So I made a game trailer for a game I plan to start making in the near future.
Rated M for violence mostly, and also because it shows vague references to drugs, alcohol, tobacco, gambling etc. But there is no nudity or foul language in the trailer itself.
All the artwork, every animation frame, was drawn exclusively by me in Flowlab. I used Flowlab music and sound effects, and text-to-speech software for the voiceovers, but everything else I did myself (with a bit of help from the community on learning how to use eases and have moving text).
Recommended to keep sound on.
Click here if you're not offended by gangsters, gunshots, cigars, casinos, & bloodshed
I’ll probably make a PC demo first, then a fuller sized version on Steam (and possibly mobile once I learn how to make that work). I might have to break it up into chapters, as there will be hundreds of different missions and different paths you can take along the way. You might get betrayed by your own gang, or you can choose to betray your own gang, or even possibly make a deal with the feds to work undercover for them (and hope your gang doesn’t find out).
Also buy and manage properties, basically your character is going to try to destroy all of the opposing factions and take over the entire city (through either direct ownership of properties, or gaining influence in each neighborhood).
Oh and also, since the setting is a gambling city, I’ll probably incorporate some gambling mini games (virtual poker and slot machines) that you can earn (or lose) extra money on.
Your character is a young 20-something living in “A.C.” (a fictionalized version of Atlantic City), working menial dead end jobs and barely making ends meet. He meets a beautiful and sophisticated young woman and charms her into dating him. She likes everything about him, except for his seeming lack of ambition, and she begins to pressure him to try to find a better job. “Fortunately” for him, she has a friend in town who has connections with a lot of the city’s big players, and she gets him to reluctantly agree to take a job interview.
He lands a seemingly mundane job as a security guard at a construction site. Nothing glamorous, but the pay is much better than what he’s used to, and she convinces him that it will be a “way in” for him to eventually get promoted to a higher position within the company. Well, this seemingly mundane job turns out to be anything but mundane, as he finds the construction site under regular attack by groups that seem hell bent on keeping this particular casino from being constructed. He eventually discovers the sordid truth - that his “employer” is actually a mafia crime boss, and that other rival gangs in the area are trying to keep him from building his casino (as it would cut into their own business profits).
Upon learning this, he realizes that he may have already been unwittingly involved in illegal activities. His new boss is impressed by his particular “talents”, and is already offering him more lucrative jobs that pay multitudes more than he has ever made in his life, but he also realizes that he is in very real danger of possibly going to prison, or worse… and if he quits the job, he’ll not only be out money, but he’ll also risk being marked or framed for the crimes he never meant to commit.
Along the way, he also gets noticed by authorities as well as other rival gangs for his deeds, some of whom wish to recruit him for themselves (though those offers could end up just being traps, as there is no honor among thieves). He’ll have a lot of choices to make along the way that will determine which direction his life goes. Whether he ends up “owning” the city as a rich and successful kingpin, redeeming his criminal past by helping authorities shut down all of these seedy groups, getting sentenced to life behind bars without parole, or ultimately buried alongside Jimmy Hoffa…
Probably more than half of it will be top down driving and running & gunning… some of the more enclosed indoor kind of levels will be 2.5 dimensional side scrolling (combination of melee & guns). There will be an “empire building” aspect, but since that’s tricky to do in Flowlab, that part will be largely fixed and linear (intended for progression purposes mostly). The more territory you own, the more passive income you will generate, and the more options you will have access to (better guns, cars, the ability to call in backup, more safehouses to escape danger, etc.)
There will definitely be lots of cutscenes and such with choices / dialogue options that will affect how the game progresses. Like if you choose to stay with your original gang, you will continue to do missions for that gang. If you choose to switch alliances, you’ll be doing different kinds of tasks for your new employer (the first of which will mostly involve taking down your previous employer).
At any given time in the game, you will have choices that may allow you to backstab people, or you may choose to stick with them and they’ll backstab you instead in the long run. You won’t know who to trust until you’ve played the missions out.
