Well, we have just passed another major milestone in our content creation progress.

As mentioned in our post last week, with our Prologue ready from a content perspective, our writers have been already working on the Early Access stories for Vagrus.

In the Prologue we have well over one hundred thousand words worth of story and lore coming together from Events and Codex entries. Actually, even a bit more since the Narration and Tutorial texts are coming through another source and so are not included in the above numbers. Those two make up over four thousand words on top.

Vagrus - The Riven Realms is a game rich in storylines and quests, and most of these appear in the form of what we call Events: text based interactions where your choices guide the story. There are a lot (and I mean a LOT) of these Events and due to their nature, writing for the game involves quite complex scripting and a non-linear narrative design angle. But what does this mean in practice and what does it involve?

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 Codex is a tool in Vagrus that lets players read up on the world, its inhabitants, locations, lore, characters, and whatever else that has an entry. The idea was to provide players who wish to know more a place to find it and to allow you to look up things you may have forgotten; but to make this absolutely voluntary. If you do not wish to read these entries, you can still absolutely play Vagrus, as this is basically additional fluff.

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.

As a strategy-RPG hybrid, Vagrus is pretty heavy on UI, so a lot of our effort goes into designing a functional and appealing UI for various elements of the game. Today, we'll take a look at our progress with the 'main UI', which is on the campaign map. This is what the player will see the most of and it's UI has to be a gateway to several key game elements.

Great news! The newest addition to the team, Marci has arrived earlier this month, starting his two months internship at Lost Pilgrims. 

Marci studies software engineering at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and being a life long gamer planning on working in the game development once he finishes his curriculum. 

Some time ago we promised to invite you all to a virtual tour of our office, so without further ado, here goes:

First stop - Budapest, 13th district

Our office is located in an edifice built in the socialist era but kept in fairly good condition compared to how others fared. Back in the day when programming meant punched cards, the whole building housed a prominent company developing 'software' on those.

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.

So you have received some details about the game, the setting and could read the first part of our lead-in short story as well. Now let's talk about the project a bit.

Early steps

First order of business: we have finally incorporated. Yay! I bet in some countries it is a fairly easy process, a dozen clicks and within a few hours you have your firm up and running. Not here. The period from the decision to start the process until you can confidently declare victory over all the paperwork connected to incorporation could take up to a month. But boy, how good it feels when you are done!

With that we could finally order our new computers, printer, etc. Hoping those will all arrive still before the holidays, will sure be a heck of a Christmas gift for us. :)