They say all you need is faith, trust and pixie dust, and the lovely folks at Wydren Games gave us a fair helping of all three when they trusted us with a trailer for their bewitching debut game 'Spellbound: The Magic Within'.
'Spellbound: The Magic Within' is a narrative game that plays out like a fantastic, interactive storybook. You create your character and eventually pick a magic affinity and develop relationships and make decisions in the world.
Animation is the perfect medium for this kind of game since it is what's called a narrative driven game, gameplay footage for a trailer doesn't completely convey the charm of the characters and the depth and mystery of the world. So we were tasked with creating a spellbinding trailer that introduced the audience to the host of interesting and diverse characters and the rich and exciting world in an engaging way.
We chose a 2D hand drawn style that would seamlessly fit the style of the game, and inter-spliced animation with edited gameplay footage to create the trailer. In some of the trailer, we were able to use backgrounds from the game that Wydren shared with us and animated over the top. We employ tricks like this for clients to make trailer production faster and more economical to produce.
To introduce the main characters, our solution was to create titles for each of them and we hand animated using toon boom; the characters coming to life, as well as their magic abilities being shown and written for the audience to learn about them in a clear and accessible way. These custom animations we then composited with the animated characters using Adobe After Effects where glow effects and shadows were added.
We feel these custom animations really make the characters feel as dimensional as they do in the game, and we chose simple and clear text to honour Wydren's request for their game to be as accessible as possible to visually impaired and disabled players.
We'd be lying though if we didn't say that our favourite part of making the trailer was playing the unreleased demo for 'Spellbound: The Magic Within'. It's truly an enchanting world, with an enticing story, fun and memorable characters, and beautiful visuals that carry you through an enchanted world. It is different in all the interesting ways an indie game should be, and we are really excited by what else is opening up in the indie game space. We hope that Wydren will choose us again to create more trailers for their magical games in the future.
(Wydren is a female founded game studio and publisher based in the London. You can find more about the good work they do and more about 'Spellbound: The Magic Within' here).
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