Creating the Strange Antiquities Trailers: Deep Dive

I have to begin this post with my deep appreciation for the Donkin brothers, Rob and John. I've known the brothers behind Bad Viking Games since before their previous game, Strange Horticulture, launched. I was actually marketing manager at Iceberg Interactive at the time, and created one of the trailers for Horticulture.

John and Rob are some of the kindest people I've ever met in the indie games sphere. They're hardworking and clever, and they have the same tendency to go quiet for 5 minutes and then come back with a perfectly crafted solution in their respective area of focus. They're lovely.

So it seems appropriate to take a deep dive on the two trailers I created for their new game, Strange Antiquities (which released on Steam, Epic, and Nintendo Switch this week)!

The Release Date Trailer

When I began concepting and scripting for these trailers, the focus of each was heavily inspired by the wonderful soundtrack by Benjamin Young.

The final track on the soundtrack (which is available for purchase on Steam, btw) is "Consequences (feat. Roniit)”. The high intensity of the music, the deep-voiced chanting choir, and Roniit’s haunting vocals created this perfectly spooky option. I immediately thought “I am going to beg to use this track.”

I made a cut of the music to fit the desired runtime, but besides pacing tweaks I only made one small change, which was to bring back in the male chanting chorals to the final swell of the trailer. That additional layer helped build to a more intense finish.

The core concept of the Release Date trailer was to use in-game dialogue from customer interactions to tease the overarching storyline of the game — without giving too much away, of course! I reviewed the full script of the game to piece together thematically appropriate dialogue, and this became the foundation of the script.

When I look back at the first and final drafts of this trailer, most of the changes were about perfecting the pacing. Changing the order of dialogue lines, choosing different gameplay moment to show more variety, and tightening and tightening up the timing of shots to keep the intensity high throughout and complement the music.

The final polish stage was all about audio. We did the full sound pass on this trailer with the original SFX files for all gameplay audio, so we could really perfect the timing and levels of in-game chimes and bell dings to further heighten the tone.

The Launch Trailer

For the launch trailer, we pulled from the “Museum of History” music track. That track was created with an instrumental-only version, as well as one with its own Roniit vocals. We were originally going to use the instrumental-only version, but over the course of editing we found we missed the vocals for the excellent drama they layered on, so we added them to the beginning and the very end of the trailer.

We were also careful to avoid as much in-game UI (button prompts, cursors, etc) as possible, to make it easier to prep platform-specific versions of the final trailer.

Peter Wicks provided the voiceover for our narration (roughly based on the in-game character Eli White, the actual owner of Strange Antiquities). Peter’s original audition perfectly captured the emotional intent of every line, and we were so pleased he was available to work on this project with us!

The Launch Trailer changed much more than the Release Date trailer from its original script and concept to the final version. About halfway through the project, we realized the original script we had come up with was slower-paced than really suited a launch trailer, which should of course get people jazzed up to play the game for themselves. We took apart the entire script and the entire music cut, and put it all back together in a totally different order. We were able to create a much faster-paced intro, cut out a lot of fluff, and we ended up with a tighter script that featured more gameplay while still explaining the core premise of the game and the general sense of intrigue and mystery the story promises. 

Basically everything a launch trailer ought to do.