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MSS - Trailer Thing? Thoughts Wanted! (UPDATE 2 - 12 July)

5 years ago2,203 words

I've made a video trailer thing for Memody: Sindrel Song, and I'm curious to hear some thoughts before using it as the primary way of demonstrating what this thing even is!

One of the good things about working alone is that while doing actual work, I'm free to follow my own preferences rather than having to tweak every little thing to suit someone else's. One of the not-good things though is that I don't have anyone I can directly ask "do you think this is okay?" as I'm going along, so I get really indecisive and things take longer than they should as a result.

This is especially the case now, where I'm not able to just sit down and work for hours, going through my To Do List of tasks, bugs, etc, like I could during actual development. There, I could mostly trust my own judgement, since I knew what I was doing for the most part. Now, I'm trying to navigate unknown territory, hindered by mental health issues. While there really isn't that much to do, the potential social judgement aspects of the few things I do need to do leads to a lot more procrastination about getting around to them. I'm frustrated at myself, at how this shouldn't have taken as many months as it has, but I'm doing what I can considering other people with these issues might be getting therapy or something (or just hiding away completely), which isn't the case for me currently. I'm just having to push through, somehow.

But it's like an arachnophobe being told that they can have a prize if they sit naked in an empty bath and have a bucket of large, feisty spiders dumped on them, but they can do it in their own time, when they're ready, no rush. Chances are they wouldn't rush too eagerly into that, even if the prize was particularly valuable. They'd really take their time taking off their clothes, change their mind, "maybe tomorrow instead?", probably.

I'm just hoping that once some mental barriers are broken, they'll stay broken.



I've made a video thing for Sindrel Song, which I'm assuming will be the first thing that new people would see before deciding whether or not to buy the game. So it's important! It's not finished yet, so I haven't uploaded it to YouTube since you can't edit uploaded videos there, but here's an mp4 which I hope you're able to view:

∞ This is a link! ∞

I'm very interested to hear some thoughts about it, what I should include or shouldn't have included. Do you think this would pique people's interest, or put them off?

I've got plenty of thoughts about it myself, but rather than posting the long ramble I just wrote about them, I'll wait and see if anyone else has anything to say first.



I've looked at a small number of indie game trailers and gameplay videos these past few days, to get an idea of what to do myself, but probably not as many as I should. A couple that stuck in my mind were for what's apparently a modern remake of Yume Nikki, an RPG Maker game from a while ago, which seemed remarkable because of the suggestions about reviving MARDEK in some form. Perhaps those of you less out of the loop already know of this game, since it seems to have come out at the start of 2018, but I've seen nothing of it beyond these two videos. I've no idea if it was well-received or made any money at all. It seems like a few people were working on it, though these YouTube videos don't have all that many hits. More than I've got on anything I've recently made obviously, but not exactly hundreds of thousands.

This one seems to be one showing intention more than a finished work, I think?



It has a lot of text; I had to pause the video to read it all. It seems to show a bit of gameplay, and it looks nicely cinematic and impressive, competent, but beyond the text, I don't really know what I'm looking at, despite having played the original a while ago. Do you think this is done well, for what it's trying to achieve? How might it be done differently?

There's also this one, which I think is a gameplay demo:



It's all very competently 3D and modern-looking and atmospheric (a whole lot of post-processing!), but all it is is the protagonist running forward, seeing a bloodstain, then waking up in her room. From what I remember of the original, this doesn't resemble anything from it, so it's not exactly a nostalgic "look, it's that thing you once liked!". I don't get to see any of the weird dream worlds that made the original interesting and unique; I've little idea of how the game would play from seeing this. But again, it's nicely atmospheric and feels cinematic, enticing in style if not necessarily in content.

Do you think this is effective in doing what it's intending to?

Though I'd say Sindrel Song is a fairly arty game (in intention if not necessarily airy ~style~), I've gone in a very non-arty direction with the video I've made. Rather than being some atmospheric little bit of cinema, enticing you in with a feeling of anticipation, it's more like a blunt demo; "this is exactly the content you will see in this game, in this exact form".

But I don't know if that's the best way to do it or not.

(I didn't talk about these videos before, did I...? I write a lot of things I never actually post, so I can't remember if I mentioned this in one of those, or if I posted publicly about it and I'm repeating myself.)



I've been seeing Sindrel Song largely as a learning experience, so I'm trying to get a lot of things as right as I can (though I've no idea how much I'm missing the mark on some of them) to establish techniques I'll be using going forward. Learning how to do this well now will mean that when it comes to releasing my next game, I won't have to worry about this in the same way; I'll just be able to call on what I learned this time and make a trailer in less than a day rather than dilly-dallying for several days.

So yes, thoughts would be appreciated, because it's not as if I have someone to directly talk to about any of this!

This is pretty much the last hurdle now. With a video to show, I think the game might be ready to show to people? I've no idea about an actual release date though; I'm still figuring all this out.

UPDATE: 10 July

I've read the comments and come up with a different approach based on what people said. The other video wasn't really much of a trailer, since I don't have experience making that kind of thing, but this new idea should hopefully give a better idea of what the game is about. I'd still appreciate some assistance with some things though!

I wonder whether indie developers get other people to make their trailers for them. Impressive video creation and editing aren't things you can just competently pick up over night, and making a good trailer isn't something you can do in an afternoon either, really. One of the hardest parts for me is just collecting the necessary clips. That takes a long time! Also my video editing program (Lightworks) keeps crashing and lagging, so that's annoying. It might be because I'm using 1920x1080 videos, so perhaps I'll have more success using a smaller resolution. Not ideal, but hopefully it should be enough for an obscure indie game?

So I don't actually have another trailer assembled just yet, but I've got this plan for how it could be structured. I'd use captions on separate screens with just text; I don't know if that's the usually-done thing or if it makes it look amateur, but personally I don't like the idea of having too much going on on the screen at once because it's too hard to absorb all of it, especially when everything's moving along really quickly. Here's what I've got; the bits in quotes would be caption screens:



"Darkness"

"Becomes light!"
[Fades quickly to white]

[Fades into Memody waking up for the first time; she'd probably open her eyes but wouldn't say anything.]
[Cut to Hearth in this scene saying "Ah, I see you've awoken!"... unless you're a tester and you can think of a more appropriate, snappy line to explain what's going on here.]

"Sing melodies"

[A simple bit of Remedy's song plays, briefly.]

"Make memories"

"Some light"

[A funny one-liner that makes some degree of sense out of context - if you know of any from testing, I'd love some suggestions here! I'm not sure what to use.]

"Others dark"

[A darker single line that works out of context - again, I'm not sure which one to use.]

"Bond through songs"

[Hammer's song, briefly; the bit where you trade single notes, as in the other video, as I feel that succinctly demonstrates the mimicry aspect.]

"To make masterful friendships"

[A bit of Vivace's song, followed by a brief show of the progress graph, as in the other video.]

"Learn why they live"

[A bit of Course's song, probably.]

"Despite your daemon's darkness"

[A single, notable line from the daemon which works out of context and adequately explains what it's all about - again, suggestions very welcome!]

"Memody: Sindrel Song" (Title card)

"Make meaningful memories
From musical melodies" - The second line fades in on the same page



The game's primary themes are light/dark and life/death (which are treated as equivalent), and memory. They cover the story stuff and the mechanics, so that's what I tried to focus on here.

One of the biggest issues is going to be figuring out how to use music. A trailer needs a coherent music track with a single building mood to be good, I'd say, but this game's mechanics use music so fundamentally that it seems wrong to not include the actual songs you're seeing being played. But that leads to those quick and jarring cuts. (The other video actually has a single mp3 playing over the top with all the clips muted; the game's audio isn't used.) That seems like it'll be tricky to resolve.

What I'll have to do now is go through the whole script, making note of lines that I feel could serve the purposes I need here, then narrowing down the lists I've made to really hone in what seems like the best fit. Then I'll need to replay the game in such a way that I can get to the relevant sections and record them. That's something that'll take time! Everything takes so much time...

I feel like I'm getting closer though, and that this is important to get right since it's what people will use to determine whether the game's worth playing or not.



Some bits I'm unsure about:

* The 'sing melodies' bit coming before the 'make memories' bit. Perhaps they could be compressed in some way?

* The "make memories" caption followed directly by "some light" - the line "some light" also feels a bit iffy since it's not self-contained, perhaps it's even unclear.

* "To make masterful friendships" sort of annoys me; originally it was just "understand others", but that's hardly better. It's supposed to be hinting at how listening to others attentively is the key to making good friendships, and also the key to getting high progress scores in this, though obviously it's not as if I can convey all the detail of that in a single text snippet shown for a couple of seconds.


I'll keep working at this myself, but feedback's very valuable!

Oh, also, I wonder whether to mention it was made by one person while recovering from brain cancer (probably at the end), since that seems to be an interesting hook, or whether it'd be weird and out of place, unnecessary.

UPDATE 2 - 12 July

I've edited the script some more, and I wanted to have a video draft to show what I have, but since that might take some time, here's the text:

"Darkness"
"Becomes light!"
"Forge new friendships through music"
"Make memories that shine bright"
"Or blight like a dark night"
"Mimic and master melodies"
"To fully understand what life means to your new friends"
"Would eternal life be a gift?"
"If your own mind is a monster?"
"Memody: Sindrel Song" (Title card)
"Make meaningful memories
From musical melodies"

The lines would be interspersed with relevant clips.

Also, a personal update: I've been feeling really bad for a while, weeks probably, but those dark clouds seem to be clearing now; I actually felt something like happy yesterday, for the first time in what seems like forever! Wow, gasp! Hopefully this'll allow me to speed up a bit and get some things done that I've been unable to get around to (or have been avoiding) recently.