How This Year’s Most Exciting Video Game Trailer Came to Be

Over 100 games were shown off at this year’s Summer Game Fest. In a matter of days, major publishers like Microsoft showcased flashy games and trailers, while indie developers showed off solo projects and everything in between. It’s not easy to stand out in that crowd, even if you have a ton of resources to make a trailer. What’s an independent studio to do with all the limitations that come with it? Because Invincible For developer D-Cell, this meant he had to act strategically.

“There are two things about how your trailer sits in the showcase that are impossible to determine before the showcase: what game is playing immediately before yours, and how people react to that,” Invincible co-director Andrew Tsai told Polygon. “We had to make sure we were giving ourselves a level playing field regardless of what the games were that came before it, which led us to implement islands into the trailer — what we internally called ‘sit down and shut up’ moments.”

Tsai gave an example: what if the trailer for a long-awaited, almost mythologized game like Hollow Knight: Silk Song Right before your game trailer premieres? You can bet that hype will carry over into the clips for the next game. “You have to make them realize that something’s happening, and then, right when they’re like, ‘Oh, wait, hey, there’s something on the screen that looks interesting,’ you turn the volume up to 11 and everyone, well, sits down and shuts up,” Tsai said.

And that is exactly what the Invincible trailer did. It starts off slow and soft, a literal and figurative petal in the wind. Co director RJ Lake told Polygon that a goal was to make the trailer boring to begin with — despite the fact that the game is anything but boring. The rhythm game is set in a world where music is illegal… and “you commit crimes,” according to the developer.

“It’s kind of Skinarink thing, where that movie is intentionally boring as bricks at the beginning, which forces you to pay attention to everything because it makes even the small moments of EVERYTHING that’s happening feel big, which means when you give people something that’s REALLY big, that feels really cool, it hits that much harder,” Lake said. “And in the context of ‘everyone throws the coolest thing ever at you,’ the only way to force a total reset of your brain is to become silent.”

Then the Invincible trailer cuts to an alarm beeping and the music starts; a woman with pink hair is singing into a microphone. There are a few places in the song where you think the beat power drop and the action will begin, but it doesn’t — until it does. The music stops and the fighting begins: The band members start a big fight with a police officer.

“We still very deliberately kept the island so that the starting point of the ‘action’ was obscured multiple times by different parts of things that were going on (and) building up over time,” Lake said. “You have a cold open, then you have the logo cards, then you have the singing, and at that point you’ve hopefully stopped thinking about whatever you were thinking about and your only question is ‘what the hell am I looking at,’ and by the time you ask that question, that’s about the time that Beat gets thrown to the ground and the action beats finally start. When you do all that, everything feels different in a way that it absolutely can’t if you just, say, start with the doubletime portion of the song.”

D-Cell started thinking about the trailer at least two years before the premiere – an experience Described in more detail in a thread on X in June.The game was first revealed in 2021 when a Kickstarter campaign was launched; It raised $267,402 And a demo published.) Various other D-Cell developers X threads created to discuss the processas did composer and sound designer Vas, who told Polygon that it was a cathartic experience to finally be able to talk about the trailer and how much care went into it. “You can’t break the game too hard or you’ll ruin it for everyone, but not being able to talk about *anything* can feel really isolating,” he said.

Such a process — devoting so much time and effort to a trailer — isn’t standard in the video game industry, several D-Cell developers said. But it’s a core part of Invincible‘s development.

“So going from the boards to the final state is a big deal because we’re not just making an animated trailer; that’s all part of the equation, which means we’re actually building stuff (within the game) on the side,” Lake said. “The actual shots that we used changed so, so quickly while that trailer was being built, just due to the nature of game development and some things were done earlier or later than we expected, so getting gameplay capture in becomes a constant series of boards spinning to figure out exactly what those shots are.”

It’s a lot of work, but it’s essential to not only aligning the vision for the trailer, but also setting the tone for the game. “And when you have[the game voice]as a lock, it really helps you focus on what’s important in making it,” co-producer Jeffrey Chiao told Polygon. “Of course, at the end of the day, it’s important to know how to speak for the game and how the game needs to speak for itself to stand out from the crowd. Our trailer was specifically about cementing that voice for anyone who’s paying attention.”

Everything in the trailer is taken directly from the game, which helped justify the amount of work that went into making the trailer, as well as the hype it would create. “If we were to do something that looked like a ‘cinematic trailer,’ there was no way it would fit into our production schedule,” Tsai said.

Well, except for one thing: Remember that tree from the beginning? Richard Gung, a programmer and VFX artist at InvincibleD-Cell, Jr. told Polygon that the pink tree was created specifically for the trailer from the start — “a hilarious last-minute team effort.” Tsai quickly drew the tree after “scrambling around on (a) voice call,” and Gung animated the tree so it looked like it was gently blowing in the wind: “The cut is so fast you can’t even see it,” Gung said. Tsai said D-Cell made changes to shots, timing and music “right up until the day of submission.”

Invincible‘s marketing has worked so far. Lake said the game is publisher Playstack’s most wishlisted game; it also set a record for the publisher with its day-one wishlist numbers. There are also a lot of PlayStation users who have the game on their wishlists, he said.

“But all of that distracts from the real answer to the core issue, which is what’s important to us,” Lake said, “because it was important to show something that we’re making and show everyone what it could be and what the vision of it is in a super clear way.”

He continued: “That’s almost impossible to do with text when it’s trying to convey a feeling and a vision that you can’t really put into words, but hopefully it’s something that’s easy to understand despite that. And the cold business marketing part of it will hopefully just come naturally because people see that and respond to it. But I want that to happen because people are really, really excited about the thing.”