KickStarter The Iron Oath - turn-based strategy RPG with awesome pixel art

[Pink Eye]

Oooh. Very cool. Still no gameplay though.

 

[Zombra]

It's like they heard Pink Eye! 3 minutes of gameplay!

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...th-dark-turn-based-tactical-rpg/posts/2703390

November Update

Hello backers! As mentioned last time around, our November wrap-up is going to be a short one, but we've not come empty-handed! We realized that it's been a while since we've shown a gameplay video, so we figured we'd share a small dialogue & combat sequence with you:



We've been working on a variety of things this past month such as new enemies, new status and damage type icons (shown below, not reflected yet in the video above), new application effects for conditions, with the biggest task being the implementation of the Camping feature. We can't share any visuals of it yet as it hasn't been skinned but you'll see it in a few months time and we'll talk about it in-depth then.

Lastly, here are the idle animations for some of our recently completed demon enemies, animated by @rafaelborven. We'll be sharing their ability animations over the coming weeks via Twitter and Facebook.

Temptress

Dreadknight

Tormentor

Our next update will likely come after New Year's, so in the meantime we hope you all have a Merry Christmas and a fantasic Holiday season

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...th-dark-turn-based-tactical-rpg/posts/2728156

Happy New Year!

Hello backers! Firstly we'd like to wish a Happy New Year to all of you, and we hope you had a terrific Holiday season Recently we've been putting a lot of focus on adding polish to combat, so in this update we're going to show off some of these improvements, which includes new hit effects, violent deaths, and boss kill effects.

Hit Effects

We've revamped all of the hit effects in the game for melee attacks, blood spatters and blocks. The effects we had previously been using were far too small and not stylish enough for our tastes, so we took a lot of inspiration from fighting games and we're quite happy with the result. Here's a look at some example gifs. (no in-game footage for these ones quite yet as they're still being implemented)

Block

Crushing Damage

Piercing Damage

Slashing Damage

The effects also change slightly based on the angle of attack, which helps convey the direction of the attack a lot more than they previously did.

Violent Deaths

Violent deaths was one of the stretch goals that was reached during the campaign. We've made them pretty gory with some Mortal Kombat influence. Each piece has its own physics applied to it, so violent deaths will always be different, and we felt it was a better way to go than having 1 single canned animation per enemy/class(also far less time consuming!). Here's a video example, the sound effects are new and still being tweaked but pretty close to what the finished product should be.


Boss Kills

Boss kills also have a unique effect now too, as we felt that their death animation went by a little too quick and didn't allow much time for the player to savor the moment. We've added a freeze frame effect which puts a lot more focus on the kill. We're still making a couple tweaks to the sounds effects for this one, but it's pretty close to finished!


That's everything we wanted to share this month and we hope you like the improvements! Our next update will will come in mid-February, where we'll have some pretty exciting news to share with you, so stay tuned!

 

[Major_Blackhart]

Overall, I'm excited for this game.

 

[frajaq]

Nice to see that this is progressing well

 

[Pink Eye]

Nice. This game is coming along very nicely indeed.

 

[anvi]

I see no game, just endless animations for pixel art hipster whores.

 

[Norfleet]

Jeez. That's some extreme splatter and chunkage for a guy merely stabbed with a spear. What the hell is that spear, the fire-lance of superheated meat-explosion?

 

[Sarissofoi]

That is fine. What about global simulation and management part?

 

[Abu Antar]

Game will be shown in a playable state.

 

[jac8awol]

Seriously excited about this project and it's hard to say why! Just captivated by the style I guess. I have high hopes for this and Urtuk.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...th-dark-turn-based-tactical-rpg/posts/2757122

February Update (PAX East, Community Discord)

Hi backers!

A few months ago we mentioned we had some exciting news to share but weren't able to do so at the time. We're now able to, and are extremely excited to announce that we will be taking The Iron Oath to PAX East in Boston later this month! We will be showcasing it in the Indie MegaBooth along with a bunch of other awesome developers from February 27-March 1. We hope that some of you can stop by to say hi and try out the game!

Below is s a cropped view of the floor plan so you can see where exactly we're situated!

The Iron Oath Discord Server

We've opened up our Discord server to the public! Everyone is welcome to join and we encourage you to do so invite your friends too! A few channels will remain private to the higher tier backers, but now everyone will be able to join in on general discussion. You can find it here: https://discord.gg/HC4AKaA

With Steam's new events & announcements feature, we're going to start posting regular dev logs on there as well. You can head over to our Steam page to comment and give them a thumbs-up, in addition to adding the game to your Wishlist if you haven't yet (which helps with visibility). While there, you may also notice that we've updated our logo and key art in time for PAX, both of which we're very happy with!

We still have some things to do prior to PAX, so it's back to work for us now, but we'll be back next month to give you a recap and share some other news! Thanks for reading, and we hope you're enjoying the long weekend!

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Darth Canoli]

So far so good, i can't wait to see how exploration and management are.

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Sarissofoi]

Pretty neat.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/project...th-dark-turn-based-tactical-rpg/posts/2793510

March Update (Humble Partnership + PAX East Recap)

Hey everyone! We hope you're all doing well and staying safe during these uncertain times. We have a couple things on the menu for this month's update, and first up is a very special announcement that we can finally reveal: our partnership with Humble Bundle!

We've had to keep it under wraps for a while, but we've been working with them as our our publisher for a little over a year now and it's been a great relationship thus far. It's certainly made development easier and less stressful, and they've been super supportive every step of the way.

I know some of you may be a bit wary of us getting a publisher, but we can assure you that the game's design has not and will not be compromised in any way due to this, and ultimately we still have 100% creative control. We'll also have more news to announce as the result of our partnership down the line!

To go along with this announcement, Humble has just launched a new video series for showcasing their upcoming games catalog called the Humble Brag. You can check it out here: (We're at the end! Be sure to drop them a like and subscribe too)

PAX East Recap

At the end of February we attended PAX East with a new build of The Iron Oath. This was our first time attending a PAX event in any capacity, and we were pretty overwhelmed by the size of it! We participated in DreamHack Austin back in 2018 with an early build of the game, which helped give us some booth experience, but PAX East is an entirely different animal and was quite a lot of work for just the two of us. That being said, we managed just fine aside from some sore feet

All set for day one!
Over the course of 4 full days we ended up handing out about 800-900 postcards, and our 3-station booth was fully occupied 95% of the time (probably had around 200 players). It was very encouraging for us to see so many enjoy the game, and be genuinely excited and interested in talking to us about the design and features it has to offer. We'd also like to give a special shout-out to the handful of Kickstarter backers who stopped by to say hi and check out the game; It was great to meet you all!

Chris blocking the TV!

We were pretty nervous about the difficulty level of the demo, but it fortunately ended up being just right. Experienced tactical RPG players were able to clear it by utilizing familiar techniques, and those who were less experienced generally found success as well so long as they took their time to read and plan things out. We didn't keep exact statistics, but something like an 85% success rate seems likely. We were also very happy to see that the vast majority of players who sat down tended to play to completion (or their death haha) despite the demo being a somewhat lengthy 30 minutes. We also came away with a few nice suggestions which is always one benefit of an event like this, but for the most part it seemed like we had a lot of quality of life things covered already

As mentioned in the last update, we were fortunate enough to be selected by the Indie MEGABOOTH and we can't thank them enough for letting us take part with so many other great devs. It was a terrific experience and we met a lot of great people(shout out to our booth neighbors Warhammer Underworlds Online & Stronghold: Warlords - be sure to check them out!). Hopefully we'll be back for future events

We have a few things to tweak, but we do plan on making this build available to all Kickstarter backers for next months update, so watch out for that! In addition, we'll also go in-depth about an update to the Dungeon Exploration system which was first revealed at PAX.

To stay up to date in the meantime, be sure to join our Discord server if you haven't yet. Everyone is welcome to join and we'd love to have you be a part of our community

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[anvi]

Zzz

 

[Abu Antar]

 

[Bara]

Not much in terms of news but maybe we're nearing release as Devs commented on steam they've had talks with gog to get on their platform.

https://steamcommunity.com/app/699330/discussions/0/2263563948129589600/#c2263564102369482594

 

[Sarissofoi]

Hopefully.

 

[agris]

Have we seen any screens demonstrating mechanics outside of combat? Combat is not this whole game, there’s a guild / kingdom aspect, a lineage / heredity system... all the sprites and combat vfx have had me worried they aren’t advancing the ball in the actual gameplay systems that made this sound interesting.

 

[anvi]

I don't think there are any mechanics, just a game full of animations.