The Iron Oath Update #52 – Humble Partnership and PAX East Recap

Curious Panda’s gritty turn-based RPG The Iron Oath was showcased at this year’s PAX East back in February. Following the expo, we get this Kickstarter update that announces Curious Panda’s new partnership with Humble Bundle and shares a quick PAX East recap. The update also lets us know that the current demo build will be made available for the game’s backers in the near future. Check it out:

Hey everyone! We hope you’re all doing well and staying safe during these uncertain times. We have a couple things on the menu for this month’s update, and first up is a very special announcement that we can finally reveal: our partnership with Humble Bundle!

We’ve had to keep it under wraps for a while, but we’ve been working with them as our our publisher for a little over a year now and it’s been a great relationship thus far. It’s certainly made development easier and less stressful, and they’ve been super supportive every step of the way.

I know some of you may be a bit wary of us getting a publisher, but we can assure you that the game’s design has not and will not be compromised in any way due to this, and ultimately we still have 100% creative control. We’ll also have more news to announce as the result of our partnership down the line!

To go along with this announcement, Humble has just launched a new video series for showcasing their upcoming games catalog called the Humble Brag. You can check it out here: (We’re at the end! Be sure to drop them a like and subscribe too)

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PAX East Recap

At the end of February we attended PAX East with a new build of The Iron Oath. This was our first time attending a PAX event in any capacity, and we were pretty overwhelmed by the size of it! We participated in DreamHack Austin back in 2018 with an early build of the game, which helped give us some booth experience, but PAX East is an entirely different animal and was quite a lot of work for just the two of us. That being said, we managed just fine aside from some sore feet 😉

Over the course of 4 full days we ended up handing out about 800-900 postcards, and our 3-station booth was fully occupied 95% of the time (probably had around 200 players). It was very encouraging for us to see so many enjoy the game, and be genuinely excited and interested in talking to us about the design and features it has to offer. We’d also like to give a special shout-out to the handful of Kickstarter backers who stopped by to say hi and check out the game; It was great to meet you all!

We were pretty nervous about the difficulty level of the demo, but it fortunately ended up being just right. Experienced tactical RPG players were able to clear it by utilizing familiar techniques, and those who were less experienced generally found success as well so long as they took their time to read and plan things out. We didn’t keep exact statistics, but something like an 85% success rate seems likely. We were also very happy to see that the vast majority of players who sat down tended to play to completion (or their death haha) despite the demo being a somewhat lengthy 30 minutes. We also came away with a few nice suggestions which is always one benefit of an event like this, but for the most part it seemed like we had a lot of quality of life things covered already 🙂

As mentioned in the last update, we were fortunate enough to be selected by the Indie MEGABOOTH and we can’t thank them enough for letting us take part with so many other great devs. It was a terrific experience and we met a lot of great people(shout out to our booth neighbors Warhammer Underworlds Online & Stronghold: Warlords – be sure to check them out!). Hopefully we’ll be back for future events 🙂

We have a few things to tweak, but we do plan on making this build available to all Kickstarter backers for next months update, so watch out for that! In addition, we’ll also go in-depth about an update to the Dungeon Exploration system which was first revealed at PAX.

To stay up to date in the meantime, be sure to join our Discord server if you haven’t yet. Everyone is welcome to join and we’d love to have you be a part of our community 🙂