It has been a while since we last heard from IronOak Games, but they recently broke radio silence over on the For The King Kickstarter page, to deliver another production update:

So why have we been so silent? Well, we were taken aback by the volume of new players and bugs for one. In particular we were surprised how popular online play was and the majority of bugs centered around this mode. Many new players also means many new PC configurations, which introduces a bunch of unforeseen issues that are particularly difficult to track down. We even brought on a new team member, Nic, specifically to help deal with bug reporting, QA, and community management. He has been an amazing addition to the team so far and has allowed us to get back to focusing on the game proper.

The overall response to For The King has been extremely positive, but one thing that keeps coming up is the dreaded Chaos system. While the community is mixed on the Chaos system, our challenge was to improve it for those who disliked it while not alienating those who enjoyed it as is. We’ve had some ideas for how this could be achieved and finally got some time to implement our plan.

The key to the new system is maintaining some of the pressure that the old timer had, but giving more options to the player for dealing with it. Chaos now increases at a steady rate at all times throughout the game, and in this way behaves more like a food mechanic in a survival game. We’ve decoupled “lives” with the Chaos so now the two systems must be managed independently from one another which in turn opens the door for more strategies and even more interesting decisions/trade offs.

As a result of the new chaos system, more time is now available, especially for the Apprentice (Easy) difficulty level. There are plenty of other subtleties which have been included to make this change work and in our limited playthroughs and testing the response has been superb. We’re really excited about this change and hope to get some of your early eyes on it to help us polish the rough edges and give feedback on difficulty.

They’ve also got a Discord channel now; you can check in with the team and the burgeoning community that is forming around For The King there.