Ballots and Bullets: Building the Iron Republic

Introduction:

Greetings community, Dylan “ItWhoSpeaks” Kahn here. It is with great pleasure that we share our first look at what we have been cooking. Consider this our “Jora Faction Preview” complete with mechanics and (some) units!

Before we get into it, I want to answer a long-standing question community members (and a few media folks) have asked over the last two years. Since the beginning of 2025, we have pledged to be more open about our development process. Consider us making good on that promise. (Feel free to scroll down to the mechanics and units if this isn’t of interest to you.)

Where is Jora and why is it taking so long?

Many of you have been with us over this long journey to make real this game and will remember we talked about the Iron Republic (along with many other factions). Ultimately, we underestimated the significant workload required by the Aru faction and logistics required to make Immortals at the quality we wanted. In short, we were junior game developers learning how to make a very large and complicated product. As an example, In RTS games, many devs wisely look to reusable rigs and animation sets due to the immense number of assets that go into a fully-fleshed out faction (to put things in perspective, the average RTS faction has about as many animated assets as a smallish-sized FPS game.) Aru doesn’t have that. Every unit is a custom rig due to our desire to have iconic and memorable creatures. Since bringing on our veteran Art Pipeline director, a lot of our processes have become more streamlined, efficient, and time-effective and these upgrades have been applied to our work on Jora.

A year ago, we decided to focus our efforts on building out more effective systems both internally and on our back-end with the goal to increase the visual quality, UX quality, stability, and performance of IMMORTAL, additionally, we wanted to prioritize the development of dropships (they are in our internal build but are still awaiting final debugging), Q’rath and Aru’s third Immortals (both are in late development, with one ready to announce soon) and the production of new maps, modes, features, and scenarios. The opportunity cost was delaying art work on Jora for a year. Now that these commitments have made it into our internal build, we can say with the benefit of hindsight we made the right call. These optimizations have allowed us to ensure that Jora will be made with better tools, faster systems, and internal checks to ensure the quality we want with fewer revisions. Additionally, throughout the year, we have built and playtested the faction extensively, ensuring that we don’t hit the design non-bos and curses we encountered with the early iterations of Aru and Q’rath.

Lastly, the market has not been kind to game developers for some time (it is essentially in recession), meaning it was difficult to scale to tackle all of these issues in parallel. Our work on this game comes from a deep passion for the genre and determination to give something worthwhile to the RTS community, but there are only so many developer-hours in a day.

Suffice to say, we have been cooking. It took longer than we wanted. Now we have something to show you. We are very excited.

Today, Jora is fully playable in our internal build with its full assortment of core units, and our first two planned Immortals. Each commander offers a distinct playstyle based around managing the faction’s signature resource (detailed below) and they are insanely fun to play. We are now in the process of concepting structures, units, and Immortals now that the faction’s designs have “hardened.” A big thanks is due to our internal playtesters who patiently put up with playing with programmer art for the last year!

Building Jora: The Early Days

In the very early days of conceptual development, when IMMORTAL was a much smaller game, Jora was envisioned as a rag-tag band of western-themed mercenaries. As the concept of the world grew in its scale, depth, and complexity, it became clear that this vibe (cowboy mercs with attitude), while compelling, was insufficient to encapsulate the product’s scope and worldbuilding. The scrappy hired guns of Dekker’s “Dust Company” became a small part of what would grow into a sprawling industrial titan.

In summary: The faction had to grow up.

Jora: A Creative Perspective

“By the Rose who laid down her life for’the founding of this land,
Whose freemen live in peace and plenty forged from their own hands,
A nation liberated: never bowed by cruel demand,
For we wield the Righteous Gun!”
-National Anthem of the United Republics of Jora, Excerpt

Jora’s creative themes are defined by many cultural currents and themes. If I were to boil it down to four elements, would go something like this:

1. Optimistic New-World Republic melting pot of cultures, tempered by adversity, pain, loss, and trial.
2. A rising unapologetic industrial super-power that sees problems as solvable with large machines and larger guns.
3. An diverse, chaotic, and hopeful democratic government balancing the need to act decisively with the need to represent their constituents.
4. This would have to feel distinct from other attempts to make a “relatable human faction,” Jora needed to feel special.

This vision would come to permeate everything: SFX, VFX, Writing, Voice Acting, and Gameplay.

Regarding our soundtrack: I am going to let our composer (and his music) speak for us. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as we enjoyed making it. In time, we hope to get the sum of his amazing work on all of our social media and video sharing sites.

Regarding visual design: We really wanted to veer away from boring grey boxes and straight-played guns. All too often, the immense variety of our species, our history, is reduced to a narrow and flat take on industrial civilization. Part of IMMORTAL’s aesthetic is having something that feels both grounded and a little larger than life, something familiar but a little fantastic. With Jora, we took a long and hard look at the Diesel Punk Genre and then blended it with WW1, Inter-War period, and Cold War period technological and aesthetic themes and incorporated those notes into a magical-tech context. The result is something that feels industrial, mass produced, quirky, a bit endearing, and formidable. Full credit to our Art Director, Javier Romo, who kept us from taking the easy way out.


Joran architecture captures a civilization’s meteoric rise in a snapshot running the gauntlet from early midcentury to retro-futuristic.

Jora’s soul is found in the New World Republics of our planet. Where ancient migrations mingle with new migrations, forming an alloy of language, culture, and ideology. Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia, Canada, Mexico, and of course, the United States of America, all form the foundation of the Iron Republic.

Game Mechanics Design: When Jora goes to war, we knew we wanted it to feel like the player was building, expanding, and directing the efforts of a literal war-Machine. We wanted to give the player the fantasy of building and managing supply lines, of keeping the guns firing, and pounding flat anything that stepped against the Free People of Jora. This is easy to do in a grand strategy or a 4X title, and tricky to pull off in an RTS built around twitch micro and very mobile armies. The UX and UI needs of the game required any Joran logistical mechanics to be intuitive, streamlined, and fun. Jora’s unique mechanics needed to flow from the heart of IMMORTAL’s design rather than a tacked-on gimmick. This led us to the mechanics of J.U.I.C.E. and “The Grid.”

The “J. U. I. C. E.”

Pictured: An early exploration of JUICE and its interactions with Joran technology.

An in-universe back-ronym that stands for “Joran Universal Interchangeable Cell-Based Energy, JUICE is an ability resource equivalent to Q’rath’s “Energy” and Aru’s “Blood.” In the lore, the advanced resource, Ether, is a naturally occurring metaphysical substance that is incredibly energy dense. It is however, quite volatile and requires an extensive refining and stabilizing process where the the most unstable elements are isolated and burned off. The Joran people however, are as resourceful as they are efficiency minded. Refining is expensive, and those volatiles are just begging to be used. Joran refinement processes take those extremely unstable elements, condenses them, and packages them into “sufficiently” safe rune-cells that keep them from prematurely exploding.
Essentially, J.U.I.C.E. are magical dynamite ammunition-bricks strapped to whatever gun, vehicle, or air-frame their engineers can make. Pound for pound, Joran units hit harder than other factions, provided they have the means to do so.

Outside of a few high-end specialists, Joran units do not regenerate J.U.I.C.E. canisters on their own and require resupply to operate at peak efficiency. This gives Jora a distinct playstyle that at its heart, is about the player seeing their army as a gun, choosing when to pace their shots and when to go all in.

Jora asks you to spend your resources wisely, to make each shot count.

So, how do you keep your army topped off?

The Grid:

Pictured: Our first successful Grid visual test!

At the center of every base, there sits the Grand Union, the faction’s Stronghold. Each Grand Union is among other things, a massive reactor capable of packaging and producing the necessary components of JUICE. Structures close enough to a GU become part of the base’s Grid system, empowering their production and research speeds as well as transmitting J.U.I.C.E. ammunition to transmission and collection points for your army. The Grid can be easily expanded with Pylons and specialists, ensuring that with a bit of foresight and planning, your army is prepared to throw down. Enemies of course, can use nimble units like skirmishers or fast generalists to pick away at exposed pieces of infrastructure or to bait out premature expenditures before counter-initiating on a depleted army.

Jora’s Immortals are built with this system in mind with their kits reenforcing or playing with the accumulation or expenditure of J.U.I.C.E.
These designs lead to various playstyles: players can build out the infrastructure to keep the army topped off, investing in defense to preserve your firepower at the cost of mobility and flexibility, or can play hit-and-run, picking opportune moments to dump all a ton of firepower before retreating for resupply while the enemy is reeling.

Let’s look at how some upcoming units use JUICE and the Grid:

Unit Previews

As usual, a Disclaimer: everything you see here is subject to change.
While everything here has been vigorously tested, we are still in Alpha (albeit, quite late). With that expectation set, let’s dive in!

Pile Driver

Tier: 1
Range: Melee
Role: Frontliner

Our first unit concept, the Pile Driver was our first look at rune tech. Expect a visual update in the future!

About: The Pile Driver has been a critical part of Joran industry for the better part of a century, and regarded as one of the main reasons why the Free People of Shum industrialized so quickly. Reverse engineered from ancient Rae labor constructs, the Pile-Driver is capable of tirelessly laboring to break large things into smaller things. Surrounded and outnumbered by potential enemies, the Pile Driver has been retrofitted for military service, it’s simple “intelligence” system and design allowing it to be produced on an industrial scale.
While the Republican Corps of Engineers still is puzzling out exactly how its rune-AI works, they have figured out how to designate enemy silhouettes from friendly ones…most of the time.

In combat, the Pile Driver is deployed in large numbers to gum up enemy formations while exacting grievous wounds. It’s minimalist design allows it to use a “reassembly protocol” found in many Ancient Rae constructs, expending its J.U.I.C.E. reserve to restore it to combat readiness in seconds. Intelligence indicates that both Q’rathi and Talmetran officers have introduced “double-tap” doctrines to their squads to ensure that the Pile-Driver stays down.

Riveteer

Tier 1.5
Range: Medium
Role: Ranged Generalist

Another early concept that ended up being a compass-point for our style guide.

About: Like the Pile-Driver, the Riviteer’s origins come from the region’s industrial boom. The Riveteer began as a construction exo-suit, allowing laborers to help construct the massive factories and refineries across member-states. Unlike the Pile-Driver, the Riveteer was quickly adapted for combat, with fire-teams being used to resolve disputes between mining barons in the region’s pre-republican history and were used extensively in Jora’s Founding War, especially by Rose Green. It has been fifty years since the birth of the Joran nation and the prospect of another war has led to the refinement of the tried-and-true design.

On the battlefield, the Riviteer is a versatile asset, featuring customization attachments that allow for easy upgrades on the go. Decades of innovation on runic engineering and weapon systems have given the platform a verity of options for its accelerated rivet cannon. Past models have utilized J.U.I.C.E. to overclock the suit’s movement and fire-rate though this module has been discontinued due to the rapid degeneration by the suit and damage to the pilot. It is rumored that several combat modules are in advanced testing in anticipation for the Republic’s next war, but are thus far strictly classified by the Top Brass in the Joran military capital of High Hawk. (Translation, we have a few different abilities we are considering for the unit and want to keep it a surprise.)

Broadside

Tier 2.5
Range: Medium
Role: Zone Control

Due to the speed of their advancement and the shadow of coming war, much of Jora’s military technology is repurposed.

About: Unlike the more common assets in the Republic’s military, the Broadside was a purpose built war machine, though its origins, true to Joran spirit, are improvised. For a century, the Q’rath Empire was dissuaded from invading the great city of Gunderval due to an impressive array of massive runeic cannon emplacements and iron-clad warships. Since the Founding, military engineers had struggled to build a vehicle capable of going toe to toe with Q’rath’s dreaded War-Shrines and formidable infantry. In a stroke of mad brilliance, it was decided to attempt a retrofit the guns of a navel cruiser onto a fortified chassis of a sturdy excavation vehicle. To accommodate for the massive energy and weight of the weapons, the cannons were shorted and positioned to allow the recoil to naturally reposition the gun (once anchored) to create a series of successive shots projecting outward from the gun array.

The result is a linear area of effect killzone that will obliterate any forward advances in its area of combat effectiveness, provided that the vehicle is provided with sufficiently energy dense (J.U.I.C.E.-y) ammunition.

Leveler

Tier 2
Range: Medium-Low
Role: Air to Ground Skirmisher.

“Let now the angels fear here to tred. -President Jez Rockfell, Aerial Defense Commencement Ceremony”

About: Built in the aftermath of Q’rath’s last attempted invasion of the Republic, the Leveler was made to instill terror in the ranks of those who would seek to conquer the Free People of Shum. While the Broadside’s deterrence is empowered by JUICE shells, the Leveler is defined by the technology, serving as an aerial ordinance delivery system (and boasting the armor, fortified hull, and afterburners to get in range).

Levelers are a heavy bomber capable of devastating entrenched ground targets and infantry alike, provided they are juiced up. In the absence of ammunition, the Leveler resorts to its heavy anti-personnel weapon while it awaits resupply from High Command.

Atlas

Tier 3.5
Range: Medium and Low.
Role: Late Game Frontliner

The Atlas’s design gives a glimpse of the future of Joran tech, both in ability and aesthetic.

About: The Atlas’s blueprints trace their origins back to diesel-powered excavation rigs repurposed by mining barons for territorial disputes and breaking sieges. However, recent advances in etheric-reactor technology have allowed the construction of a war vehicle capable of lugging around the armor of a battleship and powering directed energy weapons strong enough to turn angels in to slag. The heat generated by this process is immense and so, in classic Joran fashion, the Republic Corps of Engineers have turned a liability into an asset. The Atlas will regularly vent its scalding exhaust as an anti-personnel system capable of boiling Sipari in their armor.

This etheric core is coupled with layers of rune-sawdering and a JUICE reserve that converts stored energy into a kind of reactive armor that blunts heavy-hitting attacks. Released R&D footage shows an Atlas hull shrugging off direct strikes from armor piercing cannons, showing only minor damage.

While it is uncertain how many Atlai Jora possess, the intention is clear: the angels may lay claim to the skies, but the land belongs to the Iron Republic.

Conclusion:

Figuring out how things function is an involved and drawn out process, we really wanted to give a sense for how much goes into the making of a faction.

This was a longer development blog than usual but nations are not small things, so thanks for sticking with us to the end! A lot is going to be happening between now and when you will get your hands on Jora, we have our 5th and 6th Immortals, more maps, more features. (More on that next time!) For up to date news, join our Discord and hang out.

Until then, I will leave you with the sentiments of the noble republic, in their own words:

“By the tyrant hand of Heaven, we have bled for Freedom’s cost,
Our scarr’ed hearts memorial for each beloved lost,
From the fires of the Razing, from its bitter ashen frost,
We have forged the Righteous Gun!”
-National Anthem of the United Republics of Jora, Excerpt

May the God of Freedom, Holy Liebor guide your aim. May Rose let you kill one more.