Hello y'all. I'm making a puzzle game. It has a simple game mechanic. But the main focus of the game is to use that mechanic to break the game(or rather, the physics engine) deliberately. I'm unsure of how to promote this.

In order to showcase that aspect, I'd need to spoil the puzzles. I want the mechanics to come as a surprise but a trailer would ruin that. And not all levels can be shown and understood within the small timeframe of a trailer.

I tried focusing on showing the mechanic instead. But that just makes people go “Neat. So what” and move on. And to make matters worse, the games a puzzle platformer so I already have trouble getting people interested.

Is it ok to have levels that are not in game and are just used to showcase the mechanics for the trailer? That would at least preserve the aha moment when playing the game. Is that false marketing?

In addition to short ads presenting advanced out-of-context maneuvers, it can be popular to show failures of obvious maneuvers. Plenty of games do this on small ads, showing simple success, simple success, then multiple failures that could be easily solved based on the first two successes.

Sizzle videos often show a mix of the basics to show just how easy it is, then quick snapshots of progressively complex puzzles, occasionally showing massive chain-reactions or similar.