If you take a look at any mainstream AAA release, like the recently released Total War: Warhammer III, you’ll see dozens of videos from trailers to unit profiles to mechanics overviews. While indie games can’t replicate all of those videos without a AAA budget and staff, we can take the hint: videos can be more than just trailers and there’s value in creating video content for your game’s marketing outside of traditional trailers. This is a guide to creating indie game marketing video content.

Welcome to the Diving Deep series, a short series of blogs breaking down one way to approach video content for the release of your indie game. As Community Manager for Akupara Games, I’ve been producing video content as part of our marketing campaigns for years. Today, I want to break down the pre-production process that I go through when I’m preparing to make a video for an upcoming indie game.

The Campaign Outline

This is the highest level view of the video making process and the first step I always take when looking to make deep dive videos as part of a marketing campaign. In general, this is actually part of an even bigger process, where I’m thinking about every initiative that I’m running for an individual campaign but, for the sake of brevity, I’m just going to focus in on my planning for the videos themselves.

The Outline includes every video in a series with just a sentence or two explaining the core concept of what the video will cover. The point here is to explain to everyone on your team: “Listen, this is the fundamental point of these videos I’m looking to produce. Here’s what the videos are going to cover and why I think it’s important I make them before launch.”

To peel back the curtain a little bit, this is what I wrote for my campaign outline for the Buddy Gets Rich series of videos I made for Kardboard Kings:

• The first Buddy’s Get Rich Quick Scheme video, which will focus on the game’s most simple, core mechanics such as how to read a card’s statistics, how to buy cards, and how to list cards for sale
• The second Buddy’s Get Rich Quick Scheme video, which will focus on the game’s intermediate mechanics such as how to manage reputation, fulfill card requests that come in through phone, pay attention to Warlock news, and use tags and stickers to influence customers.
• The third Buddy’s Get Rich Quick Scheme video, which will focus on the game’s tertiary mechanics such as how to fill out weekly shop rewards, set up booster drafts and tournaments, deal with common customers coming to the store, and finalize card collections in the binder.

It’s one sentence with a little list of all the things I’m looking to cover in each of those videos. This was my starting point. And, by the way, if you want to compare those outlines to the videos themselves, feel free to give the final product a watch. Obviously, the final five minute video is going to include a ton of odds and ends that aren’t in that outline, but the core structure of it was defined when I wrote it as an outline. This is why it’s the first step in pre-production.

The Script

Once I have my outlines squared away, I begin working on the video scripts themselves. If the outline is the backbone of any individual video’s structure, the script fills out the rest of that skeleton. It’s going to be where you get to plunge into the details and really get to the bottom of whatever you’re trying to explain. If you’re breaking down the abilities of a character, running through the function of a certain mechanic, or just explaining some basic terminology that your game relies on, the genesis of that will come from the script.

To break the script down even further, I separate my script into “spots” or small collections of sentences that encompass a particular idea. If the video is a movie, each individual spot is like a scene. And spots have two purposes. First, they keep the pace of your script up. It’s a real danger when writing a script, especially when writing about intricate and complicated mechanics, that your fun breezy video turns into a droning lecture. By limiting your spots to just a few sentences, you force yourself to pare down any extraneous fluff. This mechanic might be complicated but you only have thirty seconds to explain it, so focus on what matters most. Secondly, spots help organize your video into bite-sized, digestible chunks. An unstructured ramble isn’t likely to break up the content of your video into nuggets of information that a member of the audience can easily parse. Breaking up your script helps someone watching and listening to you internalize the information they’re being presented.

Your script should have an authentic, colloquial tone, especially if the video is going up on Youtube where that kind of casual demeanor is expected by players. Which means that your script should be written to be read aloud. As you finish writing any individual spot, read it back to yourself to make sure the sentences flow together in a way that vocalizes naturally. Try and find a cadence that works not just for delivering the information but also for keeping an upbeat, high energy flow.

Recording Voiceover

This is the moment where your video starts to truly take shape.

Technically speaking, recording voiceover comes after writing a script but in practice I tend to do them side by side. The moment I finish writing a spot, I immediately read it back to myself to make sure I like the way it sounds being read aloud. Commonly, I’ll record that process just to make sure I’m capturing not just how the words sound but also how they sound filtered through the recording process. Where am I breathing as I read a spot? Can I edit that breathing out of the recording without it feeling disjointed and strange? Sounds with the letter “P” tend to pop in recording, so am I properly avoiding words (like properly) that are overloaded with that sound which might degrade the audio quality?

And while the above process plays out alongside the scriptwriting phase, at a certain point, I’m going to need to commit to recording voiceover. This is where the utility of breaking the script into spots really comes in. Each spot should be recorded as a unique chunk of audio from beginning to end. While it’s possible to record the entire script end to end without making any mistakes, it’s likely that, as you record, you’ll say the wrong thing, pause a little too long, or mix up words. Breaking the recording process into spots helps you focus on getting a good take thirty seconds at a time rather than trying to get everything in a five minute video correct end to end. Recording like this also has a subtle side effect, since your voiceover will adopt a natural introductory and concluding cadence. As you begin reading a spot aloud, your voice will naturally begin speaking about it as a new idea. As you finish reading a spot aloud, your voice will naturally conclude the idea. This will make sure each spot is a complete idea from end to end, beginning and conclusion naturally on its own before moving onto the next discreet chunk of information you’re looking to deliver.

On the technical side of things, try and record with the highest quality microphone you can, try and avoid recording in loud locations, try and eliminate background noise as much as possible and try to speak directly and clearly into the microphone itself, avoiding any verbal tics like “um” and “ugh.” I use Audacity as an audio editing program, which has all the technical specifications you’ll need for editing voiceover, and I’d recommend using an audio editing program to cut out any silences or obnoxious sounds that might get in the way of your voiceover. You may want to get rid of the sound of breathing if you really want the video to be clear of any of those distractions (though, I tend to find the pause and sound of breathing to be helpful to the flow of voiceover.)

Make sure you include opportunities for ad libbing and improvisation in your voiceover. If a particular line is leaving you tongue-tied, it can be endearing to leave small mistakes like that in the final product, especially if you can fire off a quick, witty joke that adds a little humor to the video overall. I will sometimes write jokes directly into my scripts, but more often find them in the voiceover recording process.

In Conclusion

Once you’ve finished recording each of your spots, you’re ready to move to the next part of the production process of making the video. Next time, I’ll dig into the weeds on how I approach creating a shotlist, capturing footage, and editing the video together. If you’d like to check out my last blog on indie game marketing videos, feel free to click here.

If you have any questions or comments about this blog, please feel free to come chat with me on the Akupara Games Discord! You can also see some of the videos I’ve cut for our YouTube channel here. Thanks for reading!