Pitching a Game with $100K on the Line: Lessons we learned from the Blue Ocean Games Challenge

It’s April 2025, my team and I are working on year 4 of our "quick turnaround" indie game, and we’ve got a gap between our budget and our funds big enough to drive a new Mercedes G-Wagon through. Then, I got an email from the Global Game Jam announcing a partnership with a new indie game accelerator backed by Krafton, creators of PUBG, that was offering winners of a trailer contest up to $300,000 in funding. The initiative, called Blue Ocean Games, was promoting an alternative system for helping indies get funded with a focus on new and inventive concepts.

Now, this isn’t the first time we’ve been told a group looking for new ideas was promising to lavish creatives with seed funding, but after attending some seminars/introduction meetings and joining the discord, my skepticism began to subside, and we decided to commit to making a winning trailer (in time) for the Rising Tide #1 Challenge. However, we really didn’t have Tyrant Tactics at a point where we could make a decent trailer, so we tackled the process over the month and treated it like our own little game jam. In the end, we didn’t manage to get in the top #10 in either the public or judge voting, but we wanted to share some lessons that we've taken from this experience that might be helpful.

The Calm Before the Storm (Preparation)

Since this was the first trailer we had attempted to make for Tyrant Tactics (or at all really) we tried to get some references from similar games. In this case we looked at other turn-based strategy trailers like the one for Wargroove. Blue Ocean Games also hosted a webinar with Derek Lieu, the Internet's leading expert on indie game trailers. After the webinar, we ended up creating a draft of what we wanted the trailer to be in PowerPoint, and used that to figure out what assets we already had, what we needed, and what we probably wouldn’t be able to get done in time in order to make that vision happen. With all this information in hand, we were ready to boldly leap into the Challenge! Or at least as ready as we could be. Here are our main takeaways:

Show Your Gameplay Hook Early

One of the things that Derek talks about is hooking the viewer early with what makes your game unique and then expand on it from there. This gets the viewers attention and lets them decide quickly whether or not they’re interested in a game. Looking at the winning entries from Rising Tide #1 (as well as some of my personal favorites), most of them present you with some kind of interesting hook within the first 30 seconds or so then tantalize your curiosity with the remaining run time. One of the sticking points of Tyrant Tactics is that it is very narrative driven in addition to strategy driven as opposed to similar games such as Advance Wars where the story isn’t quite as important. Additionally, we had more polished clips of the narrative art assets than gameplay ones, so we decided to try to put all that at the front of the trailer. The Result: our gameplay didn’t actually end up being shown till almost 50 seconds into the trailer, which-according to our YouTube analytics-is right after the average viewer had already started tuning out. This is a decision we certainly won’t be repeating for the next trailer.

Less Is More (Trailer Editing Style and Length)

One of Derek's other tips is that clarity of communication is paramount. Avoid using flashy cuts and edits and effects in your trailer and try to stick to the basics with simple cuts between nicely flowing gameplay clips. That means no wipes or flash cuts or animations you’d see in an overly produced slideshow presentation. Looking at the references we were using when designing Tyrant Tactics’ trailer, most of them were either no frills or they had a couple fancy transitions at the beginning and maybe end of the trailer. Another thing they all had in common: they were all 90 seconds long or less. Remember earlier when I mentioned that the average viewer tuned out roughly 30 seconds into the trailer? Well, that’s also often assuming they actually enjoy the trailer content. This means 30 seconds is generally closer to the maximum view time. Keeping runtime around 60 seconds should hopefully give enough time to get your gameplay loop across and hype up the viewer without becoming repetitive. Was this something we tried to do? Eh, I’d like to think so, but with our trailer sitting at about 2 minutes runtime it’s fair to say we could have tightened things up. Personally, as someone also voting for other entries in Rising Tide, this was an issue I encountered with a lot of trailers having exceedingly long run times, incoherent editing, excessive transitions/effects, and worst of all; no sounds whatsoever (PS: Do not do this). The lesson? Keep things short, clean, and simple.

Show Off Your Good Side (Show Polished Assets When Possible)

Now this bit is a little tricky since BOG’s mission is to provide funding to undiscovered developers that haven’t gotten any yet for their projects. So, naturally, you would expect most of the entries to be projects that are very much in progress since most of the participants are unfunded solo devs or small teams. In theory, it sounds like a sort of even playing field where everyone is working with early stage prototypes. In practice, not everyone is at the same stage of their journey when entering Rising Tide and as a result you see trailers that vary in polish from concept pitches with some placeholder assets, to what look like fully completed projects ready to ship. So, the obvious tidbit here is to try to show off your most polished content so that the audience has a firm understanding of what your final release is going to look like. When we started the Tyrant Tactics trailer we hadn’t planned out a vertical slice or any sort of small, highly polished segment to show off. As such, we had to scramble to get as many completed assets as possible ready in a couple weeks so we could record clips and put the final trailer together. Since then we’ve drawn up a plan to create a much cleaner slice for our next trailer. Something that could have helped us come off much more refined had we created it prior to Rising Tide #1.

Marketing For Indies (Know your audience)

The last thing I’d like to share a lesson on is a topic some consider the ultimate bane of all indie developers: marketing. We didn't struggle with getting eyes in front of our trailer thanks to the semi-captive viewers voting in the Challenge, but, you still need to understand who the target audience for your game is so that you can communicate what appeals to them and create an engrossing trailer. Sometimes you have to sit back and ask “what is the appeal of this? Why is my game more compelling than similar ones?” For Tyrant Tactics, we thought we had two answers for that, but after getting feedback on the trailer, we realized we were wrong. As I previously mentioned, we believed Tyrant’s narrative depth to be a sticking point for a strategy game as we thought it would compel players to get invested in characters and have a memorable experience beyond just what happens during gameplay. However, once we got the game in front of strategy players (the folks well versed with Advanced Wars-like games who were our target audience) they did not have much interest in the story and were much more curious about how the gameplay was unique compared to their current favorite. Because of this, we turned a lot of our core demographics off with the way the trailer was structured. That’s why it’s always a good idea to stop and ask “What is the hook of our game, and who does that appeal to?” before getting too far into your trailer creation.

All things considered, we learned a lot from rising tide. They say that you learn more from failing than by succeeding. Well, then I think it’s fair to say we learned a whole lot from this one. But, going from having no trailer and no plans for making one, to getting one cobbled together in less than 4 weeks had us feeling pretty good about the future potential for Tyrant Tactics. And, with the lessons learned from that we’re better equipped than ever to prepare our next trailer. Whether it be for Rising Tide, a publisher pitch deck, or even a public announcement, what we learned from Rising Tide #1 will always be in the back of our minds when we work on a trailer for any project. Hopefully these tips help you out a little bit too so you don’t have to do things the hard way (like us).