Scripting for Game Trailer Part 3: Tone

What tone do you want conveyed in your game trailer? Tone affects how viewers will feel while they watch the trailer, and is communicated through just about everything. Any written dialogue, the style of a voice actor’s delivery, the pacing and style of cuts and transitions, the music, VFX, SFX—each element will be affected by the desired tone of the game (and by extension, the trailer for the game).

Game Writing

Word choice, sentence structure, figures of speech like metaphor and hyperbole, are all conduits for a game’s tone. This spans everything from the flavor text in UI tooltips to character dialogue.

If the writing includes a lot of puns, that’s contributing to the playful tone of the game. If everything is more straightforward, the game will seem more like it should be accepted at face value. Short, easy to understand sentences will feel more accessible, while longer more illustrative writing feels more advanced.

When you’re creating a trailer, this content is already written, but what you choose to include will contribute to the tone of the trailer. The game might include a mixture of dramatic and comedic dialogue, but if you only include the funny bits in the trailer, that’s the only impression viewers will get.

Voiceover

The writing style for a trailer voiceover, as well as the actor’s delivery, will heavily influence the trailer’s tone. Same as with game writing, the language can make viewers feel comforted, excited, or even afraid depending on phrasing and word choice.

The actor has a major impact. You might ask a VO actor to read the lines like a sweet grandmother, which will create a positive, cozy tone. Or you might want an actor to read like a scurvy pirate to give a sense of adventure and possibly danger.

Speaking of pirates, it's important to think about the accent you want the actor to use. Besides feeling more grounded in the world of the game (for example, a US southern accent might feel out of place in a James Bond game), accents can be used to emphasize a serious or silly tone.

Title Cards

It probably seems obvious that the writing of any title cards or other text in a trailer will contribute to the tone. But now we’re talking about visuals as well, because the font, color, and animation of the text will also have an effect.

Take for instance the quick-paced titles you see in this trailer from Donut County.

Each one uses a different bright color (all from the game’s color palette), and shows the text zooming larger and larger. They flash on and off the screen with an air of increasing excitement and almost manic silliness.

Then compare to the titles from a trailer I made for Void Sols.

These are also fast-paced titles, but the dark colors and neon FX (accompanied by the SFX and motion design) lend themselves to a more dramatic and serious tone.

Pacing

The pacing of a trailer will directly affect how intense it feels to viewers. If a trailer has tons of cuts at a frenetic pace, everything is going to feel more exciting. This is why you often see quick cuts and lots of high-action footage in combat-heavy games.

It can also be useful to give sequences more time to breathe, to communicate more complex ideas or show off UI-heavy visuals. A slower-paced trailer can be a good fit for cozy games and management games.

None of this is black and white, by the way. Slower pacing can also increase tension with the right footage, by creating suspense. Horror game trailers often start out very slow, the better to smack you in the face with the reveal later on.

Music

We’ve already talked about how significantly music impacts scripting in the previous post in this blog series. But suffice it to say that as a conduit for emotion, music is maybe the most important communicator of tone. If your horror game trailer is undercut by a jaunty bossa nova track, that’s not gonna sound right.

(There are exceptions where tonal dissonance can work for you... see the entire Fallout franchise!)

VFX & SFX

Visual effects and sound effects compliment and enhance what everything else is communicating. Additional fire sparks and sword clangs will make fight scenes feel more dramatic and intense, while squishy bouncing elements and cartoon boings will make them feel goofy.

Put it all together

To further explain how tone affects, well, everything, let’s look at trailers for two games folks love to compare: Dave the Diver and Dredge.

On the surface (ha, ha), you can see why these titles would be compared. Both are fishing games and require the player to explore multiple regions and catch a variety of different fish to complete quests. Both employ inventory management and use equipment upgrades to unlock additional locations.

Of course, anyone who’s played both games will tell you they are very different experiences. This is partly down to the very different tone of each game. And this was pretty clear before both titles released, thanks to their trailers.

Here’s the launch trailer for Dave the Diver:

The tone is well communicated in this trailer, through several methods:

• While the narrator’s voiceover dialogue is largely informative, the delivery is tongue-in-cheek and playful. That crab pun wouldn’t work so well if it wasn’t!

• The colors of the game are bright and cheerful, emphasizing a positive upbeat feeling.

• The variety of footage and the way it’s cut together is exciting and fun, and the cutscenes and animations chosen for the trailer are intentionally silly

• The music is almost aggressively fun (complimentary)

Now take a look at the launch trailer for Dredge: 

This is obviously a very different vibe. Some of the ways this comes through:

• There’s no voiceover in this trailer, but the music is doing a lot of talking. The melody is dark, foreboding, and its slower pace carries a weight of intense drama. These are deep dark things we should take seriously.

• The visuals (animation and gameplay) feature the dark color palette we know from the game and contribute to a more ominous vibe.

• The SFX of in-game encounters (the piranhas, tentacles, crows, etc) are loud and unfriendly, making the world of the game feel sinister.

• About halfway through, we get a tone shift: the music and footage shown get significantly more spooky. We see more of the vibrant red-pink and the RGB chromatic aberration, adding to a sense of mystery and danger. 

• The chromatic abberation in particular is a very useful tool. This effect is often used as visual language for hallucination and/or supernatural influence. Does this mean our fisherman protagonist, our point-of-view character, is not reliable in the way he sees the world? Or is it a signifier of more supernatural influences coming to life in the game? No spoilers...

I’ll leave you with a fun fact: since both games released around the same time and were each popular in their own right, they inevitably were often compared to each other. Clearly this was noticed by the developers of Dave the Diver, Mintrocket, because they released a Dredge content DLC. I highly recommend watching this trailer to see how much fun you can have playing with a juxtaposition of tone!

This concludes my series about how scripting for game trailers is made up of several creative factors that all interconnect and combine.

If you feel I’ve missed something important or would like me to discuss additional elements of scripting, ping me on Bluesky or email me at suzanne(at)indiebard.co !