You will come across many caverns and subterranean tunnels in Vagrus, mostly under cities or sometimes out in the wilderness. Whether these are the lairs of terrifying monsters, the shadowy hideouts of bandits, gateways to ancient, buried ruins, or simply hollow ground is usually difficult to tell at first. There is no specific lore or design insight to be delved into here, so the only thing that remains is to admire this version of the cavern illustration by Attus, one of our artists.

You will most likely come across the artwork you can see here when wandering into sewers below Imperial cities in Vagrus' main campaign. This might not seem a very good idea since such places are typically neglected and extremely filthy. They are also most likely infested by mutated beasts or stray undead. Yet a vagrus needs to plunge into such vile places more often than not.

The greatest cause for mutations in the Riven Realms is a mysterious arcane disease that people call the Taint. There’s no telling how it spreads or why it attacks the ones it does; its workings have eluded medical science altogether. These days, every third human on the continent is Tainted. The Taint begins with a period of incubation when the victim falls gravely sick and suffers seizures and spells for days or weeks. About half of them perish during this interval.

The images above are from one of the starting regions of the main game, shedding some light on parts of the huge campaign map the player can traverse in Vagrus.

We can already hear you ask: 'But guys... why don't you show off the whole map?'

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!).

In the last part of our character design series, we talked about what goes into conceptualizing and designing characters and touched upon how Bazsó came up with distinct the art style for characters and how Szonja raised the bar when working with the majority of them.

Now it's time to discuss what actually happens after the initial phase of concepts and moodboards. Mind you, this will probably have information that is well-known by any graphic designers who work on 2D character art; yet others may find it intriguing.

You may have noticed that Vagrus is pretty heavy on UI, being a strategy/resource management game and an RPG rolled into one. A lot of UI means a lot of buttons and icons, and drawing those is a challenge in its own right. Not only because of the size of the set but also due to the requirement of having them look right: easy to discern and to tell each apart from the rest.

In Character design - Part 1 we talked about the types of characters in Vagrus, focusing especially on Companions and their roles in the game. Now it's time to move onto the topic of what exactly goes into the graphic design phase of these characters.

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. 

Well, we have been so busy that we skipped a beat in our originally planned monthly project updates. Which is actually good news if we are looking at it from a progress perspective. So what has happened since last year?

After returning recharged (and pot-bellied) from the holiday period we focused our attention on two things: 

• Creating additional graphic design capacity by finding more super-talented and like-minded artists to create environment and character art assets for us.
• Prototyping our hero combat to test its mechanics both in terms of graphics and game design.

The obvious intent behind choosing those focus areas was that we wanted to show more to our follower community on how the game is going to look like as well as display some of the game mechanics we're planning on using.