I'm making a trailer for Ducky's Delivery Service!

The plan for a trailer

I want to do something a bit like Chessplosion's trailer: begin with a quick gameplay clip to catch people's attention, explain the basic rules of the game, and show off the main features using more gameplay clips, with the occasional bit of text to explain what's happening. The outline of the Chessplosion trailer was:

• Intro gameplay clip using chess piece bombs to fight a boss while avoiding its attacks
• "Drop Chess Piece Bombs" text, followed by clips of the chess piece bombs exploding so people understand how the game works
• Single player dungeon mode and survival mode gameplay
• "Solve Puzzles" text, with puzzle mode gameplay
• "Local and Online Multiplayer (with rollback netcode)" text, with gameplay of a 2 player battle, a tennis battle, and a 4 player free-for-all battle
• The game's name, logo, and promo art

My goal is for the Ducky's Delivery Service trailer to instantly let people know it's a fast arcadey game, and to also let them know the story elements (you're a duck who has started a delivery business and you sometimes get to fulfil other ducks' requests), and that the goal of the game is to master the tricky flight physics. Here's my current outline:

• Intro gameplay clip of fast, arcadey gameplay, showing the player getting points for throwing a present into a mailbox
• "Propeller-Powered Duck Delivery Action" text, with arcadey gameplay (including delivering flyers)
• "Grow Your Delivery Business" text, with timelapse clips of your mail center growing larger and attracting a larger crowd
• Special delivery requests (e.g. you see a duck ask you to deliver a love letter, then a gameplay clip of you avoiding hazards while carrying the love letter, then you see the other duck receiving the love letter). Possibly with some text that says "Help Out Other Ducks" or something similar, if it needs text
• Gameplay of difficult late-game areas, possibly with some text if I can figure out a snappy catchy way of saying "Master The Weird Flight Physics Of Your Propeller Backpack" in a few words.
• The game's name, logo, and promo art

So with that plan in mind, I recorded some gameplay clips and started editing a trailer.

Making the trailer

Now that I had an outline, I decided exactly which gameplay clips to record. I mostly just tried to show a variety of environments (beach, cave, volcano etc) and hazards (seagulls, stalactites, ghosts etc), and tried to make sure that I went back and forth between environments as much as possible instead of showing the same environment several times in a row.

I first recorded all of the gameplay clips as in-engine replays, in case I want to reuse the same gameplay clips with later versions of the game. For example, I might want to re-record these clips for a later trailer after I add sound effects to the game, or I might want to re-record them in another language if I get the game translated. Here's what my list of replays looked like in my in-game editor:
I then recorded videos of all of these clips and threw them into some old video editing software that I bought years ago:
For the text in the trailer, I created it using the same image editing software that I used for the game's logo, which usually looks better than directly using the text feature built into the video editing software:
I worry that this text might look a little Comic Sans-y when it's the first text someone sees in a trailer, but hopefully it's fine. I'll see how I feel about it once the trailer is done.

At that point I threw together a rough first draft of a trailer (with no music) and immediately wanted to make lots of changes. Some of the sections were too boring and slow, and my attempt at using blurred gameplay footage as the background of the text sections looked awful:
So I cut the boring parts out of the slow sections, and put all of the trailer's text directly over the top of the relevant gameplay clips instead of having a separate background just for text:
So at this point, the trailer is mostly done. I have to do more medical stuff tomorrow (it never ends!!!) but once that's out of the way, I'm going to get back to working on music. I would still like to announce the game in the next couple of weeks, so let's see how much work I can get done in time for the next newsletter!