When I first started writing the lore it was pretty unoriginal with magic, elves and orcs. That soon was set aside so I could come up with something from scratch, more true to my vision and without the constraints of existing mithos. Of course it is more work but I’m having fun creating the different races with their characteristics and relationship with the world.
The goal was to make a world that feels different from what’s out there and incorporate different cultures that inspire me. And the same goes for the art, the goal is to present something very unique that will make people recognize where it is from.
As the mechanics of the game evolved the lore was also evolving in parallel, slowly. At later stages of the design the lore started influencing and shaping the mechanics, and vice versa. It was almost like designing top-down and bottom-up at the same time, until they met and started to merge.
A lot of work and research was done to build a world that is believable, intriguing and full of life. While game design can be abstract for many people, a world feels concrete and showing it through illustrations is a powerful thing. One skill illustration that I love and shows a bit of the lore is Raid the Burning depicting the mythical snake Boita, a creature based on a brazilian folk tale.
The best part of creating the lore was giving the game world a solid and real feeling, which I believe is important for immersion and to make players take the game more seriously. Another good aspect of having the lore defined (even if still not completely polished) and tied with the mechanics is that it helped me write all the art descriptions for the 100 skills in Ambal Tournament: Foundation, giving them depth and uniqueness.
Writing these descriptions was a journey on itself, imagining how each skill would be used in the game world and the best ways to represent them visually so Vincent, the artist, could bring them to life. It is a lot of work but honestly, having the lore to support it helped me immensely.
This is usually done by a publisher, but if you are going to self-publish you should consider building the world of your game to something you believe and like, even if you are using an existing world, make it your own.
The land of Ambal explores different facets of humanity through the different civilizations, different races like the immortal Yoro, different creatures and spirits that inhabit the land. These past days I took time to work on a map for the land of Ambal, giving it a body makes it more real for me and it also helps organize my thoughts while I keep working on the lore.
It’s been a lot of fun to create this and share the history of Ambal little by little. I want to base future sets of Ambal Tournament on the developing story, showing how new skills, new Schools of Knowledge and even new mechanics come into existence.