One hour till the press embargo lifts.
Damn. Rendering error. We’ll have to restart the process.
The announcement is ready to go. We’re just missing the trailer!
Outside the window, the rural countryside of Japan whooshes by while slack tries to reconnect.
Has anyone ever delivered a video game trailer from the Shinkansen?
The team back home has been on an all-nighter putting the finishing touches on the 1 minute and 45 seconds of brand new gameplay footage that will help us announce the upcoming closed alpha for our game, Dinolords.
This game director has been feeding them comments in a flurry of increasing intensity over the last 24 hours.
It’s been a year since we last showed the game. This trailer is important.
Our publisher and press agency are ready to upload the video.
We just have to get it to them.
The internet crawls inside the metal tube hurtling 320 km/h through the mountains. At least the new screenshots made it to press.
We were meant to finish the trailer before my family trip to Japan. But recording scenes took longer than expected and suddenly I was in a Shinkansen with my wife and two kids, trying to remote-direct one of the most important videos of the project.
Time was up. The rendering finally went through back home, and the video was making its way onto a server.
I’m coordinating between Northplay, our video editor at Arkaden, our PR agency SwipeRight, and our publisher Ghost Ship. Links are exchanged.
With 50 minutes left to go, our publisher has the video unlisted on YouTube.
We made it.
We arrived in Osaka exhausted. The video was live, and a few articles had come out featuring our announcement. However, the trailer wasn’t performing.
After a quick Konbini run, I pored over engagement data to figure out why. We A/B tested some thumbnails and seeded some conversations on Reddit hoping it would pick up.
It did.
The Aftermath
As of this writing, the trailer has been viewed 141,000+ times on YouTube (many more times natively on Reddit and elsewhere). It’s twice the record set by our teaser trailer.
We’re approaching 20,000 signups for the closed alpha and Dinolords has crossed 100,000 wishlists on Steam and entered the top 400 most wishlisted games.
This is good.
The rest of our Japan trip was luckily a lot less work-intensive and I’m now back with the team for the final push toward closed alpha. We recently released another video, a deeper dive into what we’re trying to build:
If you haven’t already, I’d love for you to wishlist the game on Steam— and if you want to help test out an early build of the game, you can sign up for the playtest on the steam store page for a chance to become a tester.
We’ll open up tests in waves, and there will be several between now and early access next year.
It’s all kind of absurd. Directing a major trailer launch from a train speeding through the Japanese countryside. But in the moment, it was just another reminder that creative work rarely unfolds in perfect conditions. You just find a way.
I’m lucky to work with some incredibly talented people who make all of this possible.
The train kept moving. So did we.