There's been a lot of character reveals for Vagrus - The Riven Realms here on our website and on our social media since we began posting about a year ago. We figured it behooves us to talk a little more about who these characters are and what their role is in the game.

The vast majority of the characters you see revealed are enemy characters, even if sometimes they can be allies in the game for short periods of time (or versions of them, anyways). Although Events will involve these enemy characters often, you will mainly see them as shown in the artwork in turn-based combat. All of them have their unique combat skills and synergies with other enemies.

Time to talk about the Journal. Even though I don't think most gamers are super-excited about the details of in-game journals or quest logs, it is still extremely important to get them right in a game as complex and as full of storylines, tasks, quests, and objectives as Vagrus, and gamers do appreciate quest logs that work well and aid them when they need information.

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!

Most fantasy adventures have an inn or two but in our case - in a game where you lead a caravan and its crew on all kinds of journeys - taverns and inns are vital and appear in almost every sizeable settlement.

The artwork you can see, the versions of which will serve as a backdrop for such watering holes in Vagrus, was painted by the amazing Péter Kovács. The image perfectly captures the alien feel of the world, the dark and hard fantasy elements, as well as the relatively peaceful atmosphere of an inn.

It's spring 1990 and I'm in elementary school. My best friend brings a book to school that he reads aloud to a small group of us during our big walks at lunch break. The book has a weird old wizard on the cover conjuring smoke from a crystal ball. More interesting are the illustrations on the inside: intricate black and white drawings of strange fantasy creatures and dungeon locations. The little book is Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson's Warlock of Firetop Mountain, translated to our native language. Most of you probably know that it's a gamebook that you do not read from start to end but in branching numbered chapters that make the story personal and add replayability. Yet they are much more than simple choose-your-own-adventure books because they include a stat and combat system you have to manage throughout the adventure - albeit a really simple one.

One of the core mechanics of the game is that time passes in-game each turn (1 turn equals 1 day) and you, as the vagrus, have to plan ahead when it comes to distances, supply consumption, and upkeep. At the end of the day you make camp to rest and make decisions concerning the above. This is where the Camp UI comes in.

Following our game pages on Steam and itch.io, we have joined IndieDB.com and Gamejolt. These are also gaming portals that focus on indie games just like ours. You can check out the new pages here:

IndieDB.com

https://www.indiedb.com/games/vagrus-the-riven-realms

The time has come to show you the Main Menu of the game, which might not sound super-exciting at first, but with the title screen artwork in its background it's quite a beauty. I'd rather not waste words on the menu points, they speak for themselves.

We are very excited to announce that as of now, we have our own Steam Store page!

Link to Vagrus Store page on Steam

It is finally time to look at the stats and systems related to the vagrus, that is, YOU, the player's character in the game (aka Leader). You can interact with the Leader UI screen (opened by clicking the leader's medallion in the bottom left) in order to manage said stats and improve your character.