Happy New Year from the whole team at Half Past Yellow! We hope you had a good holiday break and that you’re ready for all the great games coming out in 2025 🎉
Speaking of great games coming out in 2025, check out the First Look Trailer for Tempest Tower! Coming soon to early access.
Tempest Tower redefines Tower Defense with a dynamic blend of classic base-building and electrifying player-driven combat. Explore, plan, and meticulously construct your base during the Build Phase. Execute, adapt, and ruthlessly brawl with hordes of Creepers during the Action Phase. Every level is a thrilling test of strategy and skill!
If that sounds like your kind of game, then consider giving Tempest Tower a wishlist on Steam so you don’t miss out when the game releases in the near future 👀
Get Involved!
We will continue to post news and dev-blogs here whenever we have anything big to share and we will be making better use of the Steam Community Hub when we get closer to launch. Until then, the best way to stay informed about all things Tempest Tower is to join us on Discord! We have a few big things coming in the next 2 months and we can’t wait to hear what you think.
Making the Trailer
For all those who are interested, I thought I would pull back the curtain a bit on how the trailer was made.
The first look trailer for Tempest Tower was made by James Mcgregor (corfiz.com). We worked with James on most of the Time on Frog Island trailers and really enjoyed the process, so we were ecstatic to find out that he was available to help on Tempest Tower as well.
Having worked with James before, it was pretty easy to get started. I made a trailer brief that outlined the deadline, expected length, links to music from the game, what to show, and what to avoid showing. The brief also included some reference trailers that I thought captured the expected vibe and pace. After that, I created a Trailer Branch that James could work from so that he could easily set up shots and create sets inside the Unity project.
Once James had access to the game, he could spend some time playing and generating ideas before the two of us sat down for a proper meeting about how to best show off the game. James could then get to work on a quick blockout (descriptive text explaining each shot to show the overall timings of the trailer) for the time to give any first notes on.
Most of our notes and discussions were done through Discord or using frame.io, which we could use to give specific feedback on the current version of the trailer. The earliest iteration of the trailer took a bit too long to get to the action, but other than that, the skeleton of the initial blockout held strong through the whole process.
After seeing the first proper cut of the trailer, it was quite clear to the team that our current music selection didn’t really have anything that matched the trailer’s energy. The trailer needed to be fast moving (and the game can be hectic too), but nothing we had on hand really fit.
We are lucky enough to have both a full-time composer and a full-time sound designer at Half Past Yellow, so Nino (our composer) made the decision to make something bespoke. It took around 4 days for him to put together a track that properly fit the trailer pace and the experiments have bled back into game music.
Nino's thoughts at that time "Seeing the draft of the trailer made me question the whole musical direction of the game. So, the only reasonable thing to do was to let go the current direction and just vibe with what I have on the screen in front of me. Shortly after, it clicked, and everything started making sense again. The music direction and overall experience of the game had been changed for me. Since then, I have been revisiting the previous tracks I made for the game, sometimes re-doing them from scratch. Whatever it takes for the best experience."
Once we had a final trailer edit and music track, it was time to add SFX and balance the audio. Goran (our sound designer) previously worked in film and TV, which is a godsend in situations like this. For the purposes of highlighting specific sounds and properly balancing the SFX and music, it was easier for him to dub over the trailer than worry about using the existing sounds in the clips that James recorded.
I asked Goran to write up some of his thoughts: "The video was action-packed, so finding the right balance between composition and sound design was crucial. The trailer began with a gameplay-driven scene to give a brief glimpse of the world, followed by a gradual buildup into a high-energy trailer sequence. This transition emphasized the core gameplay mechanics while maintaining a strong focus on the sound effects that complemented the music. Since the music was percussive, the percussive elements of the sound design naturally blended in, almost as if they were part of the music itself."
Balancing the audio is always a friendly fight between Nino and Goran. They both live in the same city, so they met up in person to produce the final audio mix and celebrate the completed trailer.
Eventually, the trailer was complete. We handed off the final audio mix to James along with the art for the end slate and layout mock-ups. From start to finish, I took just under 3 weeks to put everything together and we couldn’t be happier with the results. I hope that you enjoy this first look at Tempest Tower and that you will keep an eye out for more news about the game and its production!