The Iron Oath Update #38

In their first Kickstarter update of the year, the developers behind the gritty turn-based RPG The Iron Oath share some belated holiday greetings, deliver an overview of The Iron Oath’s newly added “Bleedout” mechanic, and then talk about the recent changes and improvements to the game’s dialogues, shrine interactions and art. Check it out:

Happy New Year to everyone, and we hope you all enjoyed the Holidays 🙂 We’re a few days late here with our December wrap-up so we apologize for that, but here it is nevertheless!

This past month Chris has been working on various mechanics that take place during dungeon crawls. First up is our overhauled knockout state for your characters which we’ve dubbed as the ‘Bleedout’ mechanic.

Previously as a placeholder, your characters would get knocked down and their health would go into the negative until a certain threshold was hit, upon which time they would die. Healing them back into the positive would get them back into the action. Now when your character is knocked down in combat, they enter the Bleedout state where they dip into a reserve health pool, which is represented by a series of blocks on their health bar. They receive one for every point of Constitution they have, and this pool is persistent throughout the entire dungeon, carrying over from battle to battle. This means that if a character is knocked down and their reserves are reduced to 6 blocks prior to being revived, the next time they get knocked down their reserve pool would still be at 6 bars instead of the maximum.

On their turn, a character in the Bleedout state will lose 1 block of reserve health. Attacks committed by enemies will also deplete it further. Healing the downed character at any point will restore them and bring them back into the fight (at the health value they were healed for).

The dynamic dialogue feature has also received some love, adding in various triggers for characters to communicate, such as when they sustain an injury, experience a character’s death, or land a critical hit.

The logic for coming across and interacting with shrines is also being worked on, with various Gods that can grant your party buffs(or debuffs) depending on their nature and how you interacted with the shrine (such as what items you offered, how you answered their query or whether or not you complete a task they charge you with). We’ll have more to show for this feature at a later date!

On the art side of things, we’ve recently hired a talented artist to oversee the final version of the Overworld map which is coming along nicely. […]

I’ve continued to work on enemy designs, some of which will be passed off for animation as we continue to expand our team. […]

Thanks for reading and for all of your support during the past year. We wish you all a terrific 2019, and we’ll be back later this month with our January update 🙂