Hi folks,
I am writing a case study regarding our trailer debut in hopes that it will help some of you in your game development endeavors and cast another positive light on my branding.
Our first goal was to have a high production value and at the same time to mix multiple elements during the development of the trailer such as:
- Trailer content(actually its more of a teaser)
- Game startup menu(where the player chooses new game bonuses)
- Intro cinematic
- Credit screen
Bassically our debut teaser should cover the exact first minutes of the game.
Now, everyone to whom I talked said the trailer should not be longer than 1 minute, and I agree I had the same opinion but this time I wanted to experiment outside the box and take a leap of faith.
So the trailer ended up having 4 minutes, and I must say right now: I have no regrets about this decision.
Considering that the trailer is more cinematic and shows very little gameplay this was because we aimed it more for our already existing fan base, "Welcome Back, Commander" is the last game from our "Chromosome Evil" franchise.
As to the funding, we had 0 funding.
Now you are going to ask how can we make a high-value production with 0 funding.
Well, it's simple, I did the design, coordination, and artwork, my partner did the core animation and programming and then we searched for volunteers for voice acting, we received much support from the Mud&Blood community, Newgrounds, and some content creators friends.
For music, we found free-use music from the internet.
Work on the trailer took 2 weeks of full-time.
Now on to some bad news, we synchronized the trailer release with the release of the coming soon page from Steam, the problem is we did so at the same time Steam Next Fest started.