Hello y'all. I'm making a puzzle game. It has a simple game mechanic. But the main focus of the game is to use that mechanic to break the game(or rather, the physics engine) deliberately. I'm unsure of how to promote this.

In order to showcase that aspect, I'd need to spoil the puzzles. I want the mechanics to come as a surprise but a trailer would ruin that. And not all levels can be shown and understood within the small timeframe of a trailer.

I tried focusing on showing the mechanic instead. But that just makes people go “Neat. So what” and move on. And to make matters worse, the games a puzzle platformer so I already have trouble getting people interested.

Is it ok to have levels that are not in game and are just used to showcase the mechanics for the trailer? That would at least preserve the aha moment when playing the game. Is that false marketing?

Make an optional prologue of levels that tutorialise the mechanics, and use those for the trailer? Or release the levels from the trailer as a set of bonus levels?

I'd advocate watching a bunch of trailers from similar styles of puzzle games. In my experience, they tend to only show the most basic version of the mechanics in the trailer, and/or they show advanced mechanics out of context, so that the viewer sees the effect, but doesn't understand why it occurs.

Stocke said:
Is it ok to have levels that are not in game and are just used to showcase the mechanics for the trailer? Is that false marketing?

Films do this all the time: in the trailer they show footage/scenes that ends up being cut from the final movie. I doubt you'd end up in trouble with that approach (provided the trailer isn't actually misrepresenting the game in a significant way).

In addition to short ads presenting advanced out-of-context maneuvers, it can be popular to show failures of obvious maneuvers. Plenty of games do this on small ads, showing simple success, simple success, then multiple failures that could be easily solved based on the first two successes.

Sizzle videos often show a mix of the basics to show just how easy it is, then quick snapshots of progressively complex puzzles, occasionally showing massive chain-reactions or similar.