Railgrade - Announce Trailer

Behind The Scenes
//

When making trailers for strategy and management simulation games, there's a fine line to tread balancing the edit with trailer friendly 'eye candy', and getting granular with the player agency features. These games typically are very UI heavy, and very hard to capture and edit. Often you're fixed on a isometric or birds eye view, with limited camera controls, and almost all of the features are driven by UI heavy commands. Everything is done through hot keys or the cursor.

Finding a way to present these features without exactly showing us moving through menus is key. No one has time to read numbers and learn the game in a game trailer. You usually have only a few seconds to grab someone's attention, and these games are usually played slowly, with a lot of macro orientated decisions so there's no time to setup this in a trailer.

As with many other trailer types, we look to evoking how these choices and interactions make you 'feel', as a player, and find ways to show that, rather than complex chain commands and gritty number crunching. We focus on the overall 'systems' you can build as a player, not how to build them. After all, there's a million ways to do this, and to achieve the same goal in many of these games.

Railgrade's custom camera controls gave us a lot more freedom in presenting these ideas. We could showcase the easy building systems that the game supports. This allowed us to get claustraphobic with the low depth of field close ups, or get a sense of scale and chaos in the ultra-wide birds eye view, which were feelings you'd encounter in playing the game through. Wondering how best to lay your tracks, balancing the short term needs against the long term gains; all while your mind's eye is imagining how this will impact your future plans! Will I need this space for something else?