The For The King Kickstarter campaign continues to rake in funding, so much so that another stretch goal has been reached:

The new stretch goal sounds pretty awesome, as well…especially because the airships will actually work, rather than just sit around as decorations.

In their most recent Kickstarter update, the IronOak Games team look forward to the next stretch goal:

The Sound of Music will add musicians and musical instruments to the game along with some potentially awesome mechanics. Primarily a support class, musicians make everyone around them better through their inspiring songs and ballads.

We’ll be experimenting with some unique mechanics for this class like having them guarantee a successful slot for other party members if they successfully play an inspiring ballad. However if they miss a few notes it may have the opposite effect, so you’ll have to use this ability wisely. They can potentially use the reverse of this ability against their enemies, forcing them to fail a slot. In this manner they can neutralize enemy special attacks and critical strikes if they’re on key.

Different instruments will allow for different abilities so the option will also be there for them to play ballads of destruction doing AOE type damage to groups of enemies. Think Fire Lutes!

Imagine Iolo wandering into the middle of a pitched battle against mongbats and trolls playing a sped-up version of Stones on a Fire Lute.

As well, the game easily gained approval from the Steam community on Greenlight:

…we were just Greenlit by Steam and the community! A heartfelt thanks to all those who supported us. We climbed quickly to the top 10 in only 5 days and woke up this morning to the good news. We are so thankful to have been Greenlit so quickly and we owe it all to you.

Congratulations are, I think, in order; the team at IronOak have done really well by their plucky little game.

The First Age of Update: No sooner do I hit Publish than IronOak’s John Robert Matz (their composer) publishes a new Kickstarter update about For The King’s music.

One of the earliest topics I discussed with the rest of the team was the sound of For the King’s musical landscape, and something we agreed on immediately was the idea of avoiding the wall-to-wall traditional “big epic fantasy score” sound for much of the game, and instead focusing on a small, intimate ensemble of instruments that felt primitive, yet expressive.

The idea was that the instruments in this small ensemble would be (or sound like they could be) man-portable, that they could literally be accompanying the player’s party through the world. To that end, I began to look at instruments that were simpler, less mechanically complex, more crude, were portable, and would have had been around during, or have had direct ancestors in the medieval and early renaissance eras. I’ve always had a strong interest in early music, and getting to delve into that period led me to consider the sounds of wind instruments like recorders, Irish whistles, and pipes, plucked and hammered string instruments like dulcimers and zithers, a variety of hand drums and hand percussion, and some more “unique” bowed (or pseudo-bowed) string instruments, like the ancient Scandinavian tagelharpa (tail-harp), and the more modern (and widespread) hurdy-gurdy.

You can find some music samples includes in the post as well; there’s even a download of some sample tracks available.