You might want to watch the trailer first
Follow a lost soul as they try everything in their power to escape an endless cycle of death.
Blog posts that just exist to promote a trailer or drop a key date are boring... So I turned it into a marketing devblog :).
That said, they are necessary, because dates matter. So let's get that part out of the way right now:
JULY 15TH - SAVE THE DATE (AND TIME, AND MONEY). THAT’S OUR RELEASE.
Now, that this is out of the way, I wanted to give you more info on how trailers like this one come together - creatively and technically.
STEP 1 : Do we REALLY need to create a trailer?
Creating a trailer is quite expensive resource-wise, so we can’t do them just because they’re cool to watch. Although they are cool to do and to watch!
With our release date and Steam Next Fest approaching, we knew we needed a fresh trailer to show how the game has improved since our announcement more than a year ago.
Then we needed to find the right placement for it, that’s AG French Direct and that’s the best way to reach beyond our followers.
So yes, we needed a trailer. And this is the one. :)
STEP 2: Finding the RIGHT concept
The first question I asked myself is: What do I want players to remember and how do I show it?
For Lost in Prayer that meant showing our hook “Play as your killer” and the genre “tactical, turn-based, grid-based”.
The genre is easy to convey visually, we just show the game. But the hook needed some real thinking.
The challenge was finding a concept that meshes the game's hook with its lore and story. We didn’t want to go full story-trailer mode, because the story of Lost in Prayer isn’t ready to be told yet. That’ll come closer to 1.0. (Plus, I’ve always believed that no one's going to believe you if you tell them you have a great story. It can only be experienced in-game.)
The first concept we got was a character-based trailer with title cards introducing our hero characters, like the ones in Borderlands trailers. But since our characters support multiple playstyles, giving them distinct "personalities" didn’t make sense.
So we refocused on a more universal feeling, the conflicting emotions you can experience in our game, the mix of overconfidence, greed and temptation you get while playing Lost in Prayer.
That’s how we landed on the idea of connecting in-game sins with gamer behavior.
Being greedy in a video game? Everyone’s done that. It’s a near-universal feeling.
Plus, we could directly talk to you with a diegetical voice-over that made sense in our lore. I really wanted a VO. It achieves so much more than title cards to understand the hook while immersing you in the game.
We thought about showcasing Virtues but ditched it pretty fast. We couldn't find a clever way to portray them. No-one ever died from being too kind... But I’d love to hear if you have a clever take about it, just put it in the comments.
Finally, at the end of the concept phase, I had a complete document with each scene mapped out and early versions of the voiceover text — enough to start collecting gameplay clips and refining the tone. Here is an example although it’s quite advanced with early gameplay shots.
STEP 3: Choosing the PERFECT music
Finding the right music for the trailer is the first step before we can record gameplay.
Once we’ve got it locked, we build the montage with blackscreen placeholders with our target timing per scenes.
Great soundtracks are one of our design pillar at Nine Dots games and Jason, our composer, nailed the soul (pun intended) of the game so it was easy to pick one.
We had a lot of variety to choose from: from calm orchestral themes for Heaven to high-octane electric guitars in Hell.
For this trailer, we went with something rhythmic, perfect for a sharp edit and speeding up turn-based gameplay.
The title is Infernal Judgment and it's available on Spotify and Youtube if you want to listen to it everywhere! (That's my mandatory marketing push, sorry).
Step 4 : Recording the VO - BAGUETTE-FRENCH OR POUTINE-FRENCH?
Since the trailer premiered at AG French Direct, a French-speaking studio-focused event, we dubbed the trailer in French..
Here’s the twist: I’m French, and Nine Dots is a proudly Québécois studio (that’s French Canadian). We share the same roots, but our French sides diverged after England took over Québec in 1763 and France had its revolution. A fascinating story I recommend diving into.
We briefly discussed if we should go for a Parisian French to make it more international. But we went for our Québécois identity.
That being said, during recording, Guillaume and I discussed whether it would be understandable enough for my fellow Frenchman (whom I now refer to as “French-Baguette”).
Step 5: Finding TRICKS to get the BEST gameplay capture
Now comes the most technical, and also the most mind-blowing part: capturing gameplay that looks great and shows what we call “intricate gameplay”. That means showing gameplay moments that don’t just show ‘what happens when you press a button’, but show a cool tactical situation that you've created.
We've put a lot of effort into creating all those death scenes for example. We sat down, did little sketches on a paper, thought about the best creatures and skills to use and then the real work started.
We had to get creative: slowing down characters so they would act last, adding invisible walls to keep them in place, or tweaking the Bishop’s behavior so he wouldn’t attack his minion. Lots of tricks we came up with the full development team.
Finally, creating a specific situation in an RNG-driven game is impossible. But, we’ve got our own “marketing” playground. A dedicated scene in Unity where we can place characters, create rooms the way we want and shoot gameplay in any camera angle we want. It’s automatically updated with the latest build the team is working on, so we’re always up to date.
Special shout-out to Alexis, our capture artist, for his first trailer at Nine Dots. He did a fantastic job.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this little deep dive, I’m always happy to answer more questions, so just drop them below or hit us up on our Discord
Matthieu