An RPG about golf with famously lots more to do than just golfing, Golf Story was released in the first six months of the Nintendo Switch's lifespan when the idea that a Nintendo console could be a leading platform for indie games was just beginning to manifest. Golf Story was unique not just for proving that the Switch was accommodating to indie developers, but for being an (even more so at the time) rare Nintendo-exclusive indie title.

Years later, its sequel, Sports Story, earned itself an opening spot in a Nintendo Direct that also included announcements for SuperMash and SkateBIRD, among other indie titles. Now, developer Andrew Newey from Sidebar Games has revealed a few new details about the sequel in an interview with Nintendo fansite Nintendo Everything.

As its name pretty directly suggests, Sports Story's most notable change to the Golf Story formula is the introduction of new sports mechanics beyond just golf. Newey explains that this simple "yes and-ing" of the original game's premise fueled numerous design decisions. For example, dungeon-crawling segments, as shown in the Nintendo Direct trailer, was one way the development team decided that its multitude of sports mechanics could be integrated into a new and unique environment. Stealth segments (utilizing its sports mechanics) were included, similarly, in order to foreground the game's plot.

RELATED: Golf Story Gets Sequel, Focused On More Sports

While Sports Story is being created by a small development team, just as Golf Story was before it, the sequel is most notably employing a higher number of artists, due to an increase in both sporting animations and unique objects in its levels, those inevitably being a result of the newly-introduced sporting mechanics. So far, the game has been in development for about a year, Newey says, with an expected release of mid-2020.

Other new additions to the sequel include a complex fishing minigame and a mysterious update to GALF—the golfing game-within-a-game from Golf Story that reduced the normal game's SNES-inspired style to NES-level graphics and mechanics. Except, Newey promises that this time, the GALF (or its Sports Story equivalent) is something that nobody will expect or see coming.

Source: Nintendo Everything

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