A trailer is an obvious necessity prior to any game release but even more so for Indies who have to generate as much exposure as possible. Our first was a teaser edited by Graham as he simply couldn’t get the raw footage to me at the time, he cut it in Movie Maker which is not entirely recommended but given the constraints he did a very decent job. The teaser which was a touch slow, had limited titling and showed way too much of the menu screen but has to date had over 1100 views so Graham definitely did something right. Next up was the full release trailer for which I used FRAPS to capture footage and Adobe Premier Pro to slice and dice.

Graham's teaser trailer made in Movie Maker

OCD was not optimised for the PC so recording in FRAPS was problematic due to consistent freezing and frame rate drops. After many hours of my patience wearing thinner I had recorded the entirely of the first 6 stages and could get on with cutting the footage. I essentially dropped each stage in to order onto the timeline, chose a suitable music track and then chopped out anything I didn’t think would work well. After that is was a matter of pulling those pieces together and refining the cuts to match the music somewhat.

Steve's release trailer made in Premier Pro

I knew I wanted a quickly developing pace and we also devised the titling ‘No Zombies, No Ninjas, No Cats’ which is an Xbox live indie game in joke with those characters featuring rather prominently on the service. The full release trailer is now at almost 900 views which is great but I still did a few more bits; a Super Smith Bros XNA development trailer with previous tech demos and two Let’s Play vids each showing hardcore runs for three stages of OCD. The more relevant video content out there for our game the more prospective gamers are likely to see it, so this was very important marketing.