The fellow you can see above is called Harvek, one of the potential Companions you can recruit for your comitatus in the game. As it is probably evident from the design, he is no hero. In fact, Harvek has spent a lot of time in the cruelest, most dangerous penitentiary institutions of the Empire. It may have been for crimes he did not commit but there was certainly enough on his plate to justify the imprisonment nonetheless. Having survived the ordeal, he's now out to find his place again. Harvek is Tainted, that is, a human who has mutated into a new form due to a mysterious arcane disease. These mutations make him an extremely dangerous foe but his real value comes from his contacts in the criminal underworld.

Interested in what's new? 
You can find it on GameJolt or Itchio, or below.

We at Lost Pilgrims will always remember 2018 as the year when it all began to come together, the year when everything changed for us. It was the year when development on Vagrus got out of the preparation phase and into hardcore production.

Now that this crucial year is done and over with, we felt it would behoove us to recount how 2018 went for those of you interested (and for posterity!).

Markets and bazaars are the throbbing heart of the rebuilt cities of the Riven Realms. Due to the isolation of many settlements and regions thanks to the Calamity, trade - propagated mostly by comitati - is key to the survival of these regions and thus to the survival of the Empire.

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!

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.

We're back again with another Map Movement video!

The most important changes from last time:

• Movement Points (MPs) are displayed on the top left UI (March movement points, available as bonus and calculated from normal Movement Points) are displayed in red behind normal MPs. Running out means you have to camp, and thereby end your turn, advancing a day in-game.

• Movement Point costs are displayed either in blue (normal movement MP cost), red (the additional cost of Marching), and grey (which only serves to help you calculate longer journeys, as these nodes are not reachable this turn, not even by Marching).

• Currently, when you move the comitatus, you can first only move to deplete your MPs, then - and only then - you can opt to March further, using the March MPs, but of course risking brutal fatigue and Morale losses.

As you can see, though the base system of movement is pretty much set, we'll continue to tweak how details work.

Here's a quick look at some of the character poses from combat that Crifta, the mutated archer has. These are (from top left to bottom right): Dodge, Suppressing Shot (skill), Idle, and Downed (when a character is beaten but not yet killed). Szonja put a lot of work into making Crifta look unique and her poses dynamic, and it shows.

A lot has happened since our last project update, so let's dig in without delay!

Expanding team

Beside Marci who has recently joined our ranks as an intern and is already working on implementing new features for the game in Unity + C#, we have also got two new writers checking out our self-developed event editor tool to ready themselves for mass content production once we plunge into that phase (right after publishing our playable demo). Rest assured that we will post details about them and their work when we get there.