How we made the cinematic game trailer for Trailmakers 2.0 in just four months

In this article we'll explain how we made the Trailmakers 2.0 cinematic. Great game trailers are an art form. AAA studios have entire teams dedicated to them. Using state-of-the-art tools, the best animation software and the best 3D modelling software, they’ll work with VFX artists, editors, sound engineers, and composers to capture cinematic moments and gameplay, making a trailer that’s worthy of the biggest screens.

When it comes to indie games, however, things are different. Indie titles accounted for 99% of games released on Steam in 2024, but the developers behind those games often skip a proper trailer altogether. Instead, they cut together screen captures and put them to music, which doesn’t always captivate audiences. Perhaps they assume a AAA-level trailer is outside their budget, or maybe they’re so focused on the game that they don’t plan for all the marketing efforts needed to reach an audience.

But game trailers are more than marketing materials. They are often the first point of contact between a developer and the players, helping you introduce your audience to the character and story you’ve spent so long creating. A great game trailer can even turn the heads of potential publishers. And – if you’re smart about it – you don’t even need a AAA budget or production timeline to make one.

Why? Because you can use many time-saving tricks and workflow efficiencies to get a cinematic trailer done on an indie budget. Read on to learn more about how our team at Space Office did just that to create a trailer for our old clients, Flashbulb Games, in just four months.

Trailmakers: Pioneers | Cinematic Trailer - YouTube

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How we focused on efficiency

Space Office is a small team. We work quickly and find clever ways to save time, money, and resources. Once Flashbulb approved our story for the trailer, we worked with them to recycle as many in-game assets as possible, cutting down several days of production time that would be needed to model assets from scratch.

Props and vehicles from the game all received an overhaul on modelling and shaders. To do this, our hard-surface asset modeller would load each asset into Maya and add edge loops and subdivisions, plus extra details and gadgets where needed. PBR materials were then created from existing textures when available to give the whole thing a cinematic aesthetic.

Finally, background assets were touched up with procedural edge, curvature, and grunge maps to keep texture painting to a minimum, while hero textures got a more thorough reworking. We would then dial in the amount of grunge, detail, and realism with Flashbulb’s art director, to make sure the look remained on-brand for the game.

The space station couldn’t be upgraded from an in-game model, because it only existed as a concept drawing and part of a 3D model from an older game. Instead, we thought about one of our favorite examples of blockbuster movie magic, and kitbashed the environment.

When making miniatures for the original Star Wars, the modellers would combine parts of different model kits to create something that looked galactic and wholly original. They called these random pieces ‘greebles’. Inspired by this approach, we built the highly-detailed space station model out of our own 3D greebles.

Planet landscapes were generated using tyFlow, a versatile simulation plugin for 3ds Max. We generated high-res landscapes in minutes and ran them in real-time within the viewport. This meant we got detailed feedback from Flashbulb before we’d even left previz.

When it came to lighting and rendering, we made the process more efficient by rendering in a single beauty pass, with light sources split up for compositing. We tweaked each light source using Nuke, working with the ACES colorspace – a colour management system that standardises colour space between different input sources – to give the trailer a filmic look.

This was particularly important for overexposed areas such as engine glow, sparks, and bright light sources, all essential to a sci-fi setting. A template script auto-composited each pass with setups for lens distortion, grain, and chromatic aberration. This reduced the need for per-shot compositing and sped up the final stages of production.

As a small boutique VFX studio, maintaining our own render farm just isn’t feasible. That’s why we do all our rendering in Chaos Cloud. On this project, we rapidly rendered low-res shots and assembled the film for Flashbulb’s approval. With everything locked in, we then moved on to final resolution rendering. A process that usually takes days, was reduced to mere hours.

The result – Trailmakers 2.0 trailer

Our Trailmakers 2.0 trailer is more than an advertisement for the game, it’s a short film and a prologue to the experience that players will have in the game. A piece of storytelling in its own right. In just 60 seconds, the audience gets a taste of the gameplay mechanics, the visual style, and the overall feel of the game.

We want existing Trailmakers fans to be excited by the trailer and new gamers to be enticed to try it out, but they’re not the only reasons to craft a proper game trailer. In the past, trailers we’ve created for Flashbulb have helped them to secure publishing deals long before they had a playable demo of their game. In an age where players stream games on services like PlayStation Plus and Xbox Game Pass, a jaw-dropping trailer can even see your game added to their catalogues.

We’re incredibly proud of our work on Trailmakers 2.0 and the project represents a solution for any game developer that doesn’t have the time or budget to commission a VFX studio to create their trailer. Clients can come to us with nothing but an out-of-this-world idea and we can channel our 20 years of production experience into shaping a story and creating a blockbuster trailer.

What do you think of Space Office VFX's work on the Trailmakers 2.0? Let us know in the comments below.

Stine Sørensen

Stine is a character animator who works mostly on feature films but has also had her hand in commercials and video games. She is currently the co-owner and Animation Supervisor at Space Office VFX that provides high-end VFX and animation for commercials and feature films.