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May 23 Update (Patreon)

Published:
2021-05-23 22:35:06
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Please look at the partial OEA trailer! It took so much of my time, everybody needs to look at it. T-T Even hiring someone to make this, recording footage and coordinating was a lot more energy-consuming than I expected. The good news is that I tried to do everything, including for the parts of the trailer that aren't finished.

The trailer editor wants people to know that this is a quick example, not their best work. On the other hand, it is my best effort at a trailer design that balances sex scenes and other content. The idea is to tease a wide variety of content, moving fairly fast overall instead of lingering. The final trailer will have some sort of intro, then 15 second character sections in the order Ingrid > Ulfina > Wilhelm > Hood, then a full screen section teasing features/assets.

(If anyone feels they have marketing/trailer ideas, I'm still uncertain about what kind of intro would be best. Most trailers on Steam aren't played for very long, so the idea is to get some sex on the screen quickly for impulsive types. But I think it needs some kind of intro before transitioning into Ingrid's section.)

Hopefully this will be a trailer that entices many players to try the game. In addition to a stronger Steam page, I can use the final trailer for other promotion. Since this is my big test, I'm trying not to skimp on the elements I don't like. But ugggggh promotion. -_-

OEA Maps: Work has continued, but Patreon won't let me upload both video and images. Maybe I'll just leave them all for next week.

DStP: Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on the DStP build! We're working on making some final tweaks and then it will have a public demo on Friday. I wanted it to be this weekend, but that would have been too rushed.

I did other stuff this week, but there's nothing much to show you yet, so I suppose there's no point getting into detail. $10 backers, expect another art post soon!

Files

Once Ever After Trailer WIP

WIP for Patreon

Comments

Nathan Phoenix

I'm going to be brutally honest here. This is underwhelming. I don't know how much you want to give away but I would advise you to focus more on the story side. Your games always shine in the plot and characters, focusing on the nudity/battle sprites is a disservice to your vast talent as a writer. Keep a few unique sex scenes in but don't make that the focus. Go to Mangagamer.com and check the adult trailers. Most are just "here is girls, here is girl's boobs with a quote." The last thing we want is for you to get lost in the flood of mediocre hentai games.

androidK

i would agree it feels a little underwhelming. personally i didn’t think the windowed frame did that much for the video. i would say make sure the trailer reflects some of the themes and humor of the game. i would suspect the intro would be a book cover opening playing up the fable elements. if you plan on doing the windowed view there was a lot of empty space that needs to have something going on, if it’s feasible maybe have their sprites above the portrait with a “motto”. also the sound design should try and sync up to the clips. not sure if any of that helps, but whatever happens it needs to be more dynamic.

Dark Art

Sorry Sierra, but this is subpar at best. I get what you are trying to do, but you are severely underselling your work. This intro gives a feeling of cheap smut at best and while OEA is not exactly my cup of tea and I wouldnt rate it very high as games go (sorry, just being honest), I do have a better opinion of it than this. Now, I am not a marketing expert by any means, but if I would to make an intro for OEA I'd break in down into two sections - one focusing on the story of borderline retarded fuckdoll refusing to play the part and tries to become someone worthy of self-respect. Second part would be something like what you have now, but focused on the fact that there is an actual story for each of those NPCs.

sierralee

Brutal honesty is welcome, but here's the thing: that's what I was aiming for. I'll give my thought process, though others are welcome to disagree with me, and I could be convinced. Essentially, I'm skeptical about how well any trailer can differentiate OEA from all those hentai games. I'm also not sure that the people who would play for the plot would be convinced by any trailer. It's very difficult to communicate character in such a short period and plot can essentially only be promised. I've tried to emphasize the premise and other such elements in the Steam page overall, but I don't believe these are really selling points for the majority of gamers. You've noted how the trailers on Mangagamer go, and the problem is that those games always outsell me on those platforms. Someone could easily argue that by not betting on my story, I'm betting against my work as a whole. This may be true. It is essentially a bet that a large percentage of the people who would might actually play the game based on the trailer are people who wouldn't try it without immediate sex scenes.

Darthjake

Well, I liked it, I thought you could have lingered more on the combat and or maybe some of the social aspects, and flash the adult themes as teases, but all in all I think it was good. I especially liked the page turning for each scene.

sierralee

Several different thoughts there, thanks for sharing them. The windowed frame I could be convinced to give up, but my idea was for each character to have their own section before the full screen part. I'm not entirely sure what you mean regarding sprites and motto, other than filling empty space. I felt like having a fairly rapidly changing central area and also the blinks and other movements was enough visual density, but I could be wrong. Sound design is being done custom, but I am the wrong person to communicate anything regarding that.

sierralee

Thank you for giving feedback; see my response to Nathan Phoenix for some relevant responses. It may be possible to communicate the game's strongest points in a trailer, but I don't have an idea for doing so. An additional factor is that few Steam trailers are watched longer than ten seconds, and Valve staff advise against story trailers. So my first question was what a trailer can accomplish for the game, before what it should be.

sierralee

Thanks for giving feedback. Much of this discussion is based on the core goal of the trailer, but we'll take your thoughts into account too as we consider the balance.

Dark Art

Like I said, I dont know a first thing about Steam marketing, but I do question your approach here. Purely IMHO of course, but methinks this trailer would attract wrong people for wrong reasons, and chances are, they wouldnt bother with he game as it wouldnt be what they'd hope for (based on the ad). And your true target audience (as I understand it) would simply pass the title after seeing such a trailer. But then again, I dont know a first thing about Steam marketing :)

androidK

sorry, I sometimes focus on specifics rather than the idea, the clips themselves have stuff going on, but they don't help get a feel for the character. when hood section appears her portrait comes into view, we get her name and a little icon. it's moved over to the side and stays there while the clips play. the portrait doesn't really convey her personality and world weariness. one of the strongest things about your games are the characters and the story. I think there is a lot more opportunity to show off what makes the character unique with the static space that's more background.

sierralee

When I solicit feedback, I do mean that sincerely, so I may yet change direction. I will keep your thoughts in mind.

Dark Art

Oh I know and I quite sincerely respect that.

Grim8P

I watched this trailer a few times now. Here are my thoughts: - Around the 0:06 mark Ulfina attacks. The frame rate here looks terrible. I actually rewatched this on one of my 60Hz monitors to make sure it wasn't something wonky with one of my 144 Hz monitors. The fact that this happens so early in the trailer is almost certainly going to hurt. The rest of the combat didn't look as bad but still looked choppy to me. If you do nothing else, please fix this. (Is this a YouTube playback thing? Is it because Ulfina's attack is so fast?) - Including Hood's badass laser attack was a good idea IMO. - I see a lot of comments about how this trailer doesn't play to your strengths being writing related. I saw an explanation on one post about why you went this route and it makes sense. I might still suggest you try and get some dialogue in here though. Maybe some of your favourite lines from the game? Characters having a back and forth might be too much (you'd hope not but attention spans are a thing) but a single quote here or there should be fine. - I'm not sure if you need characters walking around or not although I think it is fine. I'd probably only include this if you were trying to pad the time. I assume this will be accompanied by screenshots of the game which people can use to verify that it is an RPGM game. - This might not make sense for what you're going for, and I'm not suggesting you scrap this and go with this idea or anything, but I thought I'd write out what I'd do if I was personally showing your game to someone else to get them interested in case that helps you generate ideas. Honestly, I'd just show them the first 30 seconds or so. I replayed the intro just to explain this properly, but if you literally captured after declining the tutorial to Ingrid reading the sign I feel like that's enough of a hook. You could even set it up for a few seconds before hand that this is a normal world where nothing ever goes wrong OH GOD. Then cut to combat and sexiness. Might be too clichéd or whatever, but I feel like it'd work. I get why you are excited to show this off. I don't really think this trailer is bad or anything but I do think this is just okay. I feel like you're suffering from success a bit here because your content is so consistently of such a high quality. I think this trailer viewed as a first draft is fine. I'll look forward to the next version!

Desertopa

Personally, I take a different view of this. If your trailer doesn't differentiate the game from stereotypical hentai games, I'm concerned that you're likely to encounter perverse audience filtering. The sort of people who think based on the trailer that the game will appeal to their sensibilities may be people who're less likely than average to actually enjoy the game. I'm thinking here of the people on the F95Zone thread who were expecting something more like a generic porn game, who didn't really get where the game was coming from or appreciate its humor. As one of the other commenters in that thread put it, "Karens not getting jokes about Karens." I'm definitely not under the impression that I'm any sort of marketing expert, and my intuitions might be entirely off base, but my feeling is, you probably do want images which feature or allude to sexual content within the first twenty seconds, but I think it may be better not to have any within the first ten or so, and to feature some content to suggest that the writing is an attraction of the game. I think that even just 2-3 well chosen lines across the whole trailer could be enough to suggest that the game has a greater investment in its writing than an average porn RPG. I think the quality (and recognizability, she's fairly well-known,) of Nayuru's art is going to give OEA an automatic advantage over your earlier projects in terms of immediate eye-grabbing potential, but that's accomplished within the first second of viewers looking at the page. Rather than it being necessary to feature sexual content so early into the trailer to hook HRPG audience members, none of the HRPG trailers I can think of which feature on Steam lead so strongly with sex, and I think doing so is likely to give audiences a misleading idea of how OEA differentiates itself from other games. If you're short on ideas on how to differentiate OEA's trailer from other HRPGs, I'd be happy to help brainstorm if you think that might be useful to you. I'm not an expert in video composition, but I think I might be able to come up with some ideas, and I can certainly take a look at what other HRPGs are doing with their trailers. There might be other people here with more video composition knowledge than I have who could help.

sierralee

Thank you for giving feedback. Ulfina's attack with the bad frame rate... I am moderately sure that my computer was recording poorly at the time, but not sure. Ugh, this is really not my thing. Including dialogue is fine in theory but I have a terrible time choosing any. Dialogue is entirely about context for me. I wanted the clips of characters walking around in part to show some of the fancy shadows in motion, but you're right, they're mostly duplicated by screenshots. I did think about using the intro segment as a hook. It's the hook I used for the game itself, after all. This ties heavily into everything I've articulated throughout the rest of the comments.

sierralee

I think you may be right about perverse audience filtering, but I'll at least give my thought process. I've been assuming that I'm already operating under a large number of filters: Steam won't let anyone who hasn't flipped the NSFW switch see the game, algorithmically it's going to be shelved with that kind of thing, etc. Even Crescentia's art is fairly strongly associated with a few specific brands. If you want to take a look at other HRPG trailers, that is a beneficial-sounding thing that I definitely do not want to do, so...

Runcible Technician

I like the music and the boobs. Porn game trailers and ads never really stand out to me though, they kinda float around the internet like neon signs in cyberpunk, they just add ambiance. Hmm... makes me wonder if one of those trashy red light district signs actually advertises a philosophy school that just happens to be staffed by prostitutes. Food for thought.

Grant Moyer

This trailer was really hard for me to follow. I think title cards or other prominent text highlighting the gameplay or story element on display would be incredibly helpful for priming me to interpret what's going on. Something like the Silksong[1] or Divinity: Original Sin 2[2] trailers. Structurally, it would probably be easier to follow a trailer organized by gameplay elements too, rather than showcasing each character independently. Also, the trailer felt really fast. Most scenes were only on screen for about a second, if that. Two to three seconds would give me more time to interpret what's happening in each segment. Finally, the music didn't correspond with what was happening on screen. At least the tempo of the music should match the tempo of the visuals. But ideally, the music would also match the predominant feel of the game; action game might have music with a strong beat, a horror game might have soft tense music, etc. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFAknD_9U7c [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTWTFX8qzPI

sierralee

Thank you for providing feedback. Some of this is down to a difference in trailer conventions, as many games of this type have very visually dense styles as opposed to the atmospheric ones you linked. The goal is to tease more than demonstrate. That said, I will take your thoughts into account.

Desertopa

To be honest, all the ones I've checked out so far are so much more circumspect with the sexual content that my first thought was "wait, are you actually allowed to put this in a trailer?" In some cases, that might be a relic of the period when Steam would only take games with adult content if it was contained in an off-site patch, but that's definitely not the case for all of them. Some are actually *so* circumspect about the sexual content as to fail to properly advertise what sort of game it is. There's one which a friend of mine shared with me recently, Scars of Summer, which is apparently a hardcore NTR game, but which I had to look up on F95Zone to confirm that, because the trailer and game page simply fail to attest to that at all. Personally, I think you probably *do* want to show off some scene art in the trailer, although maybe while hiding a bit more to entice audiences with the appeal of what's being hidden, because OEA has significantly more investment in its scene art than most HRPGs, and that's a definite selling point. But I think you probably don't want to be too in-your-face about it, because as far as I can tell, most HRPG trailers aren't, so the direction in which you differentiate yourself from them is likely to influence player expectations.

sierralee

You're allowed to in general, as I saw a fair amount of that sort of thing in my market research. The title you mention is by Kagura Games, which has a business model of bringing porn to the mainland Chinese market. I don't know for sure if that puts additional restrictions on them, but it's plausible. But my research didn't include very many real RPGs, as opposed to fetish simulators, because I didn't find many. That could also be a failing, of course.

Rachnera

It feels a bit like kicking a dead horse at this point... But yeah, the trailer's not good. To be honest though, after looking at several Steam trailers for retro and pseudo-retro RPG to have a point of comparison, it might be "good enough" for its purpose. Because the competition is not awesome either, even for big names. Like, the official Steam trailer for FF6 is 20 seconds of almost black screen, followed by the title, finally followed by a video of the gameplay... Within a tiny window, lost in the middle of an immense artwork. But regardless: Alternating between the battle scenes and the CGs might not be a good idea as it makes the former look quite appalling (the shift between detailed artwork and big pixels is huge). Except for the last one, the battle scenes tend to be lukewarm in absolute. Is there really a point showing Ulfina landing a single hit for example? The music feels a bit generic and a good music is half a trailer. But most importantly... The trailer as is does not give a single hint about what the game will be about. Well, apart for the sex and the shooting fireballs at wolves, that's it. Even the fact it's sorta based on Little Red Riding Hood is not immediately obvious. Maybe something more fairy tale like, with a literal book open at the beginning, and the role of each character made obvious? Like: Starring Ingrid as the Little Red Riding Hood Wilhelm as the Hunter Ulfina as the Big Bad Wolf Hood as the Other Little Red Riding Hood Fenris as the Other Big Bad Wolf The seamstress whose name I forgot as the Other Other Big Bad Wolf Etc.

sierralee

Thank you for providing feedback. My goal with alternating was to show diversity of assets, but I hear what you're saying. The goal of showing Ulfina landing a hit was actually to show that the battlers hop to enemy positions, which is not default RPG Maker behavior.

Rachnera

> The goal of showing Ulfina landing a hit was actually to show that the battlers hop to enemy positions, which is not default RPG Maker behavior. Ack. I've definitely played more RPG Maker games than the average "gamer", and it didn't even come to my mind once while going through the game that the jump was custom. I feel like this is a detail that only RPG Maker (MV) devs will notice.

sierralee

I put so much work into figuring out that animation plugin. T-T But that's fair, maybe it doesn't communicate.

Lamsey

When we threw together the TLS trailer, I remember you saying it was good to have a short, sharp trailer as the first one on the Steam page, with a longer, more in-depth trailer second in the list. The character intros in the preview seem like a good fit for a longer, more in-depth trailer, although I agree with the others saying they'd want to see some dialogue or quotes too, to give a feel for the characters as well as the art. If you're also going to be doing a shorter one, I'd be inclined to have it focus more on the story, as others have suggested, with sexy bits and fancy animations interspersed throughout to catch people's eyes. The many-worlds aspect is the main thing I'd focus on, hinting at how the simple LRRH tale becomes something much more intriguing as the player reaches new Tales. That's the sort of hook that could reel people in, and if potential customers are still wavering, the longer "feature list" style trailer could help to complete it.

Desertopa

Come to think of it, Kagura Games is such a large market share of commercial Steam HRPGs that it might be a bit difficult to distinguish between Kagura Games trailers and HRPG trailers more broadly. Here are a few others I was able to dig up though. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1441840/FALL_IN_LABYRINTH/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/665180/Dark_Elf/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/712840/King_Exit/ For all that its number and quality of reviews suggest significant sales, Dark Elf's trailer strikes me as... really markedly half-assed. So I guess one possible takeaway is that you can actually do okay with a pretty lousy trailer. I think though, that even if a majority of people watching trailers on Steam only watch for ten seconds or so before closing them, it doesn't necessarily follow that it's better to feature sexual content in the first ten seconds. The great majority of people who browse a game's page were probably never likely to buy it in the first place. I think that if you separate out "plausible buyers" from "all viewers," the former group will probably have significantly different habits in perusing the page, and that you're better off looking for something which will hook likely buyers, rather than grab the attention of people who would probably only have skimmed over the page for a few seconds otherwise. Some additional thoughts: The female party members' outfits (or lack thereof) all suggest a game which is at least very fanservicey if not outright explicit, even before showing any 18+ scene content, so just showing their portrait art already give the impression of it being a titillating game. The custom graphical resources are one of the major things which set OEA apart from most RPGMaker games, NSFW or otherwise, in the eyes of most audience members. I think some clips of game scenes which would simultaneously show off the mapping, sprite work and portrait art are worth giving some time to on that basis. I think it'd also be a good idea to get a couple humorous lines in there. You don't need to show enough for the audience to get a sense of what the plot is for them to pick up that the game is well-written and legitimately funny, and this is one of the big things that sets it apart from almost all of its competition.

sierralee

Yeah, to be honest I saw that the last trailer spends ten full seconds advertising that it's made in RPG Maker and thought, "Everything I've ever tried to do is meaningless." You make a valid point about the outfits. At the moment I'm considering only including a few CGs that are SFW: Ulfina headpat or Ingrid on Wilhelm's lap, for example. Those would show CG quality while not being explicit. I am constitutionally incapable of choosing humorous lines that should go in a trailer, but will take suggestions.

Desertopa

I don't have any in mind off the top of my head, but I can go through the game again soon and look for candidates.

Nathan Phoenix

So I have been thinking about how to make a trailer for this game and I keep coming back to making it stand out from the crowd. Personally I would put the "Is that it? I was expecting something...more" moment front and center. Tons of H games have the female protagonist getting hot and heavy or alternatively have her in tears and pain. I can't think of one that has her just confused and disappointed that shes missing some emotion connection. Put her sexy body, then a sex scene, then black screen and a quote.

sierralee

Don't feel obligated, but I welcome suggestions from you or anyone else reading this deep into the chain.

sierralee

Thank you for providing feedback.

sierralee

This is an interesting concept. Though I like that moment personally (I made it a major part of the game), this is something that I'm fairly convinced would turn away a large percentage of the potential audience.

WaxerRed

I think I agree with Nathan! While I do like the original trailer, I think it could be easily lost amid other games. Girls with big tittes is unfortunately a market that gets more over saturated by the year. (FLAT JUSTICE!) To quote Don Draper, "The greatest thing you have working for you is not the photo you take or the picture you paint, it is the imagination of the consumer. They have no budget, they have no time limit. And if you can get into that space? Your ad can run all day." Yes it is important for a trailer to convey information about the product, but more importantly a trailer needs to spark desire to play the game itself. And questions will always be more thought provoking then answers. A lot of my feelings on this come from watching the Ouroboros trailer. Where the reaction might be "What the fuck is happening!" but that feeling of not knowing would be what makes players want to go see the game itself. I think while big boobs and hot girls might catch the eye, it might not translate into actually player interest. If players are not also equally intrigued by the story, they might see the 20 hour play time and say "Ugh, that's probably all just grinding and bad translated English. Forget that, I'll just look up the gallery on Ehentai and forget about it." Basically, I think a good trailer would tell players what is in the game. But a great trailer would intrigue them enough to find out what the game is on their own.

BleBle

I think my post got deleted or I pushed the wrong buttons, anyway here is again the review: As someone who didn't play the game and saw the reviews from both sides of the spectrum this little trailer doesn't make me think to play the game Because I see "porn with game" In the adult market there is a lot of "porn with game" but very few "game with porn.If the audience you are looking for this game is people to masturbate, then yes, the objective of the trailer is good.It woorks on teenagers and "novice" players on adult games. If the audience you are looking for is more "veterans" then I dont think it is good. Veterans are tired of "porn with game" with hectic and bland sex. I dont know what you want, but I dont think you only want to sell game and profit, you want to be remembered as an developer and want people to support your project more than only buying a game. About trailers I think is about feelings. What the developer want to give to the audience and encourage people to play it.I think you need to give another spin and seeing from another point of view. Here is an example of a good trailer with low-budget: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPB_J6Egi28 You can see that this is a type of trailer that nailed it and sold it to the people, even if they didn't know japanese. A dance of daisies. Cheers

sierralee

I got the notification for your first comment, so if it disappeared, it must have been eaten by the Patreon spam filter. Thank you for leaving feedback.

BleBle

I am an spammer now. SPAM!!!

Desertopa

Okay, here are a few I thought could be fun without demanding too much context. https://i.imgur.com/TVokNqm.png - A bit of Ingrid's first attempt to make herself a new weapon. https://i.imgur.com/jDtshjy.png - Ingrid's introduction to Red. https://i.imgur.com/8njMNg0.png - Ingrid's introduction to Ulfina (not as punchy as some of the others, but a good showcase of art, elements of characterization, and the fact that Ulfina walks around naked just because.) https://i.imgur.com/8YiDAJ9.png - Opening a box (might suffer for lack of context, but dammit, I thought this bit was funny.)