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[sennin]

Back us now on Kickstarter!

The Iron Oath is a turn-based tactical RPG that is set in a dark fantasy world. Recruit, manage, and embark on missions with a roster of adventurers, testing the limits of their mortality. Every decision made carries weight and can have a minor or major influence on your characters and the world that surrounds them. As you and your guild progress, the world changes dynamically, enabling new storylines to discover and resulting in a unique experience for every playthrough.

- of the World Map. This is one out of nine regions

Features

• A large and dynamic overworld to traverse: 9 regions with over 50 towns and cities to visit. Cities can be overtaken, destroyed and rebuilt, and various factions can emerge, rise and fall. A playthrough can potentially last hundreds of years, resulting in many changes to the initial world state.
• In-depth roster management:
  Characters will age and die frequently in combat and you will be required to to recruit new members and keep them satisfied. Your guilds reputation in the world will shift depending on your actions, presenting the opportunity to create both allies and enemies.
• Variety of Classes: Each class has their strengths and weaknesses which you will need to take into account when assembling your party. We will be launching with at least 12 different classes, allowing for many different options when it comes to tactics.
• Hand crafted and dynamic missions to complete: Many missions will be generated dynamically based on the state of the world, but there will also be unique hand crafted questlines for you to play through, including the main storyline.
• Numerous environments to explore: Missions will occur in a variety of indoor and outdoor environments filled with a variety of enemies, secrets, traps and long forgotten artifacts.
• Tactical turn based combat: Combat occurs on a hex grid and you must figure out how best to navigate each enemy encounter. Proper party composition and resource management(from both items and abilities) is vital.
• Unique character development: Every recruitable character has their own personal backstory that shapes their motives, personality and traits.
• Dynamic dialogue: Characters have minds of their own and will have a variety of things to say during a mission, from simple conversation with one another to bringing up a past experience that may be relevant to the task at hand.
• Decisions matter: Choices bear consequences in many forms. Choosing to assault a trade cart on your journey could result in a powerful faction sending assassins after you.
• A fleshed out world backstory to uncover: NPC's are not fountains of knowledge. Many secrets remain in the world and you will need to discover things on your own through context and other avenues.
• Dark orchestral soundtrack by Alex Roe:Alex(https://alexroe.bandcamp.com) is well known for his Dark Souls remixes and we're thrilled to have him in charge of our soundtrack.

Current Status

The Iron Oath is now live on Kickstarter! You can back us for $15 and get yourself a copy of the game.

If the game interests you, you can follow us on the social media links below. We'd appreciate your help in spreading the word

Follow Us:
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Update Links:
New Enemy Designs
Composer
Enemy Animations + Timelapse
Gameplay Teaser, Tilesets & Kickstarter News
Kickstarter Announcement!
Kickstarter is Live!

[The Armorman]

Are skeletons playable

[sennin]

Are skeletons playable

These ones are not, but we have a Hellraiser class planned that will be able to summon and control his own skeletons

[zminusone]

Sweeeet! 

[Pixelcomet]

Saw you guys on twitter, love what you're doing. Pretty excited to see you guys starting a dev log

[Ruugard]

Saw you guys on twitter, love what you're doing. Pretty excited to see you guys starting a dev log

Thanks! Other half of The Iron Oath dev team here. We've gotten a lot of great feedback so far. Still got a lot of work left to do but going to try and keep this devlog up to date as best we can. Probably going to post an update soon detailing some of the features we're working on that I'm most excited about for our game.

[Perequin]

I really dig the art style!  Dunno if it's my screen but It does feel a tad too dark though. Which works when it comes to seeing who you're interacting with etc, but it gets a bit hard to see the big picture of the scene, especially that first image.
One thought I had regarding that last walking animation is the obvious feet sliding happening.
If that is the speed you're going for in terms of traversal, maybe you should go with a running animation instead?

Looks cool though! I do have a soft spot for turn-based games. 

[Ruugard]

I really dig the art style!  Dunno if it's my screen but It does feel a tad too dark though. Which works when it comes to seeing who you're interacting with etc, but it gets a bit hard to see the big picture of the scene, especially that first image.
One thought I had regarding that last walking animation is the obvious feet sliding happening.
If that is the speed you're going for in terms of traversal, maybe you should go with a running animation instead?

Looks cool though! I do have a soft spot for turn-based games. 

On my phone the lighting looks way too dark but on most of my monitors it looks ok if slightly too dark. We're definitely going for a dark moody feel to it (especially with this dungeon tileset), some of that might help with keeping the ambient low but raising lights and playing around with some fog or something.

As for the walk speed yeah I definitely feel it's slightly too fast, its kind of tuned at the moment to zipping around so I can quickly test stuff but at the same time I probably shouldn't get too used to it before tweaking and and throwing off the feel of the dungeon and time to complete it.

[Perequin]

Ok, cool.
Looking a bit closer on the animations, I feel you could really benefit from one more frame in there, and that in the form of an anticipation frame right before the action happens. An inverse of the action if you will.
One example is when the Paladin hovers and then stabs downward. Just having one frame right before the stabbing where she pulls the sword back even more could really increase the readability of it. Right now it's a bit sudden.
Another example is her going into her shield/heal animation. Try having her go down into a little crouch or squat or something right before going up into the hover. It can be extremely quick, but add a lot.
Overall, animation-wise, you've got some really strong poses going on, especially looking at the Paladin. And those effects. *drooool*

[sennin]

Ok, cool.
Looking a bit closer on the animations, I feel you could really benefit from one more frame in there, and that in the form of an anticipation frame right before the action happens. An inverse of the action if you will.
One example is when the Paladin hovers and then stabs downward. Just having one frame right before the stabbing where she pulls the sword back even more could really increase the readability of it. Right now it's a bit sudden.
Another example is her going into her shield/heal animation. Try having her go down into a little crouch or squat or something right before going up into the hover. It can be extremely quick, but add a lot.
Overall, animation-wise, you've got some really strong poses going on, especially looking at the Paladin. And those effects. *drooool*

Thanks for the cc Ideally I would like to add another frame or two to most of the animations. I'm pretty slow at animating though so I decided to keep it simple for now and hope that the spell effects kind of mask the low frame count. Its definitely a something I would like to get done before we actually release though, and might be something we outsource if our Kickstarter does well.

As to your first post, I suppose it might be a tad dark, my monitors probably brighter though haha.

[sbeast]

This looks really promising, gonna be following this one.

[Ashedragon]

I really like the look of this! Good luck to you both.

[Ruugard]

Update! We've been pretty busy lately trying to find a composer and going through all the amazing submissions we got but we'll be talking about the music more in a later update. For now, the past couple days I've been prototyping how we're going to handle cutscenes in our game. I looked on the unity asset store and tried a couple before ending up with Flux at the moment. It seems like it might not have as many features as some of the others but I think it will work for what I need. Anyone used uSequencer, Cinema Director, or Slate and have any opinions on them?

Here is a short cutscene I whipped up while integrating Flux into our workflow. Just a note, this is all just a placeholder cutscene and not being used in the final game, the "boss" encounter here is just using the regular skeleton instead of an actual boss character and the other skeletons would animate in some way in a more proper cutscene but as far as just proving the tech it seems to work. Couple other bugs and placeholder assets/ideas but enough rambling time to get back to work. Enjoy!

[sleeper_service]

Wow, the art is amazing. I agree that the walk cycles/animation could use some more work, but overall this seems to have a great direction. Keep it up.

[sennin]

It's been a while since we've posted an update, hope everyone had a good Holiday break Now that they're over we'll be posting more frequently. Here's a look at some artwork that I completed in December.

More Pyrolancer animations:

Did a few more of animations for the Pyrolancer class and recorded a timelapse of one of them which you can view further down.



New Enemy Designs:

The enemies we had been using were rather old so I wanted to redesign some(the skeletons), and introduce a few new ones.



Art Timelapses:

Made timelapses of the Pyrolancer spellcast & the design for an undead creature. Planning to do more in the future!









Website & Mailing List:

We've finally launched an official website(http://theironoath.com). It's pretty basic for now but we'll be adding more content to it over the next few months. We've also set up a Mailing List signup on the main page. Make sure you sign up to recieve important updates!

What's next:
Right now we're working towards releasing a short gameplay teaser in February, and then following that up with a longer one in March or April. So for now my next task is to get all those new enemies animated since they will be featured in those videos.

As always, if anyone has any questions we'll be happy to answer them if we can!

[sbeast]

The new designs and animations look pretty cool, keep it up!

Update! We've been pretty busy lately trying to find a composer and going through all the amazing submissions we got but we'll be talking about the music more in a later update.

Also, if you're still in the process of looking, feel free to check out my portfolio here: http://sbeastmusic.com/portfolio/. Thanks! 

[sennin]

The new designs and animations look pretty cool, keep it up!

Update! We've been pretty busy lately trying to find a composer and going through all the amazing submissions we got but we'll be talking about the music more in a later update.

Also, if you're still in the process of looking, feel free to check out my portfolio here: http://sbeastmusic.com/portfolio/. Thanks! 

We're no longer looking, but thanks anyway!

[Ruugard]

Programmer Update 2. I've been working on the logic around showing the chance to hit on mousing over a target and animating the damage from the health bar after attacking, here is a gif of that in action.(WIP)



I've also been spending a lot of my time setting up the new abilities Sennin has been doing the pixel art for. Here are a few implemented in game.





Next, I'll be tackling adding more enemy types and abilities as well as any new AI logic needed. Started on a necromancer that can raise the dead which is progressing nicely. I'll post some of that next time when it's done.

[sennin]

I've been a bit sidetracked for the last week revisiting the games lore & working on finalizing some details for the main quest line, so I haven't gotten as much done art wise as I would have liked. Regardless, here's some animations from the past few weeks! (apologies for the extra width, they're sized that way for better viewing on Twitter/Tumblr)






(idle and cast, spell fx still need to be added overtop)

[sennin]

Back in December we started the long process of looking for a composer. It took us a while, but we are happy to announce that Alex Roe(https://alexroe.bandcamp.com) will be composing our soundtrack! Alex has a ton of experience in doing remixes and original works inspired by Dark Souls & Bloodborne. We think he will be a perfect fit for the atmosphere of our game and are looking forward to working with him.

We're still working towards releasing a small gameplay video this month, I'll have a few more animations to show off within the next week