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Episode Summary

Picture a player scrolling through Steam, looking for their next game to wishlist. Your game is sitting right beside dozens of others, all fighting for the same pair of eyes. Around 21,000 games launched on Steam last year, and 2026 is already well past 10,000. In that moment, your steam capsule art gets about a second to give them a reason to stop. If they do click, your trailer gets two or three seconds to give them a reason to stay.

That is why I brought on Will Perkins. Will is the Chief Creative Officer at CONTINUE, a Toronto marketing and creative agency built for arts and entertainment, with about 70 percent of its work in indie games. His team had six showings at this year’s Summer Game Fest, including the live action teaser for Studio MDHR’s Mighty Cuphead Adventure and the wonderfully strange announcement trailer for 13AM Games’ Dungeon Lurker.

In this conversation, Will walks through how his team actually gets the work done. We start with the research: becoming an expert in the game, reading the Steam reviews of comparable titles, and figuring out who the players are before a single asset gets made. From there we get into key art that reads at every size, how to fit your genre without disappearing into it, and how to test what you have made. Then we move to trailers: what to show in the first three seconds, why so many indie trailers blur together, and how voice and music can make a chat full of strangers stop and look up.

If you have ever stared at your Steam page and wondered why people are not clicking, friend, this one is for you.

Meet Our Guest: Will Perkins, CONTINUE

Will started out as a journalist, and it shows in how he works. Before CONTINUE he was a Senior Editor at Art of the Title, the site dedicated to title sequence design, and he still talks about box art the way he talks about a great title sequence: it is the foyer you walk through before you enter the world. His rule from those days carried over too. He can only tell a story if he knows what he is talking about.

CONTINUE has a humble origin story. Will led the creative services team at a general purpose marketing agency, working mostly for real estate brokerages and law firms, with the odd game or film project mixed in. Those were the projects the team loved. Almost five years ago they spun off, pivoted hard into arts and entertainment, and slowly left the corporate clients behind. Today about 70 percent of the business is indie games, with the rest in film and television: feature and documentary trailers, behind the scenes content, and more.

The recent run speaks for itself. Studio MDHR reached out to CONTINUE directly for the 1980s style live action teaser for Mighty Cuphead Adventure, which Will admits had him checking that the email was not a joke. They created the key art and announcement trailer for Dungeon Lurker, and the launch and Act Two announcement trailers for Soft Rains’ Ambrosia Sky, where Will personally logged close to 40 hours of game capture. They also served as creative consultants on Komi Games’ Gemini X trailer.

Website: continueagency.com

LinkedIn: Will Perkins

Instagram: @wearecontinue

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Key Takeaways

“If you’re coming from a good place with this, you’re not selling it to them. You’re just showing them something that they are definitely gonna want to see.”

— Will Perkins, CONTINUE

• Become an expert in the game before you make a single asset. Will’s team starts every project by playing the game, reading the design docs, and getting inside the developer’s head. Then they look outward: who the players are, where they hang out, and what comparable games are doing with their key art, trailers, and social content. One of his favourite sources is the Steam reviews of comparable titles, because players will tell you exactly which opportunities another team missed. He calls it a little bit art and a little bit science, and he warns against assuming that what worked for another game will work one to one for yours.
• Start the marketing conversation years out, not weeks out. Will has had teams show up a month before launch, sometimes a couple of weeks before, after two or three years of development. By then most of the opportunity is gone. Bring marketing thinking in early and it can even shape the game itself, because knowing your audience changes what you build. His gut check for anyone making the kind of game they want to play: is it the kind of game more than just you wants to play, and have you tested that?
• Go where the players are, and bet on small creators. Engagement from fellow devs on X or Bluesky feels great, and other devs can be real champions for your game, but they are not your consumer audience. If Will had to pick one channel right now, it would be creators. He would rather have 10 or 20 small, focused creators who fit the game than one or two big names charging tens of thousands of dollars. Reach out like a human, point to a similar game they already love, and remember that they need content too. For community, he is steering clients toward a mailing list they own instead of putting every egg in the Discord basket.
• Your key art has to read at every size. A logotype can be clever, tied to the game, and completely unreadable once it shrinks to a Steam thumbnail. Will’s checklist is short: is it readable, does it communicate the core idea of the game, and will it stand out in a sea of capsules. Negative space matters, because plenty of capsules are pure visual noise with nothing for the eye to anchor on. As he put it, you can have the greatest, coolest game in the world, and if the thumbnail is not doing its job, you are up the creek without a paddle.
• Meet genre expectations, then find your twist. Lean too hard on the tropes of your genre and you look like every other game in the category. For Dungeon Lurker, which plays with a 1995 setting, CONTINUE built the key art as a mid 90s video game magazine ad, complete with plasticine models and over the top copy. Will also borrows from film, since movie posters carry a hundred years of design history worth mining. His one caveat came up again and again: it has to make sense for your game, never weird for the sake of weird.
• Treat key art like game design: iterate and test. Steam has no built in A/B testing, but YouTube and Meta do, so run a few versions of your art there and watch click through rate and retention. Tools like Gamalytic let you look back at how other games changed their capsules over time. On Steam itself, the quiet stretches between marketing beats are the time to swap a capsule and watch what happens, so a trailer drop or demo launch does not muddy the result. And get a second opinion before you lock anything in, because sometimes you are too busy cooking in the lab to see what is going on outside.
• Your trailer has two to three seconds, so open on gameplay. No studio logos, no wall of text, no long fade in from black. Get to gameplay or relevant footage right away. Even the Dungeon Lurker trailer, which is mostly live action, opens with a five second gameplay teaser made specifically for the Steam crowd. Whatever you show also has to be true to the game, because Will has read countless Steam reviews that boil down to “this trailer lied to me.”
• Sameness is the real enemy, and sound is your secret weapon. Gameplay, title card, gameplay, title card, wishlist now. Will sees that same trailer constantly, and in a showcase of 50 trailers it turns into background noise. Voiceover and music built for the trailer, with a real rise and climax, can pull people’s eyes up from their second screen. When the Dungeon Lurker trailer aired on The MIX stream, Will watched a snarky YouTube chat slow down and start asking what this was. That trailer was made in February, edited by March, and aired in June, so give yourself lead time.

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Show Notes & Mentioned Resources

About Will and CONTINUE

• CONTINUE
• Will Perkins on LinkedIn
• CONTINUE on Instagram

Trailers We Talk About

• Dungeon Lurker Announcement Trailer
• Mighty Cuphead Adventure Teaser
• Gemini X Announcement Trailer
• Ambrosia Sky Act Two Announcement

Games Mentioned

• Dungeon Lurker by 13AM Games
• Mighty Cuphead Adventure by Studio MDHR
• Gemini X by Komi Games
• Ambrosia Sky by Soft Rains
• Elsewhere Electric by Games by Stitch

Play It Forward

Will’s shout out went to Scott Christian and the team at Hilltop Studios, a Toronto studio he describes as great collaborators with access to an incredible pool of voice talent.

• Curse of Resthaven, which Will pitches as Twin Peaks meets Lovecraft on a weird island with a time loop
• Lil’ Guardsman, Hilltop’s previous game

Tools and Resources Mentioned

• steamcapsule: browse Steam capsule art by genre for inspiration
• Gamalytic: Steam data, including how a game’s header and capsule art have changed over time
• Derek Lieu and his YouTube channel: Will calls him one of the best in the trailer business
• Coffee with Butterscotch: the Butterscotch Shenanigans podcast, where they discussed swapping capsule art during quiet periods
• Canada Media Fund and Ontario Creates: funders that expect you to show your market research

Related Freaking Cool Indies Episodes

• Stop Wasting Money on Bad Capsule Art: how to brief and work with a capsule artist
• Meet the Man Behind Gaming’s Most Iconic Indie Trailers: Derek Lieu on working with a trailer editor
• How Two Theatre Writers Built An Award-Winning Video Game: Scott Christian of Hilltop Studios

Key Frameworks from This Episode

• Art and Science. Become the expert on the game, gather every bit of market data you can, then take your best swing and adjust based on what players actually do.
• Readable, Clear, Distinct. Check every piece of key art for three things: it reads at every size, it communicates the core idea of the game, and it stands out beside the other capsules in your genre.
• Gameplay in the First Three Seconds. Skip the logos and text, open your trailer on gameplay or relevant footage, and save the slow build for after you have earned attention.
• True to the Game. Everything in your key art and trailer should reflect the experience players will actually have, so the big creative swing still makes sense for your game.
• It Is All One Piece. The game, key art, trailer, social voice, and press release should all talk to each other, with the player you made the game for in mind.

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