Time for another project update! Seventy-seven days have passed by and even though it was summer - supposedly calmer times - it felt pretty frantic. In the good sense.

A huge Thank You! and wishing all the best to Marci

As your might remember, our previous post started with the news of Marci joining the team to complete his summer internship with us for his degree in software development. Marci has been instrumental to the progress we made on the Codex & Journal functionality and UI, as well as to catching up on our design documents. Now that he has returned to his studies, we wish him all the very best for his goal of finishing his Bachelor's degree. We're pleased to see that he is on the right track to become a great game developer!

The Game

Though we're still in the process of adding a few more features to our Prologue, most of it is done. Yep, we are coming very close to showing it to you!

By the end of the week the event narrative will have been drafted and Geri will start working on the Codex, narration, and tutorial texts. By the end of September, after running all that through proofreading, those will all be available in the game.

From the art's perspective, we are actually ahead of our goals. Our illustrators are already gearing up for creating content for our Early Access. However, we might see some of the new assets introduced back into the Prologue as well.

The same goes for our writers: on this very day they held their first creative session to learn more about the starting region of our EA so they could write insightful and intriguing narrative for the players, immersing them in the world of the Riven Realms. 

All the major blocks are done in the code as well, with the exception of the scouting mechanic, but there is still tons of work ahead to test every inch of the game thoroughly and smoke test our issues as we plug the elements together. 

Open development 

The common approach for game development was for a very long time focusing on protecting the intellectual property (IP) and trying to exploit the marketing power of big announcements/reveals. Though some studios and publishers still follow that or its lightened form, the indie game studios started to carve our their own path, founded on the culture of sharing and learning from feedback. 

The premise is that the community building power and opportunity to test and adapt the game early on out-weighs the risk of someone ripping off the idea. We, too, believe that and hence are sharing our progress vigorously on all the channels we come across. So far it has no doubt been worth it! We will talk about social media in a second but first, let us share a great example of the advantages of gathering insights from fans early on.

Overhauling our combat user interface

Yes, it was not an easy decision to let go of our original UI design but as we received consistent remarks about our combat UI (the ability selection in particular), we realized that the little paper slip with the skill names  written on it has to go.

Changing a major element like that though has its repercussions. Along with all the other changes and widening of scope before releasing our demo to the public, we are now looking at publishing that in Autumn 2018 rather than Q3 2018. Not a huge delay but still something we wanted to share with you as we know many of you are waiting for the chance to get your hands on the game, even if it is just the demo.

Social media

We again doubled our follower base! Our main growth is coming from Twitter and Instagram, with Facebook somewhat dragging behind and of course we have a new major channel: Steam, on which we jumped from zero to over a hundred followers within a month, and even more folks added Vagrus to their wishlists. Post shares are of course still very welcome on all of them. :)

We hope you enjoyed this update and in the next one, we will be announcing details about the release of our demo. Stay tuned!

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