About The Game
One Rotten Oath is a story-driven FMV+FPS hybrid with thriller elements. Created by the director of A Trip to Yugoslavia.
It’s been years since humanity enjoyed its last normal day. Everything lost its meaning, when a mysterious chemical compound leaked from one of the nearby laboratories on the edge of town. Today this event is known as, The Leak.
Chaos consumed the streets and crept into the lives of everyone. Over time, the people who had been exposed to chemicals for too long turned into monsters. Fast, ruthless creatures, driven only by instinct. Those who could, have long since fled. The lucky ones hid in bunkers, some built by themselves and others hidden deep in archival plans of the city. The unlucky ones are slowly dying, or worse.
The game puts you in the shoes of the survivor, whose job is to protect the other people who are still trying to lead a normal life in a bunker. A normal night watch turns deadly, when the only working generator malfunctions and turns off in random intervals for 60 seconds.
The Gameplay
During the gameplay cycles of One Rotten Oath the player will have to defend of waves of mutants, you start out with a rifle, walking around a courtyard that is full of trees and other obstructions brushing against these trees makes your character noise throughout these segments you will be shooting mutants until the gameplay time reaches zero once this happens you get a bit more story, eventually the rifle stops working and the player has to fall back to a different line of defence.
The second line of defence sees us dig up the old faithful revolver, between the gun and using our phone that tells us when a sensor has been tripped we are defending a barricade line. personally I found the barricade line a lot of fun and I actually forgot to take a picture so I have borrowed one from the developers page.
In between all the action we get to see little cutscenes of the developer and his aim to get a team together but to no avail, due to this he has to go at the development all alone. Now I had the ability to talk to the developer and we put a few questions to them below is a little interview or question that we sent there way and the response we got from them.
The Interview
Question: What was your inspiration for making the game?
Answer: I was inspired by various FMV titles (especially Wales Interactive games like The Bunker) and The Last Stand flash game series.
Question: How long did it take to create?
Answer: Development of the game started on September 2024. Demo was officially released in June 2025. I'm hoping to release the full game by the end of this year (2025).
Question: What plans do you have for the title in the future?
Answer: So far, it's hard to tell what the future will hold, but I'd definitely like to expand the lore of the survivor and troubled dev coding the One Rotten Oath world.
Question: Who's the FMV actor?
Answer: That's me! I'm playing the survivor / dev / mutants (at least a few of them). My actual girlfriend plays the girlfriend of the main character (and composed the soundtrack of the game as well!) and my brother helped me bring a few other mutants to life. Everything is pretty much DIY in this project.
Question: Did you take inspiration from any other game?
Answer: As for the inspirations, definitely The Last Stand. The concept of being stuck somewhere and fending off the waves of mutants / zombies until sunrise was always something appealing to me. I played A LOT of The Last Stand with my father back when the game first released. I was definitely too young to play it, but the concept stayed with me for years, although I didn't know how I could pull it off myself and give it its own identity in the defence genre of games. Years passed by and fortunately managed to figure it out.
Question: Is there a way you could animate the gun fully using FMV similar to the reloads?
Answer: As for the animations, I think I could pull it off, but that would take A LOT of work. Everything you see in game was cut off frame by frame in my spare time from the full time job. As it stands, rifle reloads have like 95 frames. Revolver reload plays about 47 frames. For the comparison, basic mutant type is made of 237 frames separated into 4 animations (depending on what's going on in-game). I could go for it in the future, but for now I think I'm going to pass on it. While you're on the level, the game plays about 300-400 frames of the enemies heading your way (and that's only when you're idle). Adding more frames would definitely tank the performance and impact further optimization.
Fun Fact: At the start of the project, I wanted to run every sprite at Full HD. The game crashed after like 5 seconds, so eventually I settled on 960 x 540 resolution of the enemy sprites to keep the game working, while the environments are rendered in HD. Actually there's a lot of tech wizardy going here in order to make this work. Almost every sprite is in such a weird resolution, but implemented in a way that looks good on bigger monitors. Personally, I'm working on a 2k resolution as so far, so good!
