Dev Diary: Demo Reviews & Fake Commercial

Demo Reviews

If you've played the demo (and liked it), please post a review on the demo's Steam store page.

Why it wasn't reviewable before

Steam allows demos to either be attached to the game, or to have their own separate store page. Demos are only reviewable if they have their own store page. At the time I originally released the demo, I was a combination of a little lazy and worried that unexpected bugs or people not "getting" the game would lead to negative reviews.

So far the feedback has been uniformly positive, and while it's wonderful to get that positive feedback directly, it'd be even better if everybody could see that positivity! So if you played the demo, please add a review to show the people that haven't played it that it's a good game.

Fake Commercial

The end result

What makes a corporate commercial

I've been playing with the idea of making a fake commercial for HAE Technologies for a looooooong time. Corporate commercials are so weird. I ended up watching a lot of corporate commercials to "study" for making my own. I came up with a 10 point list of things that epitomize a corporate commercial:

• A vague, almost poetic script.

• Lots of cuts between stock footage/images.

• Most cuts are jump cuts, but occasionally there's a fade.

• Most cuts come in clusters of similar subject/footage/topic from different angles.

• Lots of pauses in the voiceover that don't follow normal sentence or punctuation conventions.

• Occasional hyper-fast cuts of like 3-10 different scenes in a second.

• Inspirational backing music track.

• Even static shots have some movement, usually slow zoom in/out.

• Ends with corporate logo, either overlaid on footage or on own screen.

• They're selling the idea of the company, not a specific product. The commercial is for investors, not the general population.

And here are some stats from an analysis of a few different commercials:

If you want to drill into the details and see the commercials for yourself, you can check out my research here: https://haetechnologies.com/commercials

Collaborating

I'm not particularly skilled at video editing, and trying to hire an editor and voice actor was daunting enough that I'd put this idea on a permanent back-burner. But a couple weeks ago, Jeremy Jayne of /noclip posted on Bluesky that he was looking for some extra work, and said the magic phrase "no project too big small". I've been a /noclip fan for at least 5 years, and seen Jeremy's excellent videos over that time, so I was confident that he'd do great work (which is something I can't say for a random video editor from Fiverr or w/e).

So long story short, I wrote the script, I hired Jeremy to do the editing, and hired a professional voice actress Laya Hoffman to do the voiceover. They both knocked it out of the park, I really couldn't be happier with the results.

Conclusion

This was a really fun little diversion from the solo, technical side of this project. I think the commercial hits the perfect line between believable, sinister, and dystopian. If you're not paying full attention you could totally think "yeah that's just a normal commercial", but if you're paying close attention you'll notice how "off" the whole thing is, and the subtle jabs that the stock footage makes. (For example, the image of "together" being two people in a bed turned away from each other and staring at their phones).

I've already worked out how I'm going to use the commercial in-game, and I'm excited to see how people feel about it.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the commercial in the comments, and please review the demo (if you liked it)!