How the most exciting trailer of the year – Unbeatable – was made

Over 100 games were showcased at this year’s Summer Game Fest. In just a few days, major publishers like Microsoft showed off flashy games and trailers alongside indie developers showcasing solo projects and everything in between. It’s not easy to stand out in that kind of crowd, even when you have tons of resources to create a trailer. What’s an indie studio to do with all the limitations that come with it? Unbeatable For developer D-Cell, that meant being strategic.

“There are two things about how your trailer presents in the showcase that are impossible to determine until the showcase happens: what game is playing immediately before yours, and how people react to it.” Unbeatable Co-director Andrew Tsai told Polygon: “We had to make sure that we could give ourselves a level playing field, regardless of previous games, which led us to incorporating islands into the trailer, what we internally called sit-down, shut-up moments.”

Tsai gave an example: What would happen if the trailer for a highly anticipated, almost mythologized game like Hollow Knight: Silk Song You released your first game trailer just before? You can bet that the hype will carry over to the next game’s clips. “You have to make them understand that something’s going on, and just when they’re like, ‘Oh, wait, hey, there’s something on the screen that looks interesting,’ you turn the volume up to eleven and everybody, well, sits down and shuts up,” Tsai said.

And that’s exactly what the Unbeatable The trailer started slowly and gently, like a petal in the wind, both literally and figuratively. VSCo-director RJ Lake told Polygon that the goal was to make the trailer seem boring at first, even though the game isn’t that way at all. The rhythm game is set in a world where music is illegal… and “you commit crimes,” according to the developer.

“It’s a bit like SkinaMink “It’s a thing where the movie is intentionally boring at the beginning, forcing you to pay attention to everything because it makes even the small moments of EVERYTHING that’s happening seem important, which means that if you then give people something REALLY important after that, that seems really cool, it hits a lot harder as a result,” Lake said. “And in the context of ‘everyone is throwing the coolest thing in the world at you,’ the only way to force a total brain reset is to shut up.”

Then the Unbeatable The trailer cuts to an alarm going off and the music starts; a pink-haired woman sings into a microphone. There are a few moments as the song builds where you think the beat could Let it go and the action starts, but it doesn’t – until it does. The music drops and the fighting begins: the band members start a big brawl with a cop.

“We intentionally kept the island with the starting point of the action that’s obscured multiple times by different sections of things that are happening (and) building over time,” Lake said. “You have a cold open, and then you have the logo cards, and then you have the vocals, and at that point, hopefully, you’ve stopped thinking about what you were thinking about and your only question is, ‘What am I looking at?’ And by the time you ask that question, it’s pretty much the moment where Beat gets thrown to the ground and the action beats finally kick in. Doing all that gives everything else a sense of magnitude that absolutely can’t be achieved if you just start with, say, the double-time portion of the song.”

D-Cell began brainstorming the trailer at least two years before its release, an experience Lake detailed in a thread on X in June. (The game was first revealed in 2021 when it launched a Kickstarter campaign; it raised $267,402 and released a demo.) Several other D-Cell developers have also created threads on X to discuss the process, like composer and sound designer Vas, who told Polygon that it was cathartic to finally be able to talk about the trailer and the care that went into it. “You can’t break the seam too hard with the game or you end up ruining it for everyone, but not being able to talk about *anything* can be very isolating,” he said.

Such a process — spending so much time and effort on a trailer — isn’t the norm in the video game industry, several D-Cell developers said. But it’s a critical element. UnbeatableThe development of.

“Going from the boards to the final result is a very complex process because we’re not just creating an animated trailer; it’s all part of the project, meaning we’re creating assets (within the game) in parallel,” Lake said. “The live-action footage we used changed very quickly during the creation of this trailer, just because of the nature of game development and things being ready earlier or later than expected. So integrating gameplay capture becomes a constant game of spinning to figure out exactly what those shots are.”

It’s a lot of work, but it’s essential not only to align the vision of the trailer, but also to set the tone for the game. “And if you have[the game’s voice]as a lock, it really helps you hone in on what matters when you’re creating,” co-producer Jeffrey Chiao told Polygon. “Of course, knowing how to speak for the game, and how the game should speak for itself, is ultimately essential to standing out in a crowd — our trailer was meant to solidify that voice for anyone who’s paying attention.”

Everything in the trailer is taken directly from the game, which justifies the amount of work that went into making it, beyond just the hype it would generate. “If we had done something that was akin to a ‘cinematic trailer,’ none of that would have fit into our production schedule,” Tsai said.

Well, except for one thing: remember that tree from the beginning? Richard Gung, programmer and VFX artist on Unbeatabletold Polygon that the pink tree at the beginning was created specifically for the trailer — “a hilarious last-minute team effort.” Tsai quickly drew the tree after “scrambling through[a]voice call,” and Gung animated the tree to make it look like it was gently blowing in the wind: “The editing is so fast, you can’t even tell,” Gung said. Tsai said D-Cell was making changes to shots, timing, and music “right up until the day of submission.”

Image: D-Cell Games

UnbeatableThe marketing has proven effective so far. Lake said the game is the most wished-for game ever by publisher Playstack; it also set a record for the publisher with its first-day wish list. There are also a bunch of PlayStation users who have added the game to their wishlist, he said.

“But all of that takes us away from the real answer to the heart of the problem, which is actually what’s important to us,” Lake said, “because it was important to get something that really crystallizes what we’re creating in the world and shows everybody what that could be and what the vision is in a very clear way.”

He continued, “It’s almost impossible to do with text when you’re trying to convey a feeling and a vision that’s not really something you can express in words, but is hopefully easy to understand nonetheless. And the cold sales marketing part after the fact comes naturally, hopefully, from people seeing this and responding to it. But I want that to happen because people are really, really excited about this project.”