They don’t know that they are going to love this kind of game cause they have never played one. Now that leaves you with a problem in that some people don’t know they are your core players. You want to make sure you’re speaking your core player’s love language. This is really hard for this genre but it’s a universal rule for any kind of game trailer. This is, like I said all associations, applications and just not overtly stating how things work. Those moments when you saw the waterfall, which is actually a sand fall and transitioning to another sandfall, the exchange between the two planets… Those kinds of associations implicatively establish what your game is trying to do. So I had to try to make it associative so you might feel like you are solving the puzzles but you are really just seeing parts coming together. One of the key things that I found when I made a game trailer for this kind of game genre is we were a little too on the nose with explaining what you are doing, how the puzzles get solved. I am making trailers, I don’t know if I said that. Like I said, the biggest thing that you need to stay away from with this kind of game is spoilers, is any kind of solution provided to a puzzle. When you break down the genre definitions you can know what kind of game you are getting into. That’s the first key point: Break-down the genre definitions. You’re revealing what’s happening underneath the hood of the engine, which is kind of like if I were to give you the treasure from solving things on your own you would never be able to own that solution unto yourself. I can’t tell you what exactly you are doing because the moment that you do you are spoiling the experience. It’s this combination of puzzle game and first person walking.

It’s the genre that Cyan started with the first Myst game, developed with Ribbon and all of the sequels. Those are the genre definitions of the game, which still doesn’t fully tell you everything and the key is because you can’t. Number 2: it’s got some maybe sort of puzzle solving and it’s in a solar system, a hand crafted solar system. Number 1: it’s in first person perspective. You can tell a few things by watching the trailer. What are the genre definitions of this game? There is the key thing that you need to understand. I want to say so much about all of what is going on in this trailer but I am going to keep it focused on the genre. So today we’re going to talk about Outer Wilds and Is it my Genre?

That is, I don’t know, I guess the challenge of it is, “It’s so hard to talk about!” You can show things you just can’t show everything. I’m not going to spoil the game but I will help you to understand why it’s so hard to make a game trailer that has these kinds of problems….

That’s the thing you don’t have to worry about in this video. I feel like I fully understand what genre the game is and could tell you if it weren’t for the fact that there would be spoilers.

So that’s why I want to talk about that one today, especially after I have played through the whole game. It becomes especially tricky to figure this out when you have a game like Outer Wilds. We kind of have to figure out pretty quickly if this is going to be our thing. Is it my genre? This is the question that we ask every time that we open up any game trailer or any trailer but especially indie game trailers where genre isn’t always very clear.

Outer wilds trailer