After 300 hours of work and $1,500 spent on assets, a solo indie developer has released a parody trailer of The Day Before that has come to be a cautionary tale of being wary of overpromising marketing.
As indie developer Crimson told us previously, they were initially inspired to whip up a 'parody' trailer to see if they could capture the same degree of promise as what came in The Day Before's own trailers.
There was already a degree of skepticism around fans at the time as we hadn't seen much of The Day Before, though the worst was to come as the game crashed and burned at launch – it wasn't the survival MMO fans were sold, bugs were rampant, and developer Fntastic called it quits not longer after. The Day Before was a "financial failure," and so the publisher stepped in to ensure everyone was refunded.
Despite all of this, Crimson was determined to finish their project – they were right, after all, just maybe not to the degree they expected. Called The Day After – it's certainly not lost on me this trailer released the day after The Day Before's servers shut down – the near-13-minute trailer shows off plenty of savaging through abandoned cities and the odd zombie.
When we previously spoke to Crimson, I asked if they were surprised by how things played out and if they had second thoughts about the project at any point because of it.
"Sadly, I wasn't too surprised about the result of what they released," they say. "I really wanted to be proven wrong about the trailers and see some grand launch with tons of content and basically doing well on their concept, but unfortunately, that didn't happen. The studio closure, though, was definitely a shocker, especially how soon it happened after their launch date, a bit of a red flag but still very shocking."
300 hours of work later, the project is done and out the door. While Crimson isn't likely to release a playable build of the trailer, a survival co-op game is on the horizon after they finish their current effort, a top-down action shooter that blends gunplay and martial arts called Suit for Hire. We'll be sure to watch the trailer with a close eye.
