Trailers and puzzles

As Desktop Dungeons nears release, we’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about trailers. Indie games tend to be hugely impacted by their trailers – that’s how a lot of potential players first interact with your game. For ages, we had no idea how to convey the ideas behind Desktop Dungeons in video: The game isn’t really packed with action, gameplay tends to be slower and less spectacular and players often sit and think instead of being bombarded with situations they have to deal with right-the-hell-now.

A few weeks ago we started working on our trailer problem in earnest and things are starting to get really interesting. We ended up reaching out to several professional trailer makers, hoping to get a few ideas that would work. In the end, it looks like we’re going to have multiple trailers – two by different people and a third one that we initially weren’t going to pursue, but ended up liking so much that we thought we might just try to film it and see how it turned out.

That happened last weekend. The early cut of that live-action trailer has made the people we’ve tested it on laugh quite a bit, so that’s good. The other trailers serve different purposes – one is designed to get people’s attention and the other is an attempt at showing off gameplay (yes, that’s hard to do, it doesn’t mean we didn’t have ideas that could work). Shooting for a trailer that’s just over a minute long took most of the day, we’re really glad that we have friends in the film and TV industries, otherwise we’d never have made anything this cool happen… Also, effects are pretty fun to make! The eggs above worked wonderfully, although you’ll just have to wait until the trailer is finished to see exactly what we did with them.