I recently fell into a YouTube rabbit hole and found a Game Developers Conference talk by Rebekah Saltsman, CEO of Finji, the indie game studio behind TUNIC.
TUNIC is an isometric action-adventure game about a tiny fox. It looks cute at first glance, but underneath the soft exterior is a game full of secrets, difficult combat, and old-school exploration.
In the talk, Rebekah shares a painful lesson from the development of the game:
“We had to stop TUNIC development entirely in 2018 in order to build a trailer. We have stopped doing that. Now we prepare almost everything that we do in advance and we schedule this into production itself.”
That line captures a trap many teams fall into. You’re deep in development. The roadmap is full. The team is trying to hit a milestone. Then an opportunity appears: a showcase, festival, platform feature, press beat, or launch campaign.
Great news, right? Except now you need a polished trailer, playable demo, screenshots, product walkthrough, or vertical slice. Suddenly, the team has to pause building the product so they can create the materials needed to sell it.
Rebekah’s better question was: “What part of your in-development game can double as your future marketing needs? What can you make now that is cool enough for later?”
That is the core idea: use your product to sell your product.
Marketing should not be a panic button
In a lot of teams, marketing sits at the end of the process.
First you build the thing. Then, once it is nearly done, you figure out how to explain it, promote it, package it, and make people care.
But games run on anticipation. Players, press, streamers, platform holders, festivals, and communities all need something to react to before the final build exists.
If you wait until the end, every marketing moment becomes a production emergency.
Finji learned this the hard way. During TUNIC’s development, the team once had to stop normal production to create a trailer. To make that trailer compelling, they needed exciting, polished material under pressure.
That creates friction fast. Production sees marketing as a distraction. Marketing sees production as unprepared. Everyone is right, and everyone is frustrated.
The fix is not “do more marketing.” The fix is to treat future marketing needs as part of production planning.
Build the cool thing early
The best marketing assets usually come from the product itself.
A great boss fight. A beautiful area. A surprising mechanic. A strange enemy. A tiny animation with personality. A moment that makes someone say, “Wait, what is this?”
Those things are not separate from the game. They are the game.
The trick is to identify them early and build them in a way that can serve multiple purposes later.
If your game will eventually need a trailer, demo, screenshots, GIFs, press kit, store page footage, and convention material, don’t act surprised when those needs arrive. Plan for them.
That might mean building a polished vertical slice earlier than feels natural, rather than the whole game layer by layer. This gives you a small, honest, representative piece of the experience.
If your game has narrative, combat, a boss battle, a magic system, and exploration, your early slice should include small but polished examples of each.
That one chunk of production can become:
- a trailer capture source
- a festival demo
- a press preview
- a Steam demo
- a batch of screenshots
- short social clips
- internal proof that the core loop works
This is efficient because the work compounds. You are not building disposable marketing fluff. You are building a real part of the product in a way that can also communicate the product.
Use the product to fix messaging problems
One of the smartest parts of Saltsman’s talk was the way she described marketing as a tool for identifying misunderstanding.
TUNIC had a positioning problem: it looked cute. A small fox. A green tunic. A bright, charming world. Many players naturally assumed it would be a breezy Zelda-like adventure.
But TUNIC is harsher than that. Its combat is demanding. Its secrets are opaque. Its world can be punishing.
That expectation mismatch matters. If players buy the game expecting a cozy adventure and instead get crushed by difficult enemies, that becomes a problem for managing reviews, growing community, and building trust.
Finji didn’t solve it only with copy or PR language. They built product material that communicated the truth.
They created a focused demo that highlighted combat, danger, and mystery. It showed players what the game actually was, not just what it looked like. Then, when the right showcase opportunity appeared later, they already had the asset ready.
The product itself became the explanation.
Make development assets work twice
This idea applies far beyond games.
If you are building a SaaS product, your polished onboarding flow can become your product walkthrough. Your best dashboard view can become your hero image. Your sandbox environment can become your sales demo. Your internal use cases can become case studies.
If you are building a mobile app, your most satisfying interaction can become your launch video. Your empty state can become a screenshot. Your core loop can become a short social clip.
If you are building a physical product, your prototyping process can become behind-the-scenes content. Your packaging tests can become teaser material. Your manufacturing details can become proof of craft.
The question is always the same: What are we already making that could help people understand, want, trust, or share this?
That doesn’t mean every decision should be driven by marketing. It means noticing which parts of the product have communicative power.
Some features are not just useful, they are understandable and show value quickly. These features deserve attention early.
Design for shareable moments
Great products naturally create marketing moments, but you can make those moments easier to capture. For games, that might mean:
- a photo mode
- strong visual silhouettes
- readable combat encounters
- expressive character animation
- short loops that look good as GIFs
- streamer-friendly surprises
- demo sections that teach quickly
- worlds that look compelling in still images
For software, it might mean:
- a clear “aha” moment in onboarding
- sample data that makes the product look alive
- a clean demo workspace
- exportable reports
- shareable results
- before-and-after views
- templates that show immediate value
For any product, it means proposing: when someone encounters this for the first time, what will they want to show someone else?
That is where organic marketing begins.
Your best marketing is proof
There is a limit to what advertising can do.
A strong marketing campaign can amplify interest, but it cannot replace a product that gives people something worth talking about.
The best marketing usually comes from the product’s own evidence: the gameplay, the visuals, the workflow, the result, the transformation, the feeling.
That is why “use your product to sell your product” is such a useful principle. It forces you to stop treating marketing as decoration and start treating it as proof.
- Don’t tell people the game is mysterious. Build a demo that makes them feel the mystery.
- Don’t tell people the app saves time. Show the workflow collapsing from ten steps to two.
- Don’t tell people the product is delightful. Capture the moment where delight actually happens.
Build the thing in a way that makes the promise visible.
Final thoughts
Finji’s lesson from TUNIC is that promotional assets should not constantly derail production. They should emerge from production.
The team should know early which parts of the product need to be polished, captured, shared, demoed, and explained.
With this, you are no longer stopping development to make a trailer. You are, instead, building a slice of the game that can become a trailer.
So before your next milestone, ask Saltsman’s question: What can we make now that is cool enough for later?
When you build with that in mind, every piece of work starts doing double duty. It moves the product forward, and it creates the material you’ll need to sell it.
That is how you build hype easily, without bolting it on at the end.
