The Iron Oath Update #36

This month’s development update for Curious Panda’s upcoming turn-based RPG The Iron Oath describes the recently implemented injury system that will put your characters out of commision for prolonged periods of time. And then, the update also brings us up to speed with the game’s overall progress. Check it out:

Another month has passed! We’re still hard at work everyday on The Iron Oath and making great progress. This month we wanted to give you an update on some of the systems we recently implemented into the game, starting with the Injury System.

All of your characters are mere mortals, and as such they are susceptible to a variety of injuries that can be sustained during combat which will reduce their effectiveness or place them out of commission for a specified period. Our design philosophy behind this system is to encourage the player to make use of their full roster and experiment with different classes and combinations, as well as giving consequences to actions (or inactions) committed during a battle.

Injuries can be sustained in two different ways. The most common is when a character is “Downed” and reduced to 0 HP. An injury is automatically applied when this occurs, and its exact nature and location is defined by a series of dice rolls that:

• Determines the zone of the Injury
• Determines the specific body part within the selected zone
• Determines the grade of severity (which can be influenced by their injury history, age, attributes, traits, and equipment)

The second way to sustain an injury(or worsen an existing one) is by taking damage that is a high percentage of a characters max HP. Placing a fragile mage in front of an enemy with a great warhammer would risk a trip to the Infirmary, especially if they land a critical hit!

As mentioned, there are four main zones on the body where injuries can occur: the Head, Torso, Arms and Lower Body. Each zone has many possible injury types, and those types apply penalties to your characters depending on the severity of them. Many(but not all) injuries will also be accompanied by Lacerations, graded as Light, Deep and Severe. A character with a laceration will take damage whenever they perform a combative action aside from Waiting. If not properly treated, and depending on the grade, a Laceration can worsen and lead to Complications in the form of Infection, Fever and Death. The former two apply attribute penalties to the character, while the latter is pretty self explanatory!

[…]

When an injury is sustained in combat, you can apply a Bandage to Stabilize the injury and treat any Lacerations, which prevents them from worsening to a higher grade for the time being. If you’re out of Bandages, you’ll need to do your best to shelter that character until the mission is over, or risk their injury becoming worse and possibly fatal.

The recovery time varies for each possible injury. The effects could last as little as a month, but more severe injuries could sideline a character for up to a year(which sounds longer than it really is! lol). Apart from Bandages which are temporary solutions, some injuries don’t require any medical intervention and will heal on their own without issue. However, more severe injuries will require treatment, either by your guild’s Physician or at a City’s Infirmary if the injury is beyond their capabilities. Even with treatment, sustaining a severe injury can sometimes have a lasting and permanent effect(in the form of a Trait) on the character, such as the loss of an eye or an ear.

In addition to the implementation of Injuries, Chris has been working more on the world simulation code off and on for a few months now, and it’s starting to all come together nicely. This has been a HUGE undertaking and the amount of work we’ve put into it should hopefully translate into making the world of Caelum a very interesting place, with a lot of room for replayability. Houses and cities will rise and fall, Kingdoms will wage war and nobles will plot to sabotage their counterparts. Through quests, you will be able to assist Houses in their endeavors and help swing the outcome of these events one way or another. We’ll continue to have more to say on these aspects of the game in the future as we get closer to release and It’s something we’re planning to show off in a devlog video at some point.

This past month Nik has been finalizing the enemy pool and the respective abilities of each type. Enemy variety(both their looks and mechanics) is of great importance to us, and we’ll have some visuals to show off over the next couple months for that. There’s been plenty more smaller tasks we’ve tackled this month but those were the major things we wanted to highlight for this update. See you next time, and Happy Halloween 🙂