so I genuinely need to tell someone about this because nobody in my real life fully understands why I've been walking around grinning like an idiot for two days
I've been working on a horror game solo for about 8 months, no publisher no budget, just me and my obsession with making something that scares people. I kept delaying the trailer because I couldn't afford motion graphics and every time I tried editing one myself in premiere it looked like a school project.
few weeks ago I was procrastinating and started messing around with chatgpt to write the trailer script, gave it my game's lore doc, the tone I was going for, some references like silent hill and mundaun, and honestly it nailed the voiceover script way faster than I could have written it myself. Like I iterated on it maybe 3 times and had something that genuinely gave me chills reading it out loud.
then for the actual visuals I took my concept art and in game screenshots and started experimenting with AI video tools. used kling for some of the motion sequences to give my still art this really unsettling slow movement, tried seedance for a couple of the more dynamic shots where I needed actual character motion, and magic hour for a lip sync segment where a character delivers a warning directly to camera. stitched everything together in capcut with sound design I did myself.
posted it on twitter tiktok and youtube shorts expecting maybe a few views from my tiny following.(honestly praying it to go viral)
500k combined views in under 24 hours
my phone was going crazy, people sharing it saying the trailer looked like it came from a funded studio,someone said it reminded them of the PT demo and I genuinely almost cried at my desk because thats the highest compliment I can imagine for this project.
the whole teaser cost me literally a lot less than what it would have costed if I had gone the traditional route.
I'm not going to sit here and say everything was perfect, some shots needed multiple attempts and a couple sequences still look slightly off if you really study them but for a solo dev who was about to just give up on marketing entirely and hope people randomly found my steam page,this changed everything for me
I know people have mixed feelings about AI generated content and I completely get that, I probably would have been skeptical too a year ago but as someone who was genuinely stuck with no options this felt like someone just handed me a chance I never thought I'd get.
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