Believe it or not, many people enjoy Swords and Sandals games for their stories! Shock horror! Funny enough, the games of course started out with next to no story ( you're a pirate, crash on an island, fight some arena champions ) but it's grown to be quite a long tale now. Swords and Sandals Immortals is of course no exception to this, with what I hope provides a compelling story for the player to follow as they make their way around Brandor.
One of the things I've learned from making these games is you definitely want an overarching story as a way to guide the player on what they're supposed to do next, a reason from going from point A to point B, a reason to defeat these Arena Champions , a sense of urgency and so on.
I made a bit of a mistake back in the day when I was building Swords and Sandals Pirates - and that was to scrap the proposed story I had been writing in which our captain tracked down the X number of pirate captains who had betrayed and left him for dead. Without this story, the game was more of an open ended sandbox, but it left the player a little aimless without a motivation as to why they were sailing around.
Now of course, the heart of S&S Immortals is combat, but I want the player to be inspired, to feel like they need to be winning battles and making progress.
To this end, there will be a number of cutscenes sprinkled throughout the game, often when you unlock a new shop, or new game feature etc. These will be very simple scenes where a character pops up, spouts 3-4 lines of dialogue and then the game progresses. I know many people hate reading a lot of text so I've tried to keep these short, punchy and fun enough to drive the story forward without getting in the way.
Cheers, Oliver Joyce
Whiskeybarrel Studios