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How can I create a good looking trailer with limited resources?

A topic by Jort Driegen created Apr 02, 2018 Views: 1,013 Replies: 6

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Hello everyone!

I'll get straight to it. I want to get more views and downloads on my game. This is why I want a good trailer; to attract more people to download it. How will I be able to do this with limited resources? (I don't own any movie production software like Vegas or Premiere)

All ideas welcome!

Thanks.

woodsmoke6 years ago (1 edit)

Get a freeware editing program, and practice. Think of a concept for the trailer before starting to record material. Make two or three trailers and choose the best one. I have never ever made a trailer ... yet.

Jort Driegen6 years ago

Thanks!

WarpZone6 years ago

One thing I can tell you from personal experience: Don't just record gameplay! It doesn't work. Instead, look at trailers for successful games (Indie and AAA) and copy what they do!

Jort Driegen6 years ago

Thank you!!

metalsnail5 years ago (1 edit)

I'd like to put in a good word for Shotcut. (It's also good for making gameplay gifs, though you will need separate screen capture software)

I think that while WarpZone's advice mostly holds, that your trailer could be mostly gameplay footage, but probably in clips of no more than three seconds, showing off important gameplay features or particularly pretty scenes. Then intercut that with some text on a black background. You can get a lot of milage out of that.

I use OBS to capture gameplay, it's fiddly, but has the good features and plays nice with my hardware.

And if you want some free music for your trailer, CCMixter has a huge collection of it.

Green Frisbee Games5 years ago

Shotcut is good to start but you should move on to something more professionnal as soon as you have the chance IMO. The many problems I had are:

Blur lagging so much I had to export the entire video to see how it looks like
Font border gets ugly for more than 5 px
Audio desync present in the video preview of the software but not in the export
Impossible to move groups of clips, so you need to export parts of the video to be able to move it as one block
Various crashes, although the recover feature is nice

Here's the result, if you are wondering:

I got a lot of inspiration from https://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-make-an-indie-game-trailer... I hope it shows in my trailer! Overall shotcut can do nice things but at some point you need to switch. I'm not sure what I should switch to!