The Iron Oath: Dark Turn-based Tactical RPG

Happy New Year!
over 4 years ago – Sun, Jan 12, 2020 at 01:36:07 AM

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! :)

November Update
over 4 years ago – Thu, Dec 05, 2019 at 10:40:57 PM

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 :)

October Update
over 4 years ago – Mon, Nov 11, 2019 at 12:54:17 AM

Time for a belated October update! The last month has been a hectic time for us as we were crunching to meet certain deadlines, and thus didn't have the time to put together a proper update. Not going to share just yet what the crunch-time was for...we'll see in a month or two how things pan out and hopefully we'll have some good news to share :)

In this month's update we wanted to talk about our new direction for combat environments, and illustrating the point with a brand new tileset that we've created and implemented this past month. In the environments you've seen so far, a typical combat area has rarely been much larger than 5-6 rows high, as shown below:

 While the narrower corridors allowed for more streamlined exploration, they made combat encounters a bit too cramped, and didn't allow us much room to place terrain obstacles and hazards without suffocating the playfield. This resulted in combat areas not having much variety to them, which is not ideal!

With this new tileset we've greatly increased the size of the playfield(up to 10 rows high at points). The base tiles are completely empty aside from the ground and back wall, as seen below:

 With this much space, we now have a lot of room to work with for creating many different and tactically interesting layouts, populated by the terrain and hazards that are attached to this tileset. This includes a variety of rock formations, holes, falling rock obstacles, dangerous spikes and more. Here's some of the terrain objects for this tile, still need to complete a few more:

 Each "layout" will be hand made, as we think it's preferable to randomly generating them. We're not quite sure how far we'll go with the quantity, but we'll be shooting for at least 100 unique terrain layouts per environment. Here's a look at one section's layout in-game:

For the existing tilesets, we'll be going back and revising them a bit as well in order to add more space. Though in some cases, certain environments will be less open than others when it makes sense. 

Another thing we wanted to show off was the in-dungeon dialogue system which has received some work lately with additions such as portraits, text fade-in and auto scrolling. Of course you can skip through this all by left-clicking as well if you're a quick reader or just want to breeze through it! We're still not 100% done with it, but we're pretty happy with the current state for now.  The example below is from the opening mission/introduction to the game :)

 And a small bonus gif of something that occurred while I was recording some footage. I didn't think this action through very well :( lol

Lastly we wanted to give a shout-out to our friends at Shadow Knights Studio who just entered early access on Steam with their game: The Lighthouse. If you're a fan of atmospheric horror/thriller games we highly suggest checking it out!

The rest of November will once again be a fairly busy time for us, so the next monthly update will be fairly light, likely just some timelapses, character art and some new in-game enemy gifs. But it should be on time at least :) Thanks for reading!

September Update
over 4 years ago – Wed, Oct 02, 2019 at 03:03:30 AM

Hey everyone! Another thirty days have passed by and we're back to show you some of our work from the month of September. We don't have too much to share this time around, as the majority of our workload from this past month is a bit of a secret and not something we're ready to reveal quite yet ;) You'll have to wait a few more months for that but it's something we think is pretty cool and hopefully you will all feel the same!

Earlier in the month, Chris spent his time implementing new enemies and creating sound effects to go with it. You can see a small sample of this below:

...and a few gifs from other abilities!

Next month's update will have a bit more to showcase. The dialogue windows (including player responses/choices) have received some love this past month but there's still a little bit more cleaning up we'd like to do before we show it off.  We've also begun work on prototyping and implementing some new environments, so we'll be looking to share some of that next month as well (might even make it a subject for a dev video!). It's our intent to make combat environments more varied and less straight forward (with more obstacles and hazards that are unique to each environment, requiring careful attention!), so we hope you'll like the direction we're taking with that. 

See you next month, and as always, if you haven't already done so, please add us to your wishlist us on Steam as it helps to boost visibility and awareness! Thanks as always for taking the time to read :)

August Update
over 4 years ago – Tue, Sep 03, 2019 at 02:43:44 AM

Hey everyone. We're a couple days late, but our August update is here! With our management UI implemented in the game we decided that a walk through video of its functionality would be something you might be interested in. We still need to do another polish pass or two on it (skinning some pop-ups, aligning certain elements) but for now it's at least functional and presentable :)

Please forgive the cuts in the video haha, I tried to do it in one take but couldn't manage it without screwing up! Also, since the placeholder item icons are pulled from another game, we decided it was best to blur them out, so apologies for that messy look! As mentioned, once more features are in a state that we're comfortable sharing, we plan to make some similar videos to cover them. 

Moving on, Rafael has pumped out a few more fully animated enemies this month that we're very happy with! Here is a look at the Deathlord, who may look familiar. This was one of the first enemies I designed and partially animated, but hadn't gotten around to completing. Rafael did a great job finishing it off :)

Continuing with the art, I've spent a good chunk of time this past month designing some more enemies, and recorded a few timelapses of the process. I also realized I hadn't shared the Nullbeast timelapse that I recorded a while ago, so I threw that in as a bonus.  

Nullbeast Prime

  Dreadknight

  Spectral Reaper

  Temptress

That wraps it up for this month! Before going, we did want to share some camera effects that we recently started fiddling around with. It's not something we'll use for every action in combat, but for things like critical strikes and deathblows we think it adds a little extra something :) Let us know your thoughts! And of course, effects such as these would be entirely optional and you could turn them off if you wish. Thanks for reading!