The Iron Oath Update #48

The latest Kickstarter update for Curious Panda’s turn-based RPG The Iron Oath shows off the game’s new battlefield design that will offer significantly more room for obstacles and combat maneuvers. The update also shares a quick video sample of the game’s in-dungeon dialogue system. Let’s start with that:

And here are the text parts, but be sure to check out the update itself for plenty of fresh screenshots:

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 🙂