A downloadable game for Windows

About Iron Valiant:

Iron Valiant is a single-player, mecha combat action game built around tense melee fights, high-skill ranged weapon combat, and full environmental destruction and interaction mechanics. In a world of colossal steel beasts, Iron Valiant has players helm three unique mechas (known as Valiants) with a variety of unique ranged and melee weapons at their disposal. Every melee weapon will have its own unique move set, complete with particular strengths and weaknesses. Every Valiant shall contain a unique play style allowing players to craft their perfect mecha.

Iron Valiant Demo gameplay video:

Full Environmental Destruction:

Almost all buildings can be destroyed in Iron Valiant. If a structure stands in your way, then tear it down! All of our destruction is dynamic, thanks to the power of CHAOS in Unreal Engine 5. You will be able to collapse bridges on your foes, level entire structures to carve a path towards victory, and even throw your enemies into structures to damage them.

IV Gameplay 4 - Indie DB

Master Melee and Ranged combat:

Iron Valiant has tense combat centered around wise positioning, fast-paced mech battles, an in-depth melee and combo system, and satisfying ranged combat. We plan to have a large variety of enemies from other Valiants, to tanks, artillery pieces, and even infantry. Hone your skills and techniques to survive in this heart- pounding, action-packed mecha combat game.




Story:

Iron Valiant is also complete with a dramatic, touching story about a group of kids fighting desperately to defend their beloved country from a powerful empire in the west, Gundria. Follow Reinhardt and friends on their journey to liberate the fantastical land of Astera, a country of magnificent mountains, peaceful pastures, stunning cities, and enchanted forests. Iron Valiant tells a tale as old as time, what does war cost a country? How does it shape the generations to come? What environmental impacts does it have on the natural world? Take on the mantle of the King of Kings – the Valiant Lothair Magnus Rex – and grow your arsenal, modify your Valiants to fit your play style, and learn to love your faithful companions in this wonderfully realized anime world


Current and Planned Development:

Thank you for your interest!

We hope to see you on the battlefield!


Updated 4 days ago
StatusPrototype
PlatformsWindows
Rating
Rated 5.0 out of 5 stars
(2 total ratings)
AuthorTigerTeam
GenreAction, Shooter
TagsAction-Adventure, Anime, JRPG, mech, mecha, Mechs, Singleplayer

Download

Download
IVDEMO2.zip 921 MB

Development log

Comments

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Impressive demo overall. The level/environment design is great, exactly what I'd want to see from a premise that feels very much like a mix of Armored Core, Valkyria Chronicles, and just a touch of Ace Combat. Movement feels pretty good, though I'd agree with some of the other comments about lack of 'weight' and there not being much of a reason to switch to the alternate boost mode. Ranged combat works well for the most part. Dealing with the sniper felt a little hit or miss as to whether I could successfully dodge at the last second (which feels great when it works) or get tracked by the shot anyway. I like the inclusion of flares to defend against homing missiles, although I would have preferred to have something in the UI to indicate when they were recharging (assuming I didn't miss seeing it). The music fit the action and was enjoyable to listen to. I'd have liked to hear some additional tracks to fill in the silence between larger fights, but (along with some of the other aspects like the voice acting), I won't comment too much on things that don't seem like the central focus of the proof of concept demo.

I think the biggest critique I have is that the central combat flow of switching between ranged and melee combat kind of falls apart when the intensity ramps up, particularly during the boss fight. While I understand the appeal of having an in-depth, dedicated system for both ranged and melee combat, the fact that half of the combat actions are exclusive to ranged/melee modes leads to a lot of awkward switching between stances under pressure, especially at the intensity level that the game seems to be going for. Needing to take a moment to switch the main cannon with your melee weapon makes sense, but it's frustrating to have to stop shooting and change stances every time I want to block incoming fire or parry, or need to break out of melee just to use my shoulder weapons. The boss doesn't even seem to have this restriction in the second phase of the fight, which leads to a lot of unfun moments of trying to time attacks during melee exchanges and eating a bunch of missiles at close range. I also found the weapon art to be extremely difficult to use during the boss fight, since it takes so long to start up that even activating it right after a stagger opening would always lead to it getting interrupted anyway. The stagger openings themselves felt very short relative to the amount of damage (or lack thereof) that your weapons could do on short notice, to the point where it almost didn't feel worth trying to push for them against the boss.

My take is that it might help the overall combat if dealing with incoming melee attacks was less restrictive, particularly regarding the tracking (so that you have the option of dodging more reliably and aren't required to switch stances and spam parries up close) or if you had some way of accessing your block/parry from any stance. More fluid melee combat could also make it more of a viable option when fighting multiple enemies at once, since I found that trying to engage in melee in those situations would usually just get me shot by the second mech unless I had a huge opening (like getting one of them stuck on terrain or behind a huge building). Heat management during melee could use some attention, as others have mentioned - it either doesn't pose a problem at all when all you have to do is parry (although that gets old pretty quickly), or instantly cripples you as soon as you have to worry about dodging guard breaks or getting shot.

There's definitely a lot of promise here, though. The bones of the movement and combat are largely solid, so I could see most of these issues getting ironed out over the course of development and testing. I think the thing I'm most interested in seeing is how squad combat will fit into this, as well as how much the weapon customization affects the flow of combat. I'm excited to see where this project goes - good luck with development!

(2 edits)

Thanks so much for the very detail feedback, I will try to deal with it one at a time.
1. Weight is something being added right now as well as proper implementation for all stat modifiers. Weight will defining acceleration and deceleration values as well as turn time ( turn time represented as either degrees per second, how long it takes to turn 180 degrees, something like this, and speed of hockey stop turn. )

2. The tracking for weapons and accuracy in regards to friendly or enemies needs some work still. We were not able in time to add an accuracy nerf to the Sniper when at a certain window of time the Player inputs a dodge. Sniper Accuracy is also meant to have decrease at short range, but we again not able to implement in time.

3. Counter-Measure has reloading UI element, UI in general is still really bad xD, I am going to work on 4th iteration for our vertical slice.

4. I could only afford to commission just a few tracks, this project is funded solely from my pocket, but we will try to get more tracks to you guys soon and address the down time not having music. The voice acting is all placeholder and is terrible because it is done by me doing impressions of Metal Gear characters lol. We have many voice actors who are asking to work and we will get to proper VO!

5.  Yes, I 100% agree, melee has been a big focus for me on Combat Rework3, we didn't add blocking while range mode because of controller limitation but have  solution now. Mouse and Keyboard, wea re going to open up blocking and parry in Ranged mode. Controller will need compromise with combo button press, 'LB + RT / LT' will fire rockets, 'LT alone' will block, RB fire aux weapons, something like this. I am also working to see if we have a key free for Quick Melee so that we can quickly transition from combat mode with a single button. 

6. Boss was overtuned because I did the classic developer thing of 'I play this build for 80 hours and it's too easy, people will think this is too easy' and ended up make the Boss do too much damage, have too many capabilities, too much AP and HP, and probably not fun to fight. :(

7. STAGGER currently is still being adjusted, there are weapons that can do something call 'Heavy STAGGER' that we still need to add, we will definitely make tweaks based on Player feedback

8. More free form melee attacking like Batman series games ( just example) is not something we are looking at, we are going to try and solve the issue of multiple enemy engagements in melee with a better method of targeting. We are also allowing now for Players to use Hard Lock in Melee and Ranged and to cycle targets like in Gundam vs Zeta Gundam

9. HEAT capacity (baseline level) has been increased by about 60%, I agree the restriction was unfun.

10. Melee combat moves are still in-progress, going to add defensive actions that can cancel melee attacks like dodging. AI will also support these tactics

Appreciate the feedback, if you have anymore we would love to hear from you and I hope to address these issues because I 100% agree with the problems. Feel free to message me here or join Discord community where we are active on feedback :). Thanks so much for taking the time to write all this, means a lot to our team!

(3 edits)

Mech combat wise, good foundation. Feels like an interesting twist on AC6, and the controls are nice and responsive. Melee is bigger than there for sure. Melee is for big damage and stagger building, but runs on an ammo system. Builds back up slowly on it's own, goes up faster if you deal damage using ranged, works even better if you can bait the enemy into melee so you can parry to build up their stagger at the same time, which has a nice-ish rhythm to it. Still the idea of directly having it be about weaving between melee and ranged is neat. Parries are a little too easy rn, and ranged deals a little too little damage imo, making it skew a little hard towards melee engagement though. I like the idea of choosing between targeting limbs or going straight for the kill! Assault boost equivalent feels insufficiently faster than normal movement right now considering the heat cost. When blocking, dodging, and melee all build heat, it's hard to justify during combat considering how crippling an overheat is. One thing I like is that AC6 style repair kits exist, but they repair ablative armor only, and do not fix internal damage that happens if something has stripped that ablative armor. Allows for a bit more incentive to pay closer attention to maintenance. Enemies unfortunately also seem tohave armor in a way that feels bad because you can only see their real health and not their armor, meaning you don't see the damage you do for a while, so it feels pretty bad while you're whittling them down. 

Do wish we got some mech customization and the allies to play with to crank it up a bit.

 Presentation wise, it's still obviously a touch rough, but I absolutely love the decision to go full ace combat with introducing the enemy ace during the demo mission, right down to the touch of Zero style spanish guitar. The bright colors and shading are lovely. Voice acting feels rough and placeholder-y. 

Unfortunately my first attempt to play crashed my entire computer due to an error involving the resolution, but spamming alt+enter on startup seems to prevent it.

 Real potential here IMO, looking forward to watching it progress!

Hi, thanks so much for detailed feedback, I will address things one by one.

Melee is still being tuned. ammo count for weapons, ammo recovery rate, hard canceling attacks with other actions, damage, these things. I agree ranged is not tuned exactly well but the shield gun with lance weapon is overtuned for damage, current Combat 3 rework address some of this .

Parries were made easy on purpose because I had friends who play test unable to land with old timing haha, the current rework is 100MS, parry window this demo has 500MS window which is too high but we wanted to make it so people could parry, especially publisher haha. Parry function needs a bit of update, we are going to work on that.

Afterburner can be increased, faster is much cooler :)

HEAT cost is adjusted, I increase HEAT baseline by 60% in Combat 3 rework.

UI getting total rework in new demo for you guys, will make the armor and HP stat much better to understand


There is customization, but we were dumb and made it so it can only unlock after defeating Boss, I wish I didn't do this but it is what it is. Companions and companion command system is implemented in current build, can't wait to give access to other to try

Voice acting is rough, it was me doing impressions of Metal Gear characters haha and changing the pitch on some

Resolution bug is known, we are going to fix it for next build, apologies for this.

Please follow on Discord and Twitter for more news and dev updates:). We take a lot of community suggestions and questions there!

Demo is broken for me. For some reason the resolution is forced set way to high, so I can only see the top left corner. Anyway to set the resolution manually?

Hi, sorry about that, can you try to press ALT+ENTER a few times? This will minimize your screen and force the game to render the whole window, after that, you can adjust screen resolution and fullscreen. We will make sure this does not happen again on next build!

That fixed it!!! Thanks so much!!!

is it possible to mark the demo as windows compatible so that it can be downloaded on the Itch.io windows companion app?

Yes, I can do that right now.

Hello; I would really like to try your demo but I don't want to run with the FPS uncapped. As far as I can tell there's no way to save your settings in the settings menu either. Like, you can change them, but you can't save your changes. Backing out of the menu just reverts them and there's no button to save. Am I missing something?

Hi, it's been a really long time since I took a look at that package. If it's ok, I will try to get back to you tomorrow. If you're specifically talking about display settings I think you need to confirm by pressing 'ENTER'. If it doesn't work, hop in the Discord tomorrow and I will do my best to address this, thanks.

https://discord.gg/SGYyz2DS

This is a really cool idea I wanna see done justice, but at the moment it suffers from the same issue allot of indie mech games I've played have and that is lack of *weight* or hempf to the controls. All the proper shmoovement is there its just a bit floaty.

Hi thanks for the feedback, definitely agree. There is a sprint for us to address movement in general, missing feature weight, etc. We are going to be adding weight stat to armor, new build should address your concerns! You can keep up to date with posts we make on Discord community. Thanks for the feedback!

Just finished both the new and old demo today, and I think I do prefer the older demo's combat systems as it feels like it fits way more into the general feel and aesthetic of the game, if that makes sense. The weighty feel of combat given the similarities with visuals of Valkyria Chronicles makes more sense to me than the Armored Core/Ace Combat arcade shooter feel of the new demo. I hope future versions can marry the two combat systems somehow if the team prefers the direction the new combat system is going. Looking forward to updates on this!

Thank you! We have a combat system overhaul right now that involves adding more weight and movement stops to certain weapons. We also reworking missile tracking. If you can join our DIscord, we are trying to get a build up that has the new combat updates as well as Companion system inside it with new graphics :). I would love to have more of your feedback there!
https://discord.gg/ee85CMBpMq

I think I like the older demo more than the current one. It felt more distinct and interesting on its own even if it was a bit jankier. The current version feels like Armored Core 6 and Ace Combat/Project Wingman mashed onto a completely different game.

Hi ditalos, thanks for the feedback! I am in the works for a new update that will add some features that will make the changes make more sense. Also, we finally made a Discord, I hope you can join!

I'm still very excited for the game so keep up the good work! That was just a personal opinion thing.

I've played the demo, and it felt like a slog. every time I die, I have to watch the same intro cutscene which is unskippable. And the later fight is just hoping that I'm not picked off by a sniper, whilst fighting for dear life against a bloodthirsty enemy looking to kick my ass and feels like they have more health than I do. There's also no checkpoints, so when I die? Too bad! This isn't dark souls. This game is good, it has good visuals, great combat, and the valiant feels good to control. It's just obscenely difficult and sluggish in the first level. 

Sorry, for some reason I never saw your message  or got any notification for it.Thanks for the feedback, we actually did adjust difficulty significantly down for the new build. We also have the first pass implementation for the Companion system, so you can actually now bring an AI party member into the fight. He has really powerful abilities. I hope you will come back when we update the build! :)

(1 edit)

is this still being developed? I thought it was pretty good.

Yes! Indeed we are still in development, I was actually going to post a progress update on indiebd very soon, though it was supposed to happen last month but some things cause us a delay. We are working on a new build after taking in a lot of the feedback we got from people and tightening up the gameplay and adding more features. Right now we are adding a brand new map with all original art assets we make ourselves that have hand painted textures like in Valkyria Chronicles. We also made a new animations for literally everything, new weapon models, and more. Progress is slow because we are only a team of 3, but we will have an update soon.

Do you guys have a discord or something?

We do not have a discord, but we plan to set one up. If you want to contact any of the development team, you can follow us on IndieDB and message us directly from there! 

(+1)

This is so cool! the whole demo is VERY promising, it just needs more polish. I'm sure once the game has had more development it will be absurdly fun
reminds me of Valkyria Chronicles (with a bit of FF, of course) in aesthetics, and I really like how the mechs are handled here

Thank you! I get the Valkyria Chronicles comparison a lot and it is one I am pleased about. We are currently refining the melee and ranged combat, AI behaviors, as well as doing a complete overhaul on the visuals. Current things in works are:

- Switching AI from Behavior Trees to a State Machine

- Soft lock for melee attacks and also a hard lock option

- More melee attacks in combo chain

-Melee attacks now assist in tracking and all melee attacks have increased distance covered

- Rework on parry and adding a perfect block option

- Dodge and movement rebalance and update

- Aim assist on ranged weapons

-UI update and redesign

- Infantry enemy characters, Shielded Valiant Variant

- New custom shader for characters and new material for environment

- Much more

You can follow our indiedb page here: https://www.indiedb.com/games/iron-valiant for more updates. I try to gather development stuff together to send out.

Thanks for your feedback and comment of encouragement ditalos, very much appreciate it

(+1)

ah, nice, I like to see the updates
Those are all great things to focus on!

The only thing I'd maybe add is to allow players to cancel their attacks, maybe at least light attacks, with boosting. 

Maybe a camera lock on too (but maybe that's what you meant with hard lock option?).

Anyways, glad you're working on this because it looks great! Can't wait to see more!

(2 edits) (+1)

Yes, hard lock is a camera lock on, that is currently finished in our new build! As for allowing players to cancel their attacks, that was a feature added in earlier version of the game. Players could cancel an attack with a block input, however we found it to be far too strong. We currently have two weapons designed which allow players to cancel attacks, one uses the block to cancel attacks and the other uses dodge. These are still in the design phase, however, with the melee system update and entire overhaul enemy AI animations and behavior; as well as a new enemy type being added, this may be added back to all weapons. Stay tuned, we look forward to sharing our new update with everyone when it is ready!