This is an essay about how making a promotional video for my game ended up changing the game itself. The claim is simple: marketing and production look like two different activities, but both are the same job of designing an experience. Take marketing seriously, and it turns straight into production improvements.
Lately, while talking with an AI, something dawned on me.
I was editing a promotional video for my game. Cut by cut, I was loading in intent: "I want it to look like this," "I want the hype to land here." Then at some point I thought: I want this way of showing it in the game itself.
The video was supposed to be an outward-facing tool for selling the game. Yet the more I worked on it, the more I wanted to polish the game. Which part was game development, and which was a marketing deliverable? I could no longer tell.
Why does the line between marketing and production get so thin?
Because a video made for marketing feeds straight back into production. What you build for the outside changes the inside, and once the inside changes, the outside needs remaking.
I used to split it in my head. Marketing was the activity for selling, facing outward. Production was the activity for making the game itself, facing inward.
In practice, that split didn't hold. Once I decided "I want to present it this way" in the video, I felt "then the game itself should be presentable that way too." A decision in the video became a demand on production.
The outward-facing video changes the inward-facing game. When the game changes, the video needs remaking. Inside that loop, you can no longer tell which is which.
How did one cut in the video change the game?
One decision to tighten the gaps between cuts became a decision to tighten the game's presentation timing. Abstractions alone don't land, so here is the actual round trip.
In one stretch of the video, I had a sequence of several scenes shown in order. In the first edit, I tried to show each scene carefully, so I let each one linger. Played through, it felt slack.
"I want more tempo here," I thought, and I tightened the gaps between cuts. I shaved the time each scene held and handed off to the next one faster. As a video, it instantly snapped into shape.
The problem came afterward. Comparing the tightened video against the game, the game's own presentation was clearly bloated. For the very same effect, the video handed off in a fraction of a second, while the game held a pause many times longer. Once you know the tempo that felt good in the video, the game's pauses look like time you're being made to wait.
So I tightened the game's presentation timing too. How long effects stay on screen, the wait before the next input is accepted, the beat while the screen transitions. As much as the video taught me "tighten it and it snaps," I cut that much from the game.
The round trip didn't stop there. Once the game was tighter, I wanted to re-shoot the video at the new tempo. Put the tempo found in the video into the game, then remake the video because the game changed. One editing decision about a single cut went back and forth between game and video, shaving the pauses out of both at once.
Why do outward and inward converge on the same "experience design"?
Marketing is the trailer of the experience, and the game is the experience itself. That is why they look like different things but are judged on the same axis. Put into words from the operator's seat, it comes out like this.
The reason a viewer feels "this looks fun" and the reason a player feels "this is fun" point to the same root. Tempo, the feel-good, the pull that makes you want to see what's next. Whether you design that in the video or in the game, the work converges on a single point: designing an experience.
If the trailer is great but the game is dull, the trailer is lying. If the game is great but the trailer doesn't convey it, the trailer is badly designed. Both mismatches have one cause: building the same experience to different standards on the outside and the inside.
So when you take marketing seriously, it turns straight into a production improvement. The moment you think "I want to show it this way" is also the moment you discover "this is how I wanted to make it." The promo video becomes a mirror of production.
This only came into words while I was talking with an AI. Thinking alone, I probably would have felt "I'm spending too much time on the video" and left it there. Because I was consulting the AI as I worked, I realized that time was also time spent re-examining the game itself.
Which is the main thing, the game or the video?
Probably both. Which is the main thing and which is secondary has gone blurry in my mind.
I make the video to make the game, and fix the game to make the video. Inside an endless loop, both grow at the same time.
