Insider Trading
I’ve had the pleasure of knowing the amazingly talented team an Indie Pups for awhile now, so when the chance to collaborate on a project we were all so enthusiastic about came up, we were all pretty excited.
It is rare treat to get to take a trailer from some simple scribblings in my notebook to a fully finished piece. I can’t say thank you enough to the team for placing the trust in me to handle the writing, capturing, editing, mixing, and motion graphics. Needless to say, this project felt like hitting the jackpot.
More than a Trailer
A key point that I wanted to make sure we nailed with the Insider Trading trailer is that it worked on multiple levels. Of course it should work as a big, bright beacon signaling towards its core audience, but we also wanted to ensure that it also functioned as a tutorial for how to play the game. As highlighted in Derek Lieu’s excellent “How to Make a Video Game Trailer” course, we strove to highlight three major things to drive these points home: Genre, Hook, and Content.
Genre
Insider Trading at its core is a Rogue-Like Deck Builder. For the hardcore fans of that style of game, sometimes just knowing that a game is similar to another game you already like can be enough to put some eyeballs on it. We wanted to make sure that the fundamental gameplay loop was presented clearly to potential players before we started layering on all the ways it differed. A viewer is much less inclined to care about how your horror film subverts the horror film genre if watching scary movies is a no-go from the top.
Hook
After telling players how Insider Trading is similar to something they already like, we wanted to immediately follow up with what sets it apart. As someone with dozens of hours in Balatro, a very popular game in the Rogue-Like Deck Building Genre, I know I am already predisposed to liking
Insider Trading. But why should I play something new vs staying with what I already know I like?
By highlighting the uniqueness of Insider Trading’s core gameplay loop, stock price balancing, in conjunction with ingrained player knowledge about a genre, we open up a door for imagination. We take what a player already knows and layer on fun riffs that create exciting, engaging, and wholly
new experiences. This game is something that is both new AND familiar.
Content
Now that we had taken the time to lay the groundwork of what Insider Trading was, we wanted to showcase a huge swathe of exciting in-game moments. New sets of cards, multiple playable characters, and combos on combos ON COMBOS! All building up in a feverish cacophony of sound effects, swelling music, and overall visual overload. As an editor, there is such a big temptation to show off all of your coolest shots right at the top and really blow away the audience with how diverse of an experience you have on your hands. But I believe that since we took that beat to establish Hook and Genre up top, by the time we were ready to hammer home how much content we have available, we had crafted a welcoming space for new and familiar players to the genre to get invested in trailer without being overwhelmed by all the systems they don’t yet have a full grasp on just yet.
From Market Open to Market Close, this has been such a fun project, especially getting to work with such a talented, creative, and inspiring Developer and Marketing team. I could not be more proud of the finished project! Now, if you need me, I’ve got some stocks that need to be moved by the end of the day, and those calls aren’t gonna make themselves.
