The Iron Oath Receives Animation Upgrade
In 2017 the dev team Curious Panda crowdfunded the tactical turn-based RPG The Iron Oath. It was delivered to backers two years later, and has just received a fresh 2020 update.
The Iron Oath contains a large, nine-region overworld that changes as you play (an average playthrough spans centuries of time…not literally). How the world fares depends on how you manage your guild. Management of resources and smart battle strategies are a necessity, and your characters will grow and change as the game progresses.
The latest patch to The Iron Oath doesn’t include any radical gameplay changes. What it does do is revamp the animations a bit. Curious Panda explained further in their latest blog post…
Hit Effects
We’ve revamped all of the hit effects in the game for melee attacks, blood spatters and blocks. The effects we had previously been using were far too small and not stylish enough for our tastes, so we took a lot of inspiration from fighting games and we’re quite happy with the result. Here’s a look at some example gifs. (no in-game footage for these ones quite yet as they’re still being implemented)
Block
Crushing Damage
Piercing Damage
Slashing Damage
The effects also change slightly based on the angle of attack, which helps convey the direction of the attack a lot more than they previously did.
Violent Deaths
Violent deaths was one of the stretch goals that was reached during the campaign. We’ve made them pretty gory with some Mortal Kombat influence. Each piece has its own physics applied to it, so violent deaths will always be different, and we felt it was a better way to go than having 1 single canned animation per enemy/class(also far less time consuming!).
Boss Kills
Boss kills also have a unique effect now too, as we felt that their death animation went by a little too quick and didn’t allow much time for the player to savor the moment. We’ve added a freeze frame effect which puts a lot more focus on the kill. We’re still making a couple tweaks to the sounds effects for this one, but it’s pretty close to finished!
For those hoping for a more substantial update, Curious Panda is promising “some pretty exciting news” for mid-February. We’ll see what happens then.