When we got asked to be part of the Playdate Update, I took a crash course in trailer design by watching a bunch of Derek Lieu trailer talks. Almost 5 hours in total. I made a Youtube playlist should you wanna see what watched.

After taking that all in, I got left with some questions

• What style of trailer should we have?
• Which questions will we need to answer?
• How will we show off the game?

This learning process also got me thinking about something else: how we talk about the game.

What makes Comet different from other games?

That was a useful guiding light that helped us craft the trailer, and I'm really proud of the result.

All up, it took 2 weeks to make this trailer and it really only happened because I had help from the team and friends.

But things didn't start this good.

They say that the best way to make something good is to first make something bad.

So I made the point to rush out a draft trailer within the first day or two so we could identify all the pain points and iterate on it.

Here's that first bad cut.

It's got

• No sound effects (We had SFX but they weren't in the game at this point)
• Temp music
• Temp footage
• Flat feeling opening scene

Let me give you the quick rundown of all of our changes, to show how we got to our final trailer.

V2: We tightened up the editing & added a more connected set of dialog scenes

V3: ...Then we removed the dialog scenes because they weren't working well.
We added temp SFX, Xmenekai started working on updates to the first scene, and Drew made a custom transition for the scene with Stella and Mars on the cliff in the middle of the trailer.

V4: Final cutscenes and final SFX. More scene testing with temp footage. At this point, Discord mod choosh jumped in to make a temp score so we could iterate on that.

Around this time, I made a shot list so once the SFX were in-game, it would be easy to make to capture final footage. This also helped me plan out Stella's movements to make the shots flow together.

V5: Now we had final gameplay footage with SFX, and all the shots blended together really well. I added a bit of blur to the panning intro shot to sell the whip effect. Music was still in draft. I didn't want choosh to waste his time until the edit was locked.

V6: Lots of little tweaks, locked edit, final music.

V7: was the good trailer you saw above. Some minor edits within the shots, and I changed the black colour across the trailer to a more blue-black. Just a little something to make it stand out. (It fact, it's the background colour of this itch page)

One thing I learned from all of this is how bad I am at giving feedback on music. I'm often quite good at feedback on design, visuals and even a bit of writing. But with music, I just didn't have the language. So it was great to have Will onboard to shore up that weakness.

And that's how we made our trailer.

If you missed our last devlog, go check it out, there's a lot cool stuff in it.

And if you haven't already, go wishlist Comet on Catalog!