The Iron Oath Development Status Update

The latest development update for The Iron Oath, Curious Panda’s gritty turn-based RPG, explains the absence of even a vague release window at this point, lets us know that despite all the setbacks, the game is now in alpha, promises a Steam demo at some point in the future, and shares some sample art.

Here are the text bits:

Hey everyone, we hope you are all doin well! As we are reaching the last few months of the year, we wanted to give you an update on the game’s current status and release date. 2020 has been a strange and challenging year for everyone, so it’s probably not much of a shock to hear that it’s impacted the game’s development.

We went into this year with the hopes of releasing in late 2020 or early 2021. Development was going well and and we took the game to PAX East at the end of February. We had a great show, met a lot of existing and new fans and received tons of positive feedback, so we were feeling pretty good on our way back home.

Of course it was around this time that the lockdowns began and development slowed down. Chris has 3 young kids, so when schools shut down he had to begin dividing his time between programming and helping to homeschool his kids. More recently his wife got a new job in Ohio, so figuring out their move from Florida further detracted from his ability to work as much. Progress had still been made during this time, but just not at the rate we had expected or hoped in order to release this year.

For now, things are about as “normal” as they will be for the foreseeable future and we’ve settled back into a steady rhythm. His kids are doing virtual schooling at home so he still has to devote some time to looking after them during the day. All things considered, we’re doing our best under the circumstances we’re in now, and we’ve begun looking for a few additional programmers to help speed things up.

Concerning the release date, it is still TBD. We don’t want to rush out an incomplete product, so all we can say for now is that the game will be out when it’s ready. As for some good news, the game is now what we consider “Alpha”, meaning all the game’s features are in place and all that remains is adding more polish and content. So we’re excited about that at least, and it brings us one step closer to the closed Beta! We will also be putting out another updated demo on Steam in the future like we did a few months ago. So if you missed the previous event and don’t have access to the Beta, you’ll still have a chance to check out the game prior to release. As always, we’ll continue to keep you apprised of our progress, and we hope you all can understand our need for some extra time to complete the game properly.

On the art side we’ve continued to make good progress with our animator Rafael producing some awesome work with our designs. Here’s a look at a design timelapse and final animation result of two recently completed enemy characters[…]

We’ve also begun to work on the final art assets for the city hubs (we’ve had crappy placeholders in the meantime hah). I don’t think we’ve talked too much about this yet, but cities are being done at the same scale as our characters and combat environments. We wanted each city to look unique and immersive rather than just a simple menu. Since we’ve done it this way we can also occasionally have combat engagements and missions take place within the city streets (as they use the same assets). We can’t share the final look yet as we still need some more building variants and other assets (such as citizens standing and walking around), but here’s a taste of the building styles for the 3 main cultures within the game[…]