Story

Story

Index: Story Narration, Attu Games Commentary The Feudal Alloy story is conveyed through narration during the opening and closing cutscenes, which set the narrative in motion and provide closure at the end of the game. It is true that story leaves so much to be desired, considering the charming and intriguing concept of fish-controlled robots with a steampunk theme in a medieval setting. However, upon examining the backgrounds of the areas, there are hints of much-needed environmental storytelling, ranging from battlefields strewn with torn robot bodies to remnants of bygone human civilizations. Nonetheless, without the context, it is all left to your imagination. This was not always the case, as we can learn from interviews with Attu Games regarding their early game ideas. Furthermore, the concept of animated dialogues through speech bubbles featuring NPCs was in development but was unfortunately abandoned later in the process. Story Narration Opening Narration Attu was just your average farmer robot, who lived at the edge of a small village. He'd spent his entire life taking care of retired veteran robots. He oiled their rusty bodies using sunflower oil, which was made from sunflowers that he had grown himself. The job wasn't an easy one, but it was immensely fulfilling for him to provide a useful service to others. His job gave him the opportunity to hear a lots of interesting stories from the elderly robots. They told him of how they had spent their lives travelling to faraway countries and had fought in many significant battles throughout history. Attu had always wanted to travel too, but his plans always came crashing down around him before he had even got started. Attu also knew only too well how dangerous the creatures in the local surrounding woods were, so why would he risk travelling beyond the boundary of his home village? Then, one quiet summer's afternoon, the village was suddenly ransacked by a gang of robot bandits. They stole all of the vitally important oil supplies he needed to care for the retired robots, as well as valuables from local residents. Attu was concerned and didn't really know what to do, but he had a strong feeling that he had a responsibility to help the other villagers and decided to bravely go against his gut and venture into the dangerous woods. He borrowed a rusty sword from one of the elderly robots and set off on a mission to reclaim the stolen oil that the villagers so desperately needed to survive. The best clandestine escape route that Attu could think of was travelling through the interconnected cellars underneath the village which were designed to protect people from enemy attacks during wartime. Ending Narration Attu had bravely tracked down and defeated all of the robot bandits that had ransacked his home village. He learned many useful skills on his adventure, which allowed him to recover the stolen sunflower oil and return it to the elderly villagers. He was so happy that the villagers could return to their peaceful and relaxing existence.... Attu Games Commentary on the Story Feudal Alloy is set in an odd world in the far future where the fish built mechanical bodies from the relics of lost human civilizations. It means there’s a lot of human technology (teleporters, electric power), but they had to build a lot of things from scratch. So we try to connect the medieval style with new technology. [indiegraze.com interview] Originally, Eva and I were putting together a story scenario, which is actually indicated at the beginning of the game. Over time, we started to focus on other things, and the story actually fell out of the game. [Martin Virt's translated interview] "I'm sorry that we have almost no story in the game; we didn't have time to make it," revealed Eva Navratilova. Lukas Navratil added, "We wanted more things, some dialogues, NPCs, and so on, but we didn't have time. We had to cut a lot of things. [translated Zing.cz interview] Unused concept of animated dialogues, where conversations happen by way of animated speech bubbles: This will replace text in all in-game conversations with chat bubbles. Technically, making the animated bubble system is much more challenging, but I hope it will be fun for players. [translated Čeština ve videohrách interview] The reason why we use the animated bubbles is simple. We don’t like a huge amount of text in the game (except the item attributes and descriptions, of course), and there are not many games that have this kind of animated bubbles out there. We thought it would be easier, as we wouldn’t have to translate all the dialogue text, but it turned out the animations are way more difficult to make. [indiegraze.com interview] You can see the bubble dialogue in action in both archived teaser 2018 and teaser 2017.