A trailer, like a sentence, should give convey the feeling that you want your game to give. The focus should be on the Why more than the how.

Waiting for the programming to finish, I have a bunch of script and visual assets just sitting around. Like I said it expresses the full sell points of the game. Dates, Dawn looking adorable, comedy, angst, and existential dread. I thought about plotting out some future parts of the story and doing some renders to give a later taste. I did something similar at the end of the First Date Update. But, looking over what I had, none of it added to the sentiments in the existing renders. I have a breadth of visuals and promo artwork to display.

The writing is key. Some lines I can take whole from the game. Others need too much context to exist how they do on the page. For my preview of Candy in Oblivion, I take a line "How can you be shopping at a time like this?" which starts a conversation that eventually gets to the point of the story but it doesn't make a good preview. So, I made it "How can you be shopping at a time like this? We are all going to die!" In the story, this would not make sense and put off the reader, rather than draw them in. A preview or trailer, however, is perfect. The job of the preview and trailer is to give the emotion of the story and make people desire the context.

Why do I want people to play Romancing the Sun. -dates -fun -comedy -uncertainty -cute girl. There is overlap and repetition in those messages in the trailer. That is partly because all of these things will overlap naturally and partly because the mind picks up on patterns and in repetition, there is a promise that is being made to the audience.

There are a few trailer tropes that I don't like and I have heard others complain about. 
-Don't just put up gameplay or an unedited video of your game. It doesn't quite catch the attention. If your game is a visual novel or mechanics game, a trailer needs to introduce the audience to the material. It is asking them to be hook before you give them the hook.
-It is easy to do a photo motif, especially for visual novels because most of your material is pictures. There are a lot of family photo display graphics that you can just plug in some images and let do the work. But unless photos play into your themes, it will feel weird to the audience.
-Don't sacrifice game time for working on the trailer. Make a good game first.
-Don't post anything on Reddit, if you aren't familiar with Reddit. Reddit exists for its own sake and its own communities. You might be hungry for those eyes but their number one consumption need is more reddit posts and their number two is making up rules to delete your posts.

Trailers are an audio and video format. Similar to how I low-key hate voice acting in visual novels, I had reading videos. There is a lot of voice actors that do a great job and I love. In a game, I always turn voice acting off and text speed to instant. Visual Novels tend to belong and you can almost always skin the beginning (goddamned do I hate lore). But a trailer is an entire experience and you don't want to focus your attention on an inch of the screen when you could be taking it all in.  Semipro and pro voice actors will have a leg up on you when it comes to quality.

If any part of the production is done poorly, it can ruin the whole thing. A trailer without voice acting is better than the same trailer with bad voice acting. Communication and honesty is the best foot forward. If you can't pay the voice actor a lot upfront, be clear. If it is your first-time video editing, be clear. Bringing on new collaborators onto a project, it is important to be kind. Especially, if you aren't paying them a lot. In my experience, it is a lot more helpful to express verbally that you feel frustrated with a take or process, rather than express those feelings in actual frustration or abuse.

Of course, this also extends to video editors. I do youtube and throwing together some audio and voice clips to music is the least complicated thing I have done.  (I recreated the Mr. Rogers opening for a video essay). But I was in charge of that project and will be in charge of my trailer. I have hated doing video editing for collaboration. I am much more comfortable including other people's visions rather than have to redo my work for minute differences. Perfect visions are for pretentious suckers. Why did I get so angry?

~I hope you learned something and like my trailer. Maybe tell people to play my fun dating game.

-Ray