Railgrade — Game Trailer

Briefing

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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 an isometric or bird eye view, with limited camera controls and almost all of the features are driven by UI-heavy commands. Everything is done through hotkeys 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 set up 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 are a million ways to do this and achieve the same goal in many of these games.