to find are what are all the things that the player does that are unique so a good way to think of this actually is with point click adventure games because you know in point click adventure games you do a lot of like picking up of things and that's probably the same animation every time but you know there are those moments in adventure games where you have a unique animation for this one particular thing usually because you solve a puzzle so i as a trailer editor i'm looking for all of those unique moments and just putting them into this trailer so then that there's as little repetition as

possible so how long did it take you to make that trailer i honestly don't remember how long it took to edit that firewatch trailer usually two to three weeks or something like that um maybe including including the capture yeah can i ask um how expensive it is to let a professional make a trailer for you you don't have to give me your personal rates or anything but like just a rough rough number what people could expect i usually tell people well if you're gonna hire me then expect to spend at least several thousand dollars there's some places actually in poland which uh when i've given out uh information like roughly about my rates they're like whoa i wouldn't think about charging more than like a thousand dollars for a trailer uh you know i've heard as low as like 500 in some cases um some other people might be more like you know three to five thousand or three thousand especially if they're uh getting started but if you're going to want to work with someone who has like much more experience than i would

say expect to spend at least several thousand [Music] [Music] so [Music]

uh [Music] hey [Music] [Music] hey [Music]

[Music] for this trailer i was waiting basically for the shot that happened somewhere in the middle which was the actual actual game camera angle every new shot that wasn't that shot frustrated me because it seems like this it's a slow intro and it's very story focused but only really the first few shots are sort of story focused with the title cards and everything like that there wasn't enough story in there for me to care about the story section basically like if if you want to start off with story then give me a story but if it's just like a slow intro where it's sort of like this character sort of pensively looking about not really giving me any information about the world or the character then it's basically dead air you know you followed up with the like environment shots which is also very typical many game trailers which is why i made a

whole video saying don't do that basically the environments are only interesting if we know what happens in the environment and we don't know that until the middle to late part of the trailer so we don't know why it's interesting there's fire jets here because we don't even know how you move around the world and then once we get to the game play this part it's it's fine but it gets repetitive after a while we see that okay it's platforming there seems to be some bit of a bullet hell uh elements to it with the dodging the the fire yeah and you might think well it's only 20 seconds of gameplay it's like yes it's 20 seconds of gameplay but the expectation of a trailer is new stuff all the time and if you're like i'll give you the same thing for a while you're like okay well that's what they're gonna give me so i'll watch this other video here and there is game audio in there but also there's no game audio for when the projectiles hit enemies so that made that feel very empty you hear it being shot but then you don't know if they're being impacted until they die so that's just a more a game design

thing but that's a reason it's good to make trailers and think about trailers because then you pick up on these things like oh wait there's no feedback here for the audience so the trailer would probably be better off if it were just one minute or maybe even 45 seconds or something like that instead of two minutes yeah was that two minutes yeah that was two minutes yeah i'd say you know a minute it would have probably been a good amount of time unless there is more story to show but even then if the gameplay variety is not uh terribly diverse then uh just keep it short

so

i have one really really easy bit of feedback just cut out the subtitles and just get rid of them all uh because first of all again we're dividing attention visuals up here subtitles down here people cannot not read subtitles they can but they're going to want to read them regardless and the visuals and the sound and everything i think are really good i think the trailer probably could have been a little bit shorter but i think if you just cut out all those subtitles because i was while i was watching this i was just thinking are these visuals and texts in this like main part of the trailer enough for me to be interested and yes i think so just as an experiment here's a quick section without any subtitles

the dialogue um it's not adding enough to make me think yes this is necessary because the visuals do so much in terms of like teasing the story there's a lot of really cool images in there so i think you can easily just cut out all those subtitles and more nitpicky at the end you just should have again one call to action maybe too but you had the the blogspot website and facebook maybe cut out the facebook my friend who does pr marketing says people should not have game websites unless they're trying to make like a really nice presentation for like a publisher or financier of some sort because a website is just extra friction between the trailer and the store page and you want people on the store page so if it's on itch.io or steam or something like that just point them directly there i'm sure your website you put work into it and everything but we don't really care we want them on the store page and you can

you know put all the work that you would put on the website into the store page put all your bullet points and your gifts and everything like that there but that's the work that brings me to one of the other questions i really wanted to ask you um which was how many trailers does a game need and when is the best time to make a trailer for your game the best time to start thinking about your trailer is when you're thinking of game ideas there's an interview on noclip with lucas pope who did papers please and he says that he actually thinks about trailers when he's thinking of game ideas because uh if he can't think of how it would make a trailer then he doesn't approach it which oh wow obviously not everyone should do that because that means certain games would not exist because if if everyone thought that way there'd probably be no mobas so at least announce trailer and launch trailer but if it's small game then just just one trailer i was wondering how do you make sure that both of those trailers have like a lot of impact but doesn't feel like it's the

same trailer again generally i'll say the announced trailer is the big idea the big elevator pitch idea and that's it hopefully that's interesting enough for people to say ah that game where you played this or that game where time moves when you move you need that really top level idea communicated announce is idea and then launch is content overall structure sort of thing maybe a good follow-up question that i saw in the comments when i asked for people to send me their trailers for some how do you get more people to see your trailer like is that something that happens naturally is there something you can do to get your trailer out there uh that's that's the really that's the million dollar question if i could answer that i charge way more but i mean i to be honest i don't completely know um the ways to get people to watch your trailer um because that's deals with maybe like

the the format of your tweets that has the trailer it could be contacting press to say hey new trailer and usually when people ask that sort of question i say you need to talk to a pr marketing strategy person who uh is the person who thinks about these sorts of things i pretty much just think about how good the trailer is and how to make the trailer good once people are watching it um but it's it's a really really big topic because also it can go all the way down to the fundamental design of the art or something like that people like to click on pretty things and if your art's not super great then you're already kind of sabotaging your trailer in advance and i mean you might think yourself well but untitled goose game it uh it went viral it went crazy so i mine will be like that and my answer is it's probably not um i was actually on um i was talking to one of the people from house house

recently and he was talking about how specifically when they're designing games they are thinking about the spectator experience when doing that and that really makes a lot of sense when you look at untitled goose game because uh just from watching that game you know everything about it and not all games can say that coming out with a new game in a new trailer it is like um a stand-up comedy club it's open mic night and you have no one's ever seen you perform and it's a hostile environment i've performed at open mics before and no one knows what you are and you know you you cannot waste time you need to make people laugh right away or in game trailer terms you need to make people interested right away otherwise it's going to click the next thumbnail on the side and move on with their life yeah so you as a youtuber i can confirm like if it's like that with every video nowadays if you don't hook people right from the beginning they're out even even more so with trailers

probably yeah if if you think it's a hostile environment out there it is probably far worse than you think so don't waste time with logos especially unfortunately i had to let derek go at some point i'll do a little speed round now because i want to show a couple more of your game trailers i'll give you my personal feedback so if you liked anything that i had to say today i have a weekly newsletter where i give out game trailer tips whatever's on my head that week just go to gametrailertips.com and you'll get something every sunday about game trailers whether it's about having too much text on screen whether it's about capture and also if you email me just something that you're interested in i can usually send you a link to something i wrote before or maybe i'll make it a topic of a future one thanks for coming onto the show derek we appreciate it the opening looks very cute there are just a lot of wasted seconds that don't teach me anything about gameplay still no gameplay now here's where gameplay starts finally that is a little too late in my opinion

actually no hold on this is where gameplay starts here this should should come a lot earlier there's a little bit of information overload on the screen so i'd suggest removing the unnecessary parts of the ui if i don't need something to understand your game simply don't show it it's as simple as that showing the shop is fine for me maybe you could have edited this to the beat of the music to make this a little more interesting now here's the first time where we actually kind of understand that this is a tower defense game that seems a little bit late then here once again lots of unnecessary ui on the screen just remove that for the trailer that makes the shots a lot clearer actually i really like the art style though looks very nice i would play this i'm down honestly yeah this looks very fun this trailer grabs you right from the beginning with some amazing shots note how the entire trailer is basically organized like a tutorial it starts out by showing you a couple of simple things you can do makes everything fairly easy to understand and then expands on the concept step by step

like after watching this trailer you know exactly what you'll get when you buy the game and that is actually a good thing because that allows people to make an informed decision if they want to buy your game or not i don't have any evidence for this but like i'm like 99 sure that an informed customer is way more likely to buy your game than somebody who's like oh what is this game i don't understand this but you can not physically watch this trailer without understanding what it's about it's like so plainly obvious there's a pretty good humor and it's very fun to watch i like this one a lot this one i would say is off the problem of having a static playing field quite well there are a lot of custom camera shots in there which i really like unfortunately the trailer doesn't really

make it clear what the game is all about like you can kind of guess that it's probably a turn based game about boats but any more than that not really sure and then of course sound effects would have been nice but i will look past that because this is probably still in development first thing i'm thinking here is do we really need that heart in the corner do we really need to know how many lives the player has do we need the text at the bottom ah probably probably not you know also that arrow does that need to be in the trailer i personally feel like it's a little bit of an immersion breaker for me and here that is very intriguing now i was expecting a big drop and rising tension but you know it just keeps going like nothing nothing has changed um yeah so after the black there i was expecting some intense music yeah yeah this section is really cool though i like this section a lot i don't even know exactly why i think it

communicates the feeling of getting lost really well for me it looks like a labyrinth the only thing i'm worried about is that it kind of looks like local multiplayer maybe some people could misunderstand this now a little bit of a long break here where people might click off actually overall i definitely liked it thanks a lot for sending it in this game has a pretty cool premise that the entire game is on a single screen and this right here is the money shot in my opinion so i'm really confused why your show only showed that for such a short amount of time then we have the apparent lack of sound effects which seems to be a very very common thing in trailers i kind of like that the text has its own screens that makes it easy to read and to focus on maybe you could have zoomed in a little bit here and there to add a little bit of variety to the trailer and then this is where i think the trailer could have ended but it keeps going for a little bit [Music] now this game was apparently made by a

solo developer which absolutely blows my mind the trailer is a masterpiece so a great way to close off this video i really hope you learned something useful about the art of making game trailers and i'll see you all in the next one [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] no

[Music] [Applause] ah so [Music] you