The Iron Oath Update #27

The December update for Curious Panda’s curious turn-based RPG The Iron Oath shows off several new combat animations and talks a bit about producing the varied story content for the game. There’s also a brief general status update and some holiday greetings. Have a look:

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.

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 🙂