Project Update - A New Era

NEWS

02 Apr | 10:00 am

We have started almost every single project update with 'A lot has happened since our last update' but now the 'lot' of the past seems kind of tiny compared to the 'LOT' of today.

The Pandemic

Corona hit hard and unexpected. What we looked at with blissful ignorance and naivety in the early days turned our lives upside down in mere weeks. Luckily, everyone from the team is safe and sound as of now, though being in the middle of the flu season we cannot be certain whether we've been exposed to the virus already or not. Either way, we stay home to keep everyone around us safer.

We all work from home, which is new to us as a team, especially for a long period - which has just begun, really. It's hard to keep track of the day and time when part of you worries about friends and family then minutes later about rationing food, all the while working on fixing a bug in the code for your post-apocalyptic video game. Yes, we do see the irony of that. :)

The Grand Opening

We have been telling everyone for many months now how we were approaching the time to reveal the open-world part of Vagrus, and it is finally happening when the whole world is stuck in quarantine. Last week we finally opened it all up to our Patrons, and to our Fig Backers via Discord. Before that, we had an interim period of a week when some volunteers jumped in to test the build. They caught some nasty bugs and based on their findings, we tweaked on the game design too, so it was a great call to involve them for a first round of testing before pulling the trigger.

So what did that bring about?

Social Media Numbers

While it is early to draw any conclusions on the 'success' of the first Open-world region release, we've already received positive feedback, like:

'Really great work on the open world by the way, it appears the quality did not diminish in the slightest!' - a Fig Backer

Our social media reach has jumped significantly, too. Our Steam and GOG followers in particular with over a thousand new followers. On Twitter, our community's size increased with about half of that while Facebook remains slow. The downloads of the game grew almost 50% since last October, and our Crowdfunding (including investments) passed $75,000. That was actually the threshold of the Open-world milestone, so the timing was just perfect.

What Comes Next

Combat improvements! Yes, one of the areas where we fell behind a bit was the turn-based Companion Combat. We added many new enemies and came up with interesting designs for their skills and behavior but we had no time to follow those through in the code so some of them now act sub-optimally or straight out buggy, like pass on their turns or move to places that make no sense. Also, the speed with which the combat AI acts is rather underwhelming. We know that's the area we need to focus on next.

After that, we have plans for adding Factions, Tasks, a full Companion progression, and many more features that will give the game even more depth and add replayablility - which is an important in large open-world games. Beside the new functions, we also making preparations for the next section of the map to be added to the playable area. The 'Deven section' is situated just north of the currently available Tor'zag region. It is smaller but considering that our first region took about one year to create, we are hesitant to promise a delivery date just yet.

We are also waiting for the insights of our player community on what they feel needs attention and prioritize a number of smaller improvements beside the above-mentioned 'big tickets'.

Stay tuned to learn about the latest developments and a great 'Thank You!' to you all,

The Lost Pilgrims Team

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