Provisions and Camping (+Thunderclap)
over 6 years ago – Sun, Sep 03, 2017 at 01:27:38 AM

Good day everyone! We're happy to see that things are still progressing smoothly as we close in on that Guild Council stretch goal. Just under $7k until we unlock it, so if there's a friend you haven't told about our game, be sure to let them know :) We have quite a few things to mention in today's update, but first we're going to touch on two important considerations for missions: provisions and camping.

Resource management during missions is vital, and before beginning any mission you will get to choose and purchase what items you wish to bring along. Every item has a capacity value associated with it, and your bag space is limited so you will need to choose wisely. Possible items include:

• Health potions: Ranging from small to large in size, used to restore health
• Elixirs: Elixirs can grant various buffs, condition immunities or damage resistances
• Antidotes: Cures the poison condition and grants a temporary immunity
• Bandages: Cures the bleed condition and reduces the effect of injuries
• Salves: Cures the burn condition and grants a temporary immunity
• Lockpicks: In the right hands, lockpicks can be used to open locked doors and chests.
• Firewood: Used to set up campfires
• Food: Used while camping to restore a small amount of health and spirit for everyone

Many rarer items also exist in the world like special incenses that can be added to campfires to ward off spirits or grant bonuses to your characters.

When missions are long enough, and provided you have firewood, you will be able to set-up a campfire to rest and restore your party’s health, spirit and mental state. When you reach an appropriate room to camp in, your characters will chime in on whether they think the location is suitable or not.

Once you begin camping, you will first choose how much firewood to use. A small fire has a lower chance of attracting attention but is less beneficial to recovery, while a larger flame does more for your characters but may also garner unwanted attention. Once the flame is lit, you will be able to consume food, use special items like incense and other consumables such as bandages.Your characters will also converse with one another during this time, discussing the task at hand or just plain small talk. Depending on what is said, your party's Spirit pools may be raised or lowered as a result.

Following that, you will then choose how long to rest for, which character(s) you want to keep watch and whether or not they should take shifts(and in which order). The longer a character is able to rest, the more health and spirit they will recover. It is possible to be ambushed by enemies while camping, so keeping watch is an important role to consider, especially if you choose to camp in an unsecured room. In addition to ambushes, there are other events that can occur as well. Depending on their perception, your lookout may hear a rustling in the distance and you can choose to wake the party, investigate, or ignore it.

Once the resting period is over, characters who managed to sleep long enough will be given a well rested bonus that will last for the next few combat encounters.

Social Goals

Thanks to you, we’ve now hit 8 social goals, and that means that every class in the game will come with at least one alternate skin! Here are the remaining targets and rewards:

• 12 Goals: Our artist will create a video tutorial explaining his process and tips for designing & animating characters
• 16 Goals: Enlarged and improved character portraits will be added for all cinematic & dialogue sequences.
• 20 Goals: Discover the hidden secrets of our game’s world by completing a multi-stage quest which will unlock an additional character class in the game.

Check out the Social Goals section on the campaign page to find out how you can help unlock these rewards!

Paypal

We’ve had quite a few requests for a Paypal option and we’d like to address our plans for that. Following the campaign, we will be using BackerKit to allow late-backers to pledge to the campaign, and you will be able to use Paypal to do so. All pledge tiers, rewards and add-ons will remain the same as they are here on Kickstarter.

Fan Art Contest

I wanted to give a quick reminder and let our new backers know about our Fan Art Contest that is open until Wednesday September 6th at 12am EST. It’s open to everyone and we’re giving away prizes to the top 5 entries. For more information, read this update.

Community Forum

I’d also like to give one more shout-out to the community forum set up by one of our awesome backers. We encourage you to register and you can find the forum HERE.

Thunderclap Campaign

Lastly, in preparation for the final 24 hours of our Kickstarter, we’ve gone and set up a Thunderclap campaign to help give us an extra boost on that final day. If you use Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr you can sign-up for free to help spread the word. We would greatly appreciate it if you could take 30 seconds to do this, it really would go a long way to reaching those stretch goals :)

Support us on Thunderclap

Thank you everyone!

We're funded! (+Stretch Goals & Add-Ons)
over 6 years ago – Sat, Sep 02, 2017 at 01:43:38 AM

We did it! We are absolutely blown away right now, and really did not expect to get funded this early in the day! Thank you so much to all of you for your incredible support on this journey so far. We are so damn happy right now and we cannot wait to get back into full-time work on The Iron Oath, but we still have one week to go here and we're not done yet! Let's get started on some stretch goals, shall we? :)

Guild Council($55K): Council members can be recruited from all over the world, but not all will be equal in ability. Each member will offer you advice and has a number of tasks that they can perform for the guild.

The Master at Arms is in charge of your warrior classes, he or she is able to train them either as a group or individually, and you can also send them on missions to various destinations to find promising new recruits. The Archmage functions in the same fashion, but is instead charged with your mages.

The Emissary is your guild’s chosen representative for improving your reputation with other factions. When assigned, they will slowly increase your reputation over time with the targeted faction. In addition, they will bring a variety of missions to your attention that the target requires assistance with, allowing you to further increase your reputation and get rewarded in the process.

The Master of Intrigue is your main advisor and functions as your eyes and ears throughout the land. They will bring important matters to your attention that you may otherwise never hear about(such as a plot to kill a liege) in addition to any unsubstantiated rumors that may be worth looking into. They also have the ability to disrupt relations between factions of your choosing, potentially providing the spark that leads to an all out war.

As a bonus, when a character of yours retires from active duty, you will be given the chance to keep them around by offering them a position on your council. If their loyalty rating is high enough, they will likely accept the job.

Sea Travel & Encounters($65K): Every major coastal city will be given a port from which they can trade and send troops along numerous sea-routes. You can pay for passage across these routes in order to save time, but much like on land, there is a possibility of Encounters. Many different types of sea encounters exist, such as being boarded by pirates(in which combat will take place on the ship’s deck), spotting a tradeship, or even crossing paths with an entire fleet.

Purchase your own vessel($70K): If you gather enough coin, you may purchase a vessel of your own to do with what you wish. The ship will act as a separate unit for you to command in the overworld. You may leave it behind at a port while you continue on land, and order it around the map as you see fit. Paying for its crew, upgrades, and maintenance can get costly. Fortunately, owning a vessel will also present some unique opportunities for you to profit. A merchant may approach you and offer payment to transport their goods across the sea, or a family seeking refuge in a new city may pay for passage.

If you so desire, you can turn to piracy on the high seas, stalking trading lanes and taking what you want by force. Being branded as pirates will have its own set of consequences(and opportunities) however, so you best be prepared to deal with them.

$85K: This stretch goal will be revealed once the Guild Council is unlocked!

We're incredibly excited about all three of these stretch goals, and we really feel they will add a large amount of depth to the overworld and guild management. We hope that you feel the same!

Add-Ons

If you'd like, you can now pledge a higher amount to receive additional rewards.

Click on the 'Manage your pledge' button at the top, and then increase your pledge in the 'Pledge Amount' box. Add the price of reward you want(listed below), and you can tell us later in a survey what you raised your pledge for (do not change the tier that you are currently pledged at).

• Additional Digital Game(Steam or Humble): $15 per copy
• Digital Art Book: $5
• Digital Soundtrack by Alex Roe: $10

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A big thank you once again to everyone. Whether you pledged or just helped spread the word(or both!), your support has been amazing and we are so grateful to each of you. Let's keep it going now and unlock some stretch goals together! :)

Character Customization and Gear
over 6 years ago – Thu, Aug 31, 2017 at 12:12:25 AM

Eight days to go and we’re nearly 95% funded! Our community continues to be amazing and we are so grateful for all of your support! As soon as we hit our goal, we’ll be unveiling the 3rd stretch goal, but for now...let’s talk about character customization. We’ve already discussed a few aspects of customization such as ability skill trees and the mentor system, and now we’re going to dig into a few more :)

Probably the most basic way to customize your characters is by renaming them, which you can do at any time in the overworld. There are a few rare exceptions to this however: some recruits may be part of a noble House, or their backstory may require their name to be locked for continuity sake.

Gear is the most impactful form of customization. It can be purchased from city vendors or traveling merchants; looted from chests, corpses or enemies; or given as a reward for completing a mission. Each character possesses 6 equipment slots for you to fill out. Some gear will be unique to a specific class, while others may be shared across multiple.

• Armor: We’ve consolidated all the typical armor pieces into a single armor slot. All armor types are sorted into 3 categories: Light, Medium and Heavy with each class in the game being restricted to a single category. (eg. Pyrolancer can only use Medium)
• Main Hand: Categories for the main hand slot include swords, axes, polearms, lances, staffs, wands, daggers, bows. There are also some unique main hand items such as the Lute for the Troubadour class. Like armor, classes are restricted to certain categories.
• Off Hand/Accessory: The off hand(or accessory) slot can be a weapon, shield or another unique item type depending on the class you are outfitting. The Paladin uses a shield, while the Nightstalker uses a quiver.
• Amulet: Amulets are free of class restrictions, and you may equip them onto any character you wish.
• Ring: Like amulets, rings also do not have any class restrictions.
• Artifact: Artifacts can offer unique enhancements for classes, and as such are restricted to a specific class.

Our focus is going to be on less, but more more meaningful drops. We want it to feel good when you find a piece of gear, as opposed to stockpiling a bunch of junk to sell off to a merchant. The loot itself will be very much Diablo-like, with a few different tiers of rarity, and multiple special properties that make every drop unique. The highest rarity is Legendary, and these items will be hand-crafted, possessing unique properties that no other piece of gear can have.

The last thing to mention is that for now, we are not planning on having any level restrictions on gear. Any new recruit could use that shiny Legendary item you just found(provided there are no class restrictions), and we feel this will help minimize the negative effect of character deaths. And as an added bonus, you won’t need to save sets of inferior gear for your recruits.

There are a few other customization options for characters that we would like to add, but we cannot yet guarantee they will make it into the game at launch without hitting the necessary stretch goals:

• Skins: As mentioned in a previous update, we’re so close to unlocking 8 Social Goals which will give every class one alternate skin. However, we would really like to add a lot more!
• Races: Our world contains multiple races of people, but for now each class will be locked to a specific race. If we get to add multiple races for every class, we will also be introducing unique racial traits on top of that.
• Hairstyles(or Helmets): We’d like to be able to add a choice of hairstyles and helmets(when applicable) for every class to further differentiate them.
• Gender: This is the most difficult one, as it is essentially doubling the art workload for the classes we plan to offer.

As stated, the above options will all be stretch goals as they will require us to hire even more artists. Hopefully we can hit them, but regardless we’ll still try do as much as we can before(and after) launch.

Fan Art Contest

We’ve only received a few entries so far for our Fan Art Contest, and so we’ve decided to extend the deadline until Wednesday September 6th at 12am EST.

It’s open to everyone and we’re giving away prizes to the top 5 entries. For more information, read this update.

Community Forum

One of our backers, Sinistar, asked if he could start up a community forum for fans to engage in discussions about The Iron Oath. Since we haven’t set anything up yet we thought it was a good idea! You can find the forum HERE and we encourage you all to sign-up. Chris and I will try our best to drop by as often as possible, but most of our attention will still go towards the private Discord server.

Social Goals

I’ve updated the Social Goals graphic, and we’re so close to unlocking alternate skins for every class! Head to the Social Goals section on the campaign page and find out what you can do to help!

Thank you for reading, and once again thank you for your support! We hope you’re all ready for the stretch goals :)

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We'd like to highlight another promising project here on Kickstarter. Initiative: Red Dawn, is a single and multiplayer aerospace business simulator where the ultimate goal is to establish a self sustainable colony on Mars. It reminds us of Kerbal Space Program and is worth checking out!

View their campaign page HERE.

The Animation Process
over 6 years ago – Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 06:10:06 PM

Hey everyone! As mentioned yesterday I have something a bit different planned out for today's update: a look into how I animate all the characters in the game. Hopefully some of you find it interesting or helpful :)

Rough Sketch: The first part of my workflow is to just do a really rough sketch of the animation that I have in mind. I begin first by doing 3 key-frames for the starting position, anticipation and follow-through. Once I have the key-frames sketched out I then duplicate the layers, make small changes to each and I end up with a very rough version containing some in-between frames. If I'm happy with how everything looks I then move on to refining the shape of the key-frames.

Key-frame Shape: This is probably the most important step. If your silhouette doesn't read well the whole animation is going to suffer. I like to take my time here and really make sure I get the shape of each body part correct. If I'm struggling with something, I find it helpful to stand in front of a mirror and recreate the pose that I'm going for. In this instance I actually ended up recording a video of myself that I referenced on occasion.

Detail: Once the shape is refined, the detail step is a lot easier to handle, though it still takes the longest amount of time! I begin by first separating out each body part onto its own layer, and doing the same for each piece of gear that I add. The gear is done in the same fashion as the Shape step, I start with a color that stands out for each piece and make sure the silhouette reads well before I actually begin to detail onto it. Using references here is again helpful for making sure the detail on the muscles is more or less correct.

In-Between Frames: Adding in-between frames really smooths out the animation and adds a lot of life to it. It's something that I was always afraid of doing because it seemed like it would take a lot of time, but in actuality it only took about 2 hours for the above example(the entire process took 12h). For this step, I do my best to recreate the in-betweens that I roughed out in the sketch step. You don't need to have a ton of frames here to trick your mind into seeing a fluid motion. The mantra to follow is "ease in, ease out" which basically means you want to add frames that are easing in, and then easing out of your 3 keyframes. Some of the in-betweens might end up looking a little silly on their own, but as long as it looks good in motion it doesn't really matter!

Here's another workflow for a necromancer cast animation which took about 16 hours:

I also created two timelapse videos which you can view on youtube. They're a little bit long, but hopefully it will be instructive for those of you who are interested in animation & pixel art! :)

Bounty Hunter Youtube Timelapse

Necromancer Youtube Timelapse

I've created a gallery post on imgur detailing the same steps. If you have an account we would appreciate it if you could take a second to upvote it. It would really help our campaign out! http://imgur.com/gallery/ZrJz2

Thanks again everyone, we hope you have a terrific weekend!

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Lastly we'd like to direct your attention to another awesome project here on Kickstarter, a tabletop game called The King's Guild: A strategy board game where players compete to establish the most renowned guild. Lead your guild to prosperity by crafting powerful equipment, sending heroes on quests to earn treasure, and upgrading your guild with unique characters and rooms.

 

Check out their campaign page HERE

Grappler Class Reveal
over 6 years ago – Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 10:38:21 AM

Hey everyone, hope you all had a great weekend! Yesterday we hit 75% funding and are 3/4 of the way there with more than half of the campaign still yet to come! Your support has been incredible, so thank you again. As mentioned on the weekend, you’ve unlocked the first Social Reward by reaching 4 Social Goals, so without further delay, we present to you the Grappler class:

Grapplers thrive in close quarters combat where their fists, mind & reflexes are both a shield and a weapon. While wearing only cloth armor can leave them somewhat vulnerable, they are masters at blocking and countering attacks, and when wounded can slip into a meditative trance to heal themselves.

Here are a few abilities that the Grappler possesses:

• Crippling Force: The Grappler cuts through the air with his fist and hurls a shockwave towards his target, damaging and stunning them for 1 round

• Three-Fisted Fury: The Grappler dashes forward towards his target and lands 3 lightning quick strikes. If the target dies during the assault, the Grappler dashes to the nearest enemy within range and repeats the ability.

• Hurricane: The Grappler delivers a powerful roundhouse kick to the target, damaging and knocking them back 2 cells. Any enemies caught in the knockback are displaced and suffer damage.

We hope you like his look, and of course if you have any thoughts or just want to discuss the class further, we encourage you to leave a comment! With that out of the way, we’re now only a few Social Goals away from unlocking the next reward which is alternate skins for each class. Here’s a little preview of what that will look like!

To find out what you can do to help unlock the next reward, head to the Social Goals section on our main campaign page.

Before going we’d like to once again tell you about another awesome game here on Kickstarter: Maelstrom. Its fast-paced naval combat caught our attention when browsing through Kickstarter, and we highly suggest that you check out their campaign page HERE.