2 months after our first devlog post about Vagrus yesterday we crossed 800 followers on GameJolt.com!

Huge thank you to Yaprak, Cros (co-founders of Game Jolt) and all our fans on this awesome #indiegame portal!

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!

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.

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

Vagrus Itch.io page

In our crusade to get Vagrus to the players who would play it we are constantly looking for new opportunities. Game portals, of course, offer a good chance to present the game to as many as possible, so it was only a matter of time that we reached out to some.

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. 

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. 

The Calamity burned down the great forests, tranquil glades, and neat hedges of the region that is now the Searing Plains. A part of it, what is today called Smolderbone Flats, used to be a series of large lakes and islands surrounded by these forests. During the cataclysm, the lakes became sour and salty in a matter of hours and everything in them died. Today even the traces of them are gone. What remains is a barren, infertile, salty flatland that is only inhabited by weird monsters that thrive in such environments: salamanders, fire lizards, even fiery elemental creatures. 

Here's a small taste of what kind of enemies the player is going to face in Vagrus. Enjoy!

Many forms of undead have existed all around the continent of Xeryn ever since the Calamity. One of the side effects of the magical cataclysm is that in some places, the dead don’t rest in peace, but walk among the living. Much of this threat is dealt with by Imperials, but some remote areas are still constantly plagued by the undead. One such area is the Molten Tongue and Dvendar Tharr, the former kingdom of the Dwarves, where shuffling, burnt corpses rise to kill indiscriminately.

These charred corpses are in various degrees of degradation, but all show signs of burning (as well as other traumas). There is still some flesh that cling to their bones on most of them, albeit burned and charred. They are completely mindless, attacking living beings on sight. It is remarkable that no Dwarven corpses are reanimated in this way, suggesting that the curse could have some kind of connection to scavengers or the disturbing of the dead kingdom by outsiders. Cinderborns attack by mauling, clawing, and biting, and often fall apart quite easily.