More than 100 games were showcased at this year’s Summer Game Fest. Over the course of a few days, major publishers like Microsoft showcased eye-catching games and trailers, while indie developers showcased their solo projects and everything in between. It’s not easy to stand out in that crowd, even when you have tons of resources to create a trailer. What’s an independent studio to do with all the limitations that come with it? For example, Unbeatable For the developer D-Cell, this meant taking a strategic approach.
“There are two things you can’t predict when your trailer appears in the presentation: what game will be shown immediately before yours and how people will react to it.” Unbeatable Co-director Andrew Tsai told Polygon, “We needed to make sure we were giving ourselves a level playing field regardless of the previous games, which led us to build islands into the trailer – what we called internally ‘sit down and shut up’ moments.”
Tsai gave an example: What if the trailer for a highly anticipated, almost mythical game like Hollow Knight: Silksong premiered right before your game trailer? You can be sure that this hype will spill over into the next game’s clips. “You have to make them realize that something is happening, and then just when they’re saying, ‘Oh wait, hey, there’s something on the screen that looks interesting,’ you turn the volume up to eleven and everyone sits down and shuts up,” Tsai said.
And that is exactly what the Unbeatable Trailer did it. It starts slow and gentle, a petal in the wind in the truest sense of the word. C
“It’s somehow the Skinamark thing where the movie is intentionally boring as bricks at the beginning, which forces you to pay attention to everything because it makes even the little moments where EVERYTHING is happening seem big, which means that when you give people something REALLY big afterward that feels very cool, it hits them a lot harder,” Lake said. “And in the context of ‘everyone is throwing you the coolest thing ever,’ the only way to force a total brain reboot is to go quiet.”
Then the Unbeatable The trailer cuts to an alarm beeping and the music starts; a woman with pink hair sings into a microphone. There are a few places as the song builds where you think the beat could fall and the action begins, but it doesn’t – until it does. The music stops and the fight begins: the band members start a big brawl with a policeman.
“Nevertheless, we deliberately left the island as it was, so that the starting point of the ‘action’ is obscured several times by different sections of the events. [and] “It builds over time,” Lake said. “You have a cold open, then you have the logo cards, then you have the vocals, and at that point you’ve hopefully stopped thinking about what you were just thinking about and the only question is ‘What the hell am I looking at?’ and when you ask that question, that’s about the time when beat gets thrown down and the action beats finally start. When you do all that, everything else feels massive in a way that’s absolutely not possible if you just start with, say, the double-time part of the song.”
hey! I’m running this game with @pixelhavokk (we both do too many th ings to list in the remaining space of this tweet) and now that a day has passed and I’ve slept for more than an hour, I think it’s time to go over the process of this trailer a little bit! cool https://t.co/3SGdCcz7k3
— rj (@spellbang) June 11, 2024
D-Cell started thinking about the trailer at least two years before the premiere – an experience See detailed in a thread on X in June. (The game was first revealed in 2021 when a Kickstarter campaign was launched; It raised $267,402 And has released a demo
Such a process – spending so much time and effort on a trailer – is not common in the video game industry, several D-Cell developers said. But it is a central part of Unbeatable‘s development.
“From the board to the final product, it’s all pretty chaotic because we’re not just making an animated trailer. It’s all part of the thing, which means we’re building things. [inside the game] really on the side,” Lake said. “The actual footage we used changed so, so quickly during the creation of this trailer, just because of the nature of game development and because some things are finished sooner or later than we expected. So including the gameplay footage is a constant back and forth to figure out exactly what those footages are.”
It’s a lot of work, but it’s important to not only align the vision for the trailer, but also set the tone for the game. “And if you [the game’s voice] as a barrier, it really helps you focus on what’s important when you’re making it,” co-producer Jeffrey Chiao told Polygon. “Of course, ultimately knowing how to speak for the game and how the game should speak for itself is key to standing out from the crowd – our trailer in particular was meant to anchor that voice for everyone listening.”
Everything in the trailer is taken directly from the game, which justifies the amount of work that went into the trailer, aside from the excitement it would generate. “If we were to do something like a ‘theatrical trailer,’ there’s no way that all of this would have fit into our production schedule,” Tsai said.
Well, except for one thing: Do you remember the tree from the beginning? Richard Gung, a programmer and VFX artist at Unbeatabletold Polygon that the pink tree was made specifically for the trailer from the start – “a hilarious last-minute team effort.” Tsai quickly recorded the tree after it “crawled around in [a] Voice call,” and Gung animated the tree to look like it was gently blowing in the wind: “The editing is so fast, you don’t even notice it,” Gung said. Tsai said D-Cell made changes to shots, timing and music “up until the day of submission.”
UnbeatableThe marketing of has worked so far. Lake said the game is publisher Playstack’s most wishlisted game; it also set a record for the publisher with its wishlist numbers from day one. There are also a lot of PlayStation users who have put the game on their wishlists, he said.
“But all of this kind of takes us away from the real answer at the heart of the matter, which is ultimately very important to us,” Lake said, “because it was important to bring something out into the world that really crystallizes what we’re doing and shows everyone what it could be and what the vision of the thing is, in a super-clear way.”
He continued, “That’s almost impossible with text when you’re trying to convey a feeling and a vision that you can’t really put into words, but hopefully it’s still easy to understand. And the cold marketing aspect will hopefully come naturally as people see it and respond to it. But I want that to happen because people are really excited about it.”