Trailer Thrashing

When Steam Greenlight came online back in 2012, we decided we wanted Powargrid on there, mostly to see what kind of feedback we would get. We already had our website with the playable alpha, we could easily take some screenshots and it wasn't that hard to write something about Powargrid. So we figured we basically had everything we needed. Except for a trailer. And since we din't want our Greenlight page to go live without a trailer, I set out to make one from scratch. I succeeded, and we were very happy with the end result. We had everything we needed, so we put up our Greenlight page (you can find it here, if you want to give us a thumbs up).

This was the result of my efforts back then:

But that trailer is a year and a half old now. Which means it's pretty dated. Powargrid looks better, feels better and runs smoother than it did back then, so it was about time to replace it with something new. I set out to remake the trailer with new video material, while keeping the basic setup the same, since we still like that. The music (by Wrathgame Studios) is great and the switches between different video fragments are fitted to it. It was just a case of recording some new videos with the new Powargrid looks. Shouldn't take that long, should it?

Well, I was wrong. I'd forgotten that recording a piece of video I'm really happy with takes time. From the small and silly things like forgetting to move my cursor off screen after clicking 'end turn' all the way up to the aesthetics of the structures you see on the game grid (by the player and the AI). That second example means looking at the game in a totally different way than what I'm used to. When all was said and done, each video fragment had taken me at least three tries to achieve the quality I was aiming for.

After the video portion was taken care of, I still needed to take a look at the text fragments. While I still like the 'Recruit 429841' joke from the first version, put in at the time because Powargrid hadn't been reviewed yet, we now have actual quotes we could use. Especially useful was a Twitter conversation with Alpha Beta Gamer, from which we could take 'A great new take on the turn based strategy genre'. This quote does triple duty; first and foremost by being a positive comment on our game. Second, it makes explicit that Powargrid is a turn based strategy game. This is too obvious to outright mention in the trailer, but having this quote makes sure that there is no question about it. Third, it indicates that Powargrid does something different from other turn-based strategy games, which we think is one of the strengths of our game but also is something we would hesitate to put in the trailer ourselves. Needless to say, we are enormously happy with what Alpha Beta Gamer has written about Powargrid :D.

After discussing the video fragments and texts with Michiel, I made the final tweaks this week and uploaded the trailer to Youtube. We loved the frame Youtube suggested for the video, so we used that :).

We hope you like the new Powargrid trailer:

- Willem -