Dev Diary: Making the Announcement Trailer

Often, the first thing you see about a new game is the announcement trailer. It’s the trailer that lets the world know three pieces of information: the game exists (or rather, the game will exist), the name of the game, and a sense of what the game is about.

What may surprise you is that these trailers generally do not showcase gameplay because at the time of their making, there isn’t any gameplay to showcase! Art assets haven’t been fully developed, player characters are generic, everything in-game is a bunch of grey boxes that don’t have shaders or textures or much lighting, and things like sound design haven’t even been discussed yet. If you haven’t seen the Outer Worlds 2 announcement trailer, you really should! It truly tells it like it is.

We chatted with (mostly) everyone who was involved in making the First Moon of Mercury announcement trailer to get a glimpse into what goes into the making of something like this when the game is still in its early stages.

There are quite a few of you here, so why don’t we start with you telling us who you are and what you do at Games by Stitch, followed by how you contributed to the trailer.

I'm Ashleigh, a producer at Games by Stitch and I recently celebrated 3 years with this team. I sourced our lovely voice actor for the voice over, Aiden Dawn! I had a wonderful time in our recording session with her, and I feel she really brought an emotional angle to the script.

And I am Heather Jackson. I started my writing career as a television screenwriter and moved into game writing and narrative design about a decade ago. I was first hired by Games by Stitch to write a new script for Broken Spectre when they were already half done with the game. Challenge accepted! Oh, and I wrote the script for this trailer.

Evan Sawatsky. I’m a designer and 3D artist here, and I am new to the team. I was given the responsibility of planning out and setting up the station "timelapse" final shot, and creating the station assets that appear in the timelapse.

Jeffrey Flores, here. I’ve been with Games by Stitch as Art Director for ten years now. I worked as the cinematographer of the trailer, directing its visual aesthetic, along with guiding the composition of the shots to form a compelling arc through visual storytelling.

My name is Kelvin, and I started as a 3D generalist working on Flow Weaver and Terrorarium, and moved on to lead artist for Broken Spectre, Elsewhere Electric, and now First Moon of Mercury! I was charged with designing the two 'main character' modules seen throughout. Their design paved the way for future experiments and iterations on the art style, which has evolved since we made the trailer, even.

Janal Bechthold. I’m a composer for film, television, and interactive media. I previously worked with Games By Stitch on the titles Terrorarium and Rival Books of Aster. As the composer for the trailer, my role was crafting a piece of music that would help establish the tone of the game, help the audience understand what the stakes are for the player, and get everyone excited to join the mission.

And I’m Victoria Rogers, the new Community Director at Games by Stitch. By the time I started at the company, work on the trailer had already begun. My main contribution was in co-directing the music score with Games by Stitch head, Evan Jones. Janal is wonderful to work with. I also worked on the communications and messaging side of things. That YouTube copy? All me. Ha.

Did anything about the making of this trailer differ from your usual approach?

Ashleigh: The art team conceived of the entire trailer in Blender because we didn’t have any in-game assets yet. Something so conceptual was a first for the team, but I think it really helped us figure out how we wanted to present First Moon of Mercury aesthetically. It's as much of a trailer as it is a team exercise.

Jeffrey: There was a lot of groundwork that needed to be explored first in terms of spacecraft design and style. Another difference was that it was all pre-rendered so that we weren't limited to what could be done in-engine.

Kelvin: Models and textures could be much higher resolution than when in-engine which was liberating, but also not my typical workflow.

Heather: Well, I had to write a trailer script before I'd even developed the story for the game! We barely had a concept, let alone characters, so I had to craft what little we had into something compelling. At least keeping the script short wasn't a problem!

The script for the First Moon of Mercury announcement trailer.

How did you decide what direction you wanted to go in for the trailer and what direction did you end up with?

Heather: By the time I came onto the project, there was already a rough visual trailer; therefore, I had to come up with words that fit with those visuals. I focused on making the trailer as emotionally compelling as possible, without locking the game into any specific story points before I'd had a chance to flush them out.

Jeffrey: We had some rough ideas to begin with, such as the fragility of being out in space, hinting at transformational game mechanics, and an epic reveal [of the station]. From there, it was figuring out how to turn that into a storytelling arc.

There were three key beats that were mapped out from the beginning: having the solar flare be the inciting incident, the vessels reconfiguring to address the issue, and utilizing a time lapse to show off a fully realized station.

Ashleigh: While the art team took the lead for the beats of the trailer (and did an amazing job, thank you!), I knew from reading our script that I wanted to find a voice actor with an approachable voice that still had a bit of an edge, versus something too lofty, far-away, etc. that you might imagine in sci-fi media. Aiden was the perfect fit for this!

Janal: When I’m composing I draw a lot of inspiration from the story, game mechanics, and art style. Based on those elements I started by putting together a playlist of music which could serve as reference material and inspiration to help frame our creative discussions. We really liked the idea of adding voice to the music as a way to insert the human element into this futuristic high-tech space station.

Victoria: For my part, I really wanted some electronic elements to modernize the orchestral feel that Evan [Jones] was leaning toward with his direction. I mean, who doesn’t like Two Steps from Hell? There's nothing quite like a dubstep drop with strings, guitar, and big percussion instruments for a dramatic moment.

More seriously, it was important to me that we evoked emotional reactions in the viewer. There are no human figures in the trailer, so it was imperative that emotions, a core human experience, were driven home by the audio – score, sfx, and voice over alike.

Steam post image A segment of the Miro board used for planning the announcement trailer.

What was a constraint you had to work through, and how did you manage to solve that challenge?

Heather: Ha! Pretty sure I already answered this question. [I had to write] a trailer script when I hadn't even written a game script. I solved that challenge by keeping the trailer script short and sweet and, honestly, kind of vague.

Ashleigh: The trailer required a lot of care to be great, and we still had to be trucking ahead on the game itself at the same time. I learned a lot about what may be most understandable to the team when it came to goalsetting, which led me to create a few options for the team to use to stay on track that all followed a single source of truth.

Evan: It took the entire team working together to come up with a pipeline and troubleshoot roadblocks as they emerged, since this particular workflow was new to all of us in some way or another.

Kelvin: There wasn't much to go on in terms of worldbuilding and game design quite at this point so, we on the art team, decided to push the visual style as much as we could within reason, we really wanted to set ourselves apart.

Evan: We wanted to avoid the classic grey, dusty, greeble-filled sci-fi aesthetic of Star Wars, Alien, etc and closer to the semi-alien, colourful, and eye popping aesthetic of Jodorowski's Dune concepts, and games like No Man's Sky.

Steam post image A portion of the production schedule at the beginning stages of game and trailer development.

What were some key learnings from working on the trailer?

Ashleigh: My biggest takeaway is that conceptual trailers are meant to be exploratory, and not lock us in a box.

Jeffrey: It was a great project for the art team to experiment with and to figure out what directions could carry over to the game.

Kelvin: We developed a few different modeling techniques to achieve the geometry we needed. There was a constant push and pull between making things too generically grounded and far too whimsical.

Evan: I learned about the balance between realism and stylization in creating a digital environment; lighting in real space versus what's interesting to look at in a trailer, the true scale of space modules/station and spacecraft, and how sci-fi influences real space technology and vice versa.

Heather: I learned that this is a legit type of trailer in the game biz! In film and television, no one makes a trailer before the movie or show is shot. At most, they'll make a poster, but even then, a polish draft of the script would be complete to base the poster on.

Victoria

[Laughing]Well, from watching the others, I think perhaps next time we should write the script first.

Janal

Based on some conversations we had with the team I was sure they wanted a big sweeping melody with an emotional orchestral score giving large “sci-fi stories set in space” vibes. My first pass felt much too saccharine when paired with the darkness of the story, and as the team was tweaking the game narrative we realized that [initial] direction didn’t reflect what the game needed.

I learned some new aesthetic descriptors like “solarpunk” and “hopepunk” and the music became a new mix of voice and gritty synth percussive textures. I’m hoping audiences will see this, feel the grit needed for this game, and get excited. Throw up some devil horns and give us a “hell yeah!” while listening!

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