Chris Wingard & Nik Mueller Interview: The Iron Oath, A Fresh Tactical RPG

New tactical RPG The Iron Oath made its first appearance at the 2022 Humble Game Showcase, promising a unique blend of genres in a medieval fantasy setting. Now available in early access, the game draws inspiration from elements of popular strategic turn-based games like Darkest Dungeon and XCOM and combines them with management games like Football Manager to make a brand-new player experience.
The Iron Oath tasks players with leading their own mercenary party in an open-world environment, where they will have to manage the business of their party alongside in-game battles. Players will recruit other mercenaries to their payroll, having to generate enough income to pay their employees while keeping up party morale. Years pass by in-game somewhat quickly, and players will see their mercenaries die or retire as the game’s overworld changes as well – kingdoms may fall or change their allegiances, or be wiped off the map entirely. These unique elements combined with riveting turn-based combat has The Iron Oath poised to become one of the best tactical RPGs on the market.
SCREENRANT VIDEO OF THE DAY
The game’s developers Chris Wingard and Nik Mueller sat down with Screen Rant to discuss the evolution of the game, its ever-changing world and characters, and what the future holds for The Iron Oath.

This post: Chris Wingard & Nik Mueller Interview: The Iron Oath, A Fresh Tactical RPG

The wait is over! The Iron Oath is out NOW in Steam Early Access!
Buy it here: https://t.co/PVPFm0kMJD pic.twitter.com/wM897DYK9H
— The Iron Oath ⚔️Out Now on Steam! (@TheIronOath) April 19, 2022

I’ve been playing The Iron Oath, and it’s really fun. I tend to prefer a turn-based game, because it’s less stressful.

Nik Mueller: The nature of the game is a little stressful.

That’s true. I’ve had two people die, but it wasn’t the main ones that I was building up the skills for. Going into the background of you as developers, Rhythm Destruction was much different than The Iron Oath. What would you say were the main things that you took away from that development experience that have influenced how you went about The Iron Oath?

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Chris Wingard: I think for me, it’d be mainly having completed a project, just the two of us. In the past, I used to work in the AAA games, but I wanted to get away from that. Rhythm Destruction was like a hobby project for the two of us, and getting something finished was a good way to get into making a bigger scale game like The Iron Oath.
Nik Mueller: It helped us become a little more disciplined, I guess? I think if we were to work on Rhythm Destruction continuously, full-time as we’re doing now, it probably would have only taken us a year. But we were working on it for probably four years, just very casually.
Chris Wingard: Yeah, and fighting feature creep and all that stuff.
Nik Mueller: Adding asynchronous multiplayer, which was a big waste of time.

The Iron Oath has been a long time coming. I think the concept first originated in 2015?

Nik Mueller: Yeah, very early 2016, I think.
Chris Wingard: That was when I left my job at EA, and then we started developing a prototype so that we could go to Kickstarter. Which we did at the end of 2017, I think that’s when our Kickstarter went live.

I went through a lot of your Twitter, and it’s awesome that your Kickstarter was able to get off the ground. I know this game has seen a lot of changes and evolution since the concept first began. What would you say the biggest changes are?

Nik Mueller: Definitely the combat. With dungeon exploration in general, the combat was the first big change. It initially started off closer to Darkest Dungeon, where you’ve got four guys in a row – except we added a second row. So, there’s a little bit of movement and targeting possibilities with the abilities we had.
It seemed fun, and we designed all our abilities around that. But we quickly realized, “What if we opened up the grid and let you move wherever you wanted?” That was the first big change.
Chris Wingard: A little closer to an XCOM-type movement. I love XCOM, so some of that was brought in with how we went about designing what now is the combat system.

A lot of what you’ve shared about the game development online has had to do with visuals. You’ve shared a lot of time lapses and graphics about how different character designs have come about. What would you say are your biggest artistic inspirations for the game, and what are your goals for it stylistically?

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Nik Mueller: It’s hard to say. When I initially started doing pixel art, we were a little bit inspired by that. Artistically, I learned how to do a lot of animations looking at sprites from the game Duelyst, so that had a pretty big influences. Even today, we’ll see people say like, “This game reminds me of Duelyst.” And like, “Well, there’s a good reason for that.”
We also have an animator who did a lot of our animations, who worked on Duelyst as well. There’s definitely a connection there.

I was watching a time lapse of the Reaper, and it was interesting how the colors and shapes evolved throughout the process. When you come into a design, how solid of an idea do you have behind what the character will look like? Is it just playing around with different colors before it feels right?

Nik Mueller: Yeah, it’s in the moment, just fiddling around with things. We design out what we want the character to do beforehand, and then I bring up a bunch of different art references to give me some inspiration on how I want to think the character to look.
But as I’m designing it, I’ll change a lot of things. We don’t have any concept art, so it’s just doing everything from scratch. Things can change quite a bit, and I’ll fiddle with colors quite a bit.

As you mentioned, a lot of this game’s inspiration is Darkest Dungeon, especially the psychological aspect of the battles and the adventuring taking a mental toll on the characters. What about that mechanic do you think makes the game special and made you want to include it in The Iron Oath?

Chris Wingard: I think one of the things I liked about that was how, in games like Darkest Dungeon and XCOM, you have these procedurally-generated characters. You’re building attachment to them by just playing as them in the game, but they’re not story-created, plot characters. You build up this love for these characters, and when they die, you’re like, “Oh, no!”
I think a lot of that is what I liked; trying to get you to care about characters that are procedurally generated.

I also was curious about the characters in the game, because they each have their own distinct morals and different personality traits. Were they all procedurally generated as well?

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Chris Wingard: Yeah, all the characters in the game are procedurally generated. There’s one that you start with, who is the only story character, and we try to tie him into the events of the dialogue and stuff. But all the dialogue is pulling in random characters and checking their traits and stuff like that.
They’re all assigned these traits dynamically, so one can be assigned a greedy trait. And then if you come across someone in a dungeon that needs help, he might want you to do the greedy option.
Nik Mueller: Pipe up and be like, “Hey, we could steal stuff from this guy.”
Chris Wingard: Yeah, like, “Why would you help this guy? We can just loot his corpse and take his stuff.” That’s pretty one interesting thing about having these generated characters like that.

What was the process of generating those characters like?

Chris Wingard: Well, we have a whole system, actually, where we can take these little bits of a character story and build it procedurally. Basically, what it does is it takes your parents’ backstory, an early childhood story, and a young adult story – and it sort of splices them together. They kind of chain from one to the next, so you’re not going to have a story where it knows that your parents are killed. The branching story from that one knows that your parents are dead, so there are these additional options that can potentially generate.
Some of the traits are built off of that, so maybe you would get an honorable trait by someone who in their backstory had something that led them to that. Right now, in game, it’s kind of a basic implementation of that. But that’s one of the things we’re gonna be expanding on in early access.

It’s really cool. I had no idea that each character would have such a specific branching background like that.

Chris Wingard: It’s in there. Right now, there’s not a ton of options for it to pull from, but that’s one of things that we’re looking to expand upon even more. And bring it more into the forefront, because right now, you can only really find that if you dig deep into the character stats screens and look through their backstory panels.
But we’re going to be expanding on that by having these quests that can be generated for a character based off their backstory. If, in their backstory, their parents were killed, then maybe you get a loyalty quest generated later that talks about like getting revenge and that type of thing.

When you were coming up with all of these different backstories, how does that work? Did you write all of them, and then say, “These can go together and these can’t go together?”

Chris Wingard: Basically. It really wasn’t too much more than that.
Nik Mueller: It’s just a giant Madlib.
Chris Wingard: They all just kind of have keywords that branch off each other. If this one has a key word with this one in it, then it can lead to this and this and this. It just kind of goes from there.

How many different backstories would you say there are total?

Chris Wingard: I’m not sure of the exact number, bur I’m pretty sure the file is like 1000 lines long. Most of them are fairly short, because it doesn’t need to be super involved. It’s more like an overview, and a couple sentences to give you an idea on who this character is.

That’s really interesting how it influences their traits too. Each character has their own specific set of morals, and I did find myself wondering a few times. I replaced someone in my party with a morally bad person, and I was finding myself wondering, “What’s up with this guy? Why is he like this?”

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Nik Mueller: There’s also an insane trait where they could just go any which way at any time, and you don’t really know how they’re gonna lean.
Chris Wingard: The cannibal trait is another fun one.
Nik Mueller: It’s not on our roadmap right now, but one of our later updates is gonna be focused all around character personalities and all that; just expanding the backstories and adding more dynamic dialogue lines. During combat right now, they don’t say too much. There’s some instances where they can talk, but that’s something we didn’t want to expand on. They’ll talk based on how they feel about each other and what their traits are.
Chris Wingard: Right now, there’s a couple where if someone one character really hates dies, then they might just be like, “That was pathetic.” Something like that.

I know that the members of the party have a relationship with the player, just in terms of how loyal they are and that kind of thing. But I hadn’t realized they also have interpersonal dynamics, which adds a really interesting extra layer. In terms of in-game events, there, there’s a lot of text that reads like a Dungeons & Dragons DM narrating. What else did you draw from in terms of inspiration?

Chris Wingard: Dungeons & Dragons definitely played a big role in a lot of our inspirations. In combat, there’s the concept of of attack of opportunities, where if two characters are engaged and then move outside of their range of influence right next to each other, then the other person gets a free hit. Things like that come from Dungeons & Dragons.
Like you mentioned, that is kind of the idea. Those events and stuff feel like they’re being crafted by a DM right in front of you, so that you feel like someone’s creating the story for you as you’re going.
Nik Mueller: The ability charges also something we pulled from D&D. Your powerful mages can’t use too many spells before they’ve got to rest and all that. Yeah, our original idea was basically just Darkest Dungeon meets D&D. That’s where we started from.

Did you draw any D&D inspiration when it comes to the game’s monsters?

Nik Mueller: A little bit, I think. I definitely look through their whole Monster Book just for ideas on different cool enemies we could have.
Chris Wingard: We do have some typical, like, “Here’s a skeleton monster,” or whatever. But we tried to branch out and be a little bit more unique with most of our characters. A lot of our enemies, especially the demons and stuff, we tried to be a little bit more unique with.
Nik Mueller: The demons in particular, we tried to make them almost look heavenly. But corrupted it in a way, like really bad angels. They’re all floating. They look like they’re godlike, but they’re demons.

I remember being so impressed with how creepy they are, but a lot of them don’t look 100% evil. Except for one monster…

Nik Mueller: The big guy with spines growing all over the place? Something went wrong in his evolutionary process.

There’s just so much going on in this game that it’s almost hard to nail down any single aspect to talk about. You’re building up your company’s reputation, and you’re managing your party’s emotions along with your money. Was that a difficult balancing act for you guys? Did you ever wonder if this too much for a player to manage?

Nik Mueller: We definitely had to go through a lot of iterations with our tutorial, because trying to introduce all these different things to the player was definitely a challenge. We probably went through three different tutorials, or maybe four different versions. In our most recent one, we cut down on the words a lot and added more videos where we could to help illustrate the points.
I think that does a much better job. Because there’s a lot of reading anyway., so when people get a tutorial pop up that’s like three paragraphs long, it’s just like, “Ughhh.” Then they skip it, and they’re like, “Hey, the game never explained this to me!”

Going back into the morals of different characters, the player is presented with a lot of moral choices, and your choices can influence the party’s reputation. Why did you choose to include that sort of moral system into the game?

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Chris Wingard: I’ve always found things like that interesting in Dungeons & Dragons, where you can kind of do whatever you want. I think giving you access to all those options is more interesting than always playing the good guy. If we only gave you the option to help him, then it just limits your input on the game.
Obviously, most people in these types of games want to do good. They want to help someone. But I think just being given the option is more interesting.

And I think that often comes with the territory of an open world game, but it’s not something you see a lot in tactical games like this one.

Nik Mueller: Yeah, I think it’s because we have the main story, but we also want it to be very much a sandbox. Having those choices is very important. If people wanted to be a bandit company type of thing, we wanted to let them do that. Just ruin their reputation to earn a little extra coin.
Chris Wingard: But we also to wanted to balance it a little bit, so that you’re not just gonna be making these terrible choices and being a terrible person, by giving you the feedback from the people who are in your party. Because if you keep making those choices, then they’re gonna respond and be like, “Why did we do this? This is a terrible thing to do.” And then eventually, you’ll lose loyalty with them, and they can even leave your company if the loyalty drops enough.
Nik Mueller: They can be like, “I don’t agree with the decisions you’ve been making lately, and I’m leaving if things don’t change.” That’s another thing you need to keep in mind when you’re recruiting characters, looking at their traits and seeing if it’s gonna fit the playstyle you’re going for.
If you’re playing an honorable guy, you don’t want to be going and recruiting someone who’s treacherous, because they’re always gonna be going against you.

You mentioned you really wanted it to be a sandbox experience. What other elements were important for you, in terms of creating that element of freedom in the game?

Chris Wingard: I think just being able to go wherever you want is a lot more interesting than making a linear campaign. I think that was one thing we really wanted to do from the start.
Our day one thought was, “What if we made Darkest Dungeon but an open world?” Then it’s nothing like that, really. There’s obviously inspirations from Darkest Dungeon, but we’ve gotten far away from that concept.

Of course, you have the passage of time and stuff like that too, which I think is really interesting.

Nik Mueller: You’ve got to play a lot to get to that point. I was asking people in our Discord the other day, “Has anyone had anyone retire yet?” We’ve had people play for 50 hours already, so I was curious to see how that was going for them.
Balancing the whole time aspect was kind of tricky, because we wanted time to pass and your characters to age, but we didn’t want to have to make you play 300 hours in order to get to that point. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but our in-game year is only 120 days. We had to really shorten it down, kind of in the same way that Wildermyth does. I think their in-game year is 140 days or something like that.
Chris Wingard: We wanted the passage of time to not feel completely broken from reality, but at the same time, we wanted the years to advance. You’re playing through at least a decade or two during your campaign.
Nik Mueller: Going along with the years passing, that was part of the design of the overworld. Our inspiration for that was a very light version of Crusader Kings, where the different houses can go to war and take over cities from one another, and all that can get wiped out off the map and maybe come back a little later.
That was something we were really excited about early on, just having a world that can change. If you play for 200 years, the world stage is gonna look totally different. Maybe what house has taken over the entire realm and is ruling over all of it.

That’s awesome. I never considered that part of it. I knew that there were relationships between kingdoms and the player, but it didn’t even occur to me that there could be complete map changes essentially. I think that’ll inspire players to keep coming back to it.

Nik Mueller: Yeah, it’s a good role-playing immersion thing. You just pick a house that you feel is the most attuned to your morals and all that, and you just help them help them conquer their enemies basically.

Are the characters literally aging one year per year, or is it a sort of sped up process?

Nik Mueller: Yeah, it’s one year per our in-game year. So, every 120 days, they’ll age one year.

This game reminds me of a Tycoon game, in that you’re managing your funds and the things that you’re buying and your employees – which is really fun – combined with fighting strategy and all of that other stuff. It’s just a really interesting blend of stuff.

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Nik Mueller: There’s definitely elements from sports simulator games, like a Football Manager type thing, where you’re going and finding the best recruits, then signing them to contracts and making sure you can afford to pay them when their contract is up and at all that.

Is there anything that you guys want players to know about The Iron Oath and its future?

Nik Mueller: There’s a lot coming in the future. The dragon story aspect was also a big thing; we nailed down pretty early on exactly what we wanted to do with that. There’s no story in there yet, but that’s something that’s gonna be coming for the 1.0 release.
What we have right now is your personal company’s story serving as the main campaign currently. But there’s definitely a lot of other campaigns we want to explore. We didn’t want to have one long, linear overarching campaign. We kind of wanted to break them up into a bunch of little mini-campaigns, so you can pick and choose what you want to wanted to do in your playthrough.
Chris Wingard: We want to continue, during early access, to add lots more content and lots more quests and enemies. That’s kind of the theme of early access: more of what’s there, and expanding on it.
Nik Mueller: It’s really awesome that we only have 15 hours of unique content right now, but we’ve already seen multiple players already playing 50+ hours on PC. So when we see a steam review and it has 80 hours, we’re just like, “Wow.” It makes us feel pretty good that people are enjoying it that much to put that much time in.
Chris Wingard: Yeah, and we’ve built our tools so that it’s pretty easy for us to iterate and add new events that are just a one-off encounter, and entire quests and campaigns. With every big content update, we’re planning on blowing that out and having lots more stuff to explore.

Is there any timeline for upcoming updates?

Chris Wingard: So far, we’ve been pushing out little mini-patches pretty regularly. We’ve actually got another one going out today. But our first big major content update is slated right now for sometime this spring.
Nik Mueller: Spring, summer and fall is what we’re looking at for the first three ones. In general like we’re just targeting a 2023 release for 1.0.

That’s so exciting. I’ve been having so much fun – though I know that’s repetitive.

Chris Wingard: That’s good to hear. We don’t get tired. Especially when you’ve been working on a game for six years, and then you’re like, “Is this thing fun? I’m enjoying it, but are other people are going to enjoy it?” Because I’m biased.
Nik Mueller: We were doing out testing a couple of months ago, and we were both reaching 100 hours. We’re like, “This is fun, right? I’m having fun.”

It’s a really addictive experience. It’s an awesome combination of so many different things, and I think that’s going to make it have a broader appeal than a normal tactical game.

Nik Mueller: I wouldn’t say anything we did was totally unique, but we just pulled various aspects that we liked from different tactical RPGs. There’s a little bit of Battle Brothers, a little bit of Darkest Dungeons, XCOM, and all that stuff in terms of caring about your company and everything.
And the narrative, of course. A lot of those games, like Battle Brothers, are very sandbox-y and don’t lean too much into the narrative. That’s one thing we see people mention a lot. It’s like, “There’s a lot of reading…”

But the text is very visual and descriptive. Even though it’s just text, you really get a feeling for the mood and everything that’s happening.

Nik Mueller: Adding the sounds adds a lot. The little arrows shoot out as the text comes up, and it just gets you a little bit more immersed.
I think we originally wanted to show those things onscreen, with your characters and all that. If you found someone in a dungeon, it would show your characters coming across them. But it was a lot of work, so we had to retool our dungeon exploration. We were like, “Okay, we’re just gonna have to describe everything from a DM type perspective,” and it worked out really well for us.

Is there any plan for voice acting in the game?

Chris Wingard: Probably not, because it’d be too much. Especially if you get the wrong guy narrating it, then it would be pretty grating after a while.
Nik Mueller: Possibly for the prologue, maybe we could do it. But then people might feel like it was a bait and switch. Like, “Oh, I thought they had voice acting for the whole time. But it cuts off after this point.”

The Iron Oath can be bought in early access on Steam for Mac and PC.

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