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The Iron Oath: Dark Turn-based Tactical RPG

Created by The Iron Oath

A dark turn-based RPG with a focus on tactics and the management of your guild within a dynamic world. (Windows, Linux & Mac)

Latest Updates from Our Project:

March/April Update
almost 6 years ago – Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 01:25:49 AM

Hey everyone, we were running a little late with the last update for March so we decided to instead combine it with April’s. We’ve gotten a lot done during this period and it’s probably been the busiest we’ve been thus far, so we hope you’ll excuse the tardiness of the update :) As previously mentioned, we’ve been working to make a stable build of the game that is polished enough to show off at major trade shows(almost there now!) and with that goal in mind we wanted to share some recent additions to assets and gameplay mechanics.

Combat Mechanics

We’ve added a couple new combat mechanics and tweaked some of the existing ones in order to achieve the tactical depth that we want out of the game. None of this is set in stone and will still require further tuning but we’re happy with the premise of each.

First up, we’ve added a new ‘Swap’ mechanic for every character. You can now use your turn to swap positions with any adjacent allied character. This allows you to move someone out of harm's way quickly, and avoid them suffering an Attack of Opportunity. There are a few situations where using Swap is not possible, such as when the target is Stunned, Feared or Taunted. Enemies can also take advantage of this function so it’s important to plan accordingly.

We’ve removed our Backstab mechanic and reworked it into a Flanking mechanic, one that is easier to understand and execute within the context of the game. Previously, you were able to control the direction that your characters were facing at the end of their movement, and any attacks at their rear would be considered a Backstab. However we decided that the mechanic was a little unclear, annoying and clunky to deal with. A character is now considered “Flanked” whenever there are 2 enemies on opposite sides of his or her location. The Flanked debuff reduces Defense and Evasion for all attacks against that character, whether they are from the flankers, or elsewhere on the field.

The final combat addition is a Line of Sight mechanic, which places an increased importance on your positioning for both attacking and defending. For certain classes and abilities, the game will now check to see if the target is valid(due to LOS) and whether or not any accuracy penalty will be applied. If a character or object lies on a direct path(horizontally or diagonally connected hexes) between the attacker and the intended target, the target will be deemed untargetable due to the attacker having No Line of Sight. Full Line of Sight(no characters or objects blocking the path) would obviously incur no penalties and the attacker could freely attack the target within the limits of their abilities. Anything in between is classified as Obscured Line of Sight, and the attacker will incur a moderate accuracy penalty against their intended target.

Of the three, this mechanic has the potential to change the most as it hasn’t been fully implemented yet and will need a proper round of playtesting to ensure that it’s beneficial to the game’s tactics.

Animations and Abilities

We’ve completed and updated all of the current class animations to bring them up to a consistent level of quality across the game. This meant a lot of reworked keyframes, and inbetween frames, which in turn lead to adjustments or full overhauls of the existing Spell FX. As a result, the frame count of each character class has jumped up quite a bit, most around 4 or 5 times as many(200~ frames per class), but we feel it’s well worth the time spent and now we can focus on new classes and new enemies.

We also had a few unfinished abilities, and some others that we decided to overhaul and make more interesting. For example the Pyrolancer’s ability “Wildfire” was previously a ranged attack that applied a Burn condition to the target. We wanted to keep him at melee range however, so we reworked the ability to engulf an adjacent cell, which spreads in a line from his position over the next 3 turns. Any character standing on an engulfed cell(this includes walking or being pushed through) will incur a Burning condition. Enemies will do their best to avoid the flames, making it a valuable tool for controlling the battlefield by blocking off enemy routes and creating favorable choke points.

Wildfire
Wildfire

His Return to Cinder ability is a fire rune that is triggered when an enemy walks over it. We’ve added a knockback effect to it which cancels the enemies movement. With the changes to Wildfire, these two should have a fairly good synergy for manipulating enemies into vulnerable positions.

Return to Cinder
Return to Cinder

The rework of Wildfire was actually a merging between 2 previous abilities, so to fill the gap we added a new area of effect ability called Crossfire.

Crossfire
Crossfire

The Valkyrie’s Skewer animation was completely redone and its mechanics slightly tweaked. It remains an ability that can pierce 2 enemies horizontally, but alternatively it now functions as both a push and pull depending on the situation. Against single targets(one of the 2 cells is empty), Skewer will now push those away who are next to the Valkyrie, or pull them towards if they are separated.

Skewer
Skewer

The Valkyrie’s Take Flight ability was completed and implemented, giving her extra movement options to engage or escape, while at the same time dealing damage to anyone in her path.

Take Flight
Take Flight

Guardian Angel is a new high-cost ability that the Valkyrie can use to relocate allies into a safe position behind her. Not only useful for saving those near death, but you could also send a character into a high danger area, inflict heavy damage and rescue them before the enemy can retaliate.

Guardian Angel
Guardian Angel

There’s many more animations/abilities to share and we’ll be spreading them out on social media over the next little while!

Other than abilities, we’ve added some new action icons(move, pass turn, use item, flee, swap) to the skill bar, shuffled its elements around and repositioned it into the bottom right corner(it was in the bottom middle). The “Basic Attack” ability(the icon is placeholder obviously! lol) is also now beside the other 6 abilities to better reflect its importance.

New Skillbar layout. Some placeholder elements
New Skillbar layout. Some placeholder elements

Audio

We’ve now fully integrated FMOD into The Iron Oath which has streamlined the process for hooking up sound effects to events in our game. We haven’t yet hired a Sound Designer, but having FMOD will make the collerberation process much easier for when we do.

Alex Roe has also been hard at work on new tracks for The Iron Oath and they’re sounding fantastic. We look forward to sharing more of the soundtrack with you a little further down the road.

Overworld Updates

Outside of combat we’ve also made a lot of updates and additions. For dynamic encounters, we added the ability to highlight certain words or phrases, allowing players to get additional information about the world whenever they want. This is just the first phase of this feature. Eventually we’ll expand on it so you can learn more on each topic(like codexes in other games).

Here’s a round-up of some other features we’ve been working on :

  • Added a system for showing dynamic world event notifications when on the world map
  • Quest Tracker on the world map
  • Level editor additions like placing Boss Encounters, chests, locked doors, etc
  • Support for showing graphics and playing animations during cinematics
  • Implemented the ability to use items in and out of combat (like potions or bandages)
  • Skinned several UI menu screens
  • Bug fixes! Yay!

Thanks for reading, and we’ll be back in May to share more with you all :)

February Update
about 6 years ago – Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 11:04:14 PM

Hey everyone, we're back with another monthly update and today we're going to talk about how our dungeon layouts are created. We originally had been using a system that created layouts dynamically when entering a dungeon, but we've recently decided to go with a more hand-crafted approach so we have a little more control over everything. Here's an example of what creating a layout looks like from our end.(note this isn't an actual layout that will be used, it was more of a "stress-test" to make sure everything functioned properly despite some awkward placement!)

Since the mapping part is fairly quick and easy, our plan is to make hundreds of layouts for every environment, making it be extremely unlikely to ever get a repeat.

Each box on the grid corresponds to a specific tile for that environment. All the tiles transition seamlessly into one another(with the exception of isolated rooms) and we can place them in any fashion we want. The sewer tileset below is comprised of 21 pieces at the moment. We'll add a few more down the road but it's functional enough for now!

 

 

 

Each tile also has a number of prefabs within Unity that are decorated in various ways with props. Based on the mission and enemies you will be facing, the game will choose a prefab that matches the theme.


Finally, things such as obstacles or traps(also influenced by the enemies you will face - traps in particular) that occupy hexes will be randomly placed upon entering the dungeon. We're hoping all of this will result in a good amount of replayability for every environment!

We're continuing to work towards our next demo phase and are getting fairly close. We also have a couple new additions to combat that we will touch on in the next update. Hope you all have a great weekend and we thank you for your continued support! :)

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Crowdfunding Shout-out

Before going, we have two great looking tactical RPG's here on Kickstarter that we'd like to turn your attention to.

The first is Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics. It’s a clever mashup of WW2 and the Cthulhu Mythos. The original Achtung! Cthulhu pen-and-paper role-playing game smashed its goals on Kickstarter five years ago. It’s now back, bigger and more exciting than ever, and it’s going digital!

 

Achtung! Cthulhu Tactics is a turn-based strategy RPG where the player fights a desperate battle in the shadows of World War II against the Nazis and their inhuman ailles. The developers are looking for some extra support to add the Pathfinder Demon Hunter warriors into the game - and your support buys war bonds, guns, ammo, and spiritual warfare to fight the good fight!

 

 

The next is Bevontule, a turn-based, role-playing game that seamlessly integrates classic RPG genres and elements into a cohesive and novel gameplay experience. Featuring an engaging storyline, unique tactical combat, a progression system reminiscent of old-school JRPGs – and numerous Western influences as well – Bevontule offers massive environments and open-world exploration in a modern, 3D art style.

They're currently almost 40% funded, and with 12 days left to reach their goal they could use your help!

January update
about 6 years ago – Mon, Jan 29, 2018 at 01:01:35 AM

Happy New Year to everyone! As mentioned in our last update, Chris took the game to Otronicon a few weekends ago. His report and some pictures of the event are below. We're currently working towards a larger build aimed for March, and we'll share some video of it once complete. I mentioned last month that we were going to show how our dungeon layouts are generated from our various environment tiles. I do have a couple more tiles I would like to tackle before then so I'm going to save that for the February update. All in all, things are starting to come together and it's pretty exciting for us :)

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Hey everyone, Chris here. Earlier this month I took a short demo to the local Otronicon convention to showcase some of the game's combat to attendees. The audience there skewed a little younger than our core demographic but we met some awesome people and got some great feedback. My favorite from the weekend was a kid, who was probably around 10, telling me how much he liked it because it reminded him of Mario + Rabbids. I guess that game is a pretty good jumping off point for kids to start down the path of tactics games haha. 

 

On another note, I've been hard at work continuing off from last month where I built out our quest system and now I've incorporated all our dialogue into using Yarn as well. Yarn is a great tool that will help us create tons of quests and dialogue very quickly. I'm looking forward to showing off more around that down the line. Aside from that I've been working on the world map and how quests/events are handled in towns and while traveling on the road. Also fixed several bugs that I'd seen during the course of people playing the game at Otronicon. As we gear up to our next major milestone you'll probably see us start posting more on social media and in discord with updates, gifs, and screenshots which should continue through the release of the Beta towards the end of this year.

December update
over 6 years ago – Sat, Dec 23, 2017 at 09:17:02 PM

Hey everyone, another month has flown by and we’re back with our second monthly update to let you know what we’ve been up to. I’ve continued to work on animations for the past few weeks, and here’s a look at the animations for a character getting hit, getting knocked down, and dying during combat. The death featured here is the standard death animation(minus blood, which is added in game), the violent ones will be completed later :)

 

 

 

After Christmas I’ll be doing some tileset work in advance of our demo at Otronicon in Orlando, and in the next update we’ll show you how our dungeons are actually created.

In case you missed our tweet about it, we published our Kickstarter postmortem over at Gamasutra last month, check it out here if you’re interested.

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Hey Chris here with my December update. This month has been very productive from the point of laying the groundwork for producing all the story content for the game, from dynamic world events to branching quest chains.

I spent some time looking into a few possibilities on how to tackle the tools we'd need to develop all this content. Originally I had planned to adapt our dialogue engine I had been modifying to suit our needs and had it mostly up and running and working. It was fairly easy to use but I quickly realized down the road it would need to adapt quickly to the needs of individual quest lines and events. As in we might realize we need to expose more variables to tweak in game or add support for some feature or whatever the case might be. Retrofitting the current tool could work but it would be time consuming to modify not to mention the time to get back up to speed with its inner workings could provide challenges and delays. Long story short I looked around online and found a tool called Twine used for creating sort of simple text based games which then led me to a tool that was based off Twine called Yarn. Yarn is extremely easy to modify and work with to our needs and it took me no time at all to get it up and running in our game. Using the built in scripting abilities of Yarn we're able to do just about anything in The Iron Oath we can dream up with quick modifications. So now we're basically ready to start creating quests and dynamic events as we see fit which is very exciting to start to see everything coming together.

Quick example of how yarn is set up
Quick example of how yarn is set up

Aside from that I also implemented some of the new animations Nik has been working on and started a pass on some combat balancing but it's still early for that. Fixed a lot of bugs surrounding generating dungeon layouts, AI issues, and other assorted UI problems. I also took some time to clean up a lot of placeholder code. Previously to change which tileset a dungeon loaded into required a bunch of small hacks to get it to work right but since I wanted the newly created quests to be able to set which tileset could be associated with it I did the work to properly implement it. So now determining which tileset to load is just a matter of changing 1 variable in the Yarn editor for a node associated with a quest.

Next month I'll be looking at implementing more of the newest animations as well as getting the sewer tileset closer to finalized in its implementation. Also if you live in Orlando, I would like to invite you to come to Otronicon. I'll be there January 12th-14th showing off a build of The Iron Oath. Otronicon is a little more geared towards just being a science convention but some local Orlando indie developers will be there so I wanted to represent as well.

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We wish you all a merry Christmas and happy holidays, and we’ll be back with more in the new year :)

November Update
over 6 years ago – Tue, Nov 14, 2017 at 12:56:48 AM

Hello backers! Over the last month we’ve settled into a nice development groove. I(Nik) have mostly been focusing on character sprites while Chris has been tackling various tasks and he’ll tell you about it later in this update. We’re currently working towards a demo build that will be playable at the Otronicon Expo in Orlando on January 12th.

My most recent task has been finalizing the design and animations of the first 4 classes. Each class has undergone some minor visual changes such as the Pyrolancer’s head and the Valkyrie’s weapon. I didn’t change too much overall and mostly just wanted to clean things up a bit by improving the lighting/shading and getting rid of stray pixels. Here’s a before and after of each design.

One thing that was mentioned frequently during the campaign was the “asthmatic” look of the idle animations when characters weren’t in combat. I decided to get rid of the breathing animations entirely(as I wasn’t a huge fan of it myself) and rework the idles to be a lot less distracting(mostly limited to some cloth/hair sway). I may revisit the breathing animations later on and see if I can make it look more natural and less like they’re constantly gasping for air, but for now I don’t want to spend too much time fiddling with it.

The next animation that I completely redid was each characters “ready state” animation. The previous animation was basically the same as each character’s idle with some bobbing added in, which some voiced their dislike over. While I haven’t completely gotten rid of the bobbing motions, I’ve given each class a unique ready stance that makes the bobbing look more natural. Here’s a look at both the idle and ready animations, including the transition back and forth.

The newest addition to the game is a run animation for each class. We’re not entirely sure at this point whether or not we should use it during the exploration phase(either replacing the walk, or having it alongside as a toggle), but it became apparent to us that it was needed for combat. As one backer pointed out, it looked a little odd having your characters casually walk up to the enemies prior to attacking them. The run animation adds a sense of urgency to your heroes, and as a bonus speeds up the movement phase which is always a plus.

Speaking of speed, we have also added the ability to increase the speed of combat by holding spacebar, with the multiplier being customizable in the options menu. This was another feature that many were vocal about, and we understand that not everyone wants to sit through a lengthy turn phase. Here is a comparison video that shows off the feature:

I’m just about done with the first 4 classes and am currently finishing up some new ability animations. Afterwards I’ll be moving on to some enemy animations and dungeon design. At some point I’ll have to craft some more UI graphics to go along with the work that Chris has been doing, but for now he’s making do with programmer art ;) I’m also in the midst of finishing up our Kickstarter Postmortem and am planning to publish that this coming Thursday, so keep an eye on our Twitter/Facebook if that’s something you’re interested in seeing!

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Hey, Chris here. I have been tackling a lot of small tasks since the Kickstarter, focusing on polishing things that got left to the wayside in the wake of getting the Kickstarter up and running. Much of that dealing with the flow of combat and bugs. The biggest task I delved into was the start of implementing the logic that governs how the world plays out as time advances forward. I prototyped how the different Houses in game will have children, choose heirs, vie for the throne, manage their resources, etc. There is still much work left to do on that front but it is coming along nicely.

As Nik mentioned, the focus now is getting a build ready (primarily combat focused) for Otronicon in January. Otronicon isn't really a purely gaming focused event but it's a local show I wanted to participate in along with the rest of the indie game scene in Orlando, FL. We have a couple phases of builds we're working towards with each one getting us closer to our beta build that will be sent to backers late next year.

Some other tasks I worked on included:

  • implementing keys for locked doors/chests
  • updated internal tools for creating dynamic events and dialogue
  • updated character abilities to be more inline with their designs
  • tweaking general pace of combat (an ongoing process)
  • worked on equipping gear and looting from chests
  • added consumable items (e.g. health potions)
  • implemented stores to purchase items from various vendors
  • skinned/implemented some pre-mission UI screens
  • various bug fixing

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Crowdfunding Shout-out

 

To wrap this up, we would just like to give a quick shoutout to our friends working on a tactical RPG called Summoner’s Fate. Their Kickstarter campaign has 3 days remaining and they’ve just passed their goal, be sure to give them a look here!