We are extremely proud and happy to announce that our core team grew with a brilliant graphic designer, Szonja. We have been looking for a character artist for quite some time to ramp up our progress on that front and Szonja proved herself to be the best fit by miles with her unique style and open-mindedness.

Her main task is to bring our hero and enemy characters to life and help us with shaping the user interface as we enter Pre-Alpha stage with more parts of the game added each day.

We have a marvelous journey ahead and could not imagine any better traveling companion than Szonja. Welcome aboard!

Called the Desert of Black Sands, or the Black Desert (Arenas Negrasin the Imperial language), this vast, empty desert that has fine, black sand instead of any other color is probably one of the most ill-reputed places of the post-Calamity era. Nothing lives here, not even insects. The silence is deafening. People who enter the desert and stay for a while usually inexplicably disappear. In the center of the area is a terrible place, supposedly the source of all evil in the region: The City of the Dead, Arx Mortis.

Formerly the capital of the Sanvorati province and previously known as the Shining City, Calderum was made into its own horrible caricature by the Calamity. These days, Arx Mortis is a dead place filled with eerie moaning and groans, cast in perpetual twilight, beset by bone-chilling cold and a pale, frigid light emanating from the faded rocks that are almost all that remain from the once beautiful buildings and walls. Now these stand vacant and hollow, often reminding visitors of broken teeth peeking out of black gums.

We are all extremely grateful and proud to share that we have just crossed the hundred dollars per month threshold earlier today here on our Patreon site.

It's your support and continued trust in our work that helped us to get this far, and we cannot say enough times how much we appreciate that. We hope you have been enjoying our updates, and kindle an interest in sharing the next chapters of our journey.

As we ramp up our graphic design and writing departments, as well as closing in on finishing our first prototype, which connects the different modules of our game, we could really use your help in shouting out, promoting your patronage and encouraging others to spread the word.

Thanks again and cheers!

The Lost Pilgrims Team

Here's a second look of how the comitatus (caravan) led by the vagrus (the player) moves on the world map. It is still pretty early stuff, a lot can and will change, but it should give a good idea of how things will work. A few thoughts on the movement mechanics that might further clarify what you can see in the video:

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.

From the very first moment in art design and development for Vagrus, we knew that the game world's haunting, post-apocalyptic beauty is key to conveying the atmosphere we want to create. Of course, that may not be saying much, since most games today rely heavily on visuals, it comes with the genre. More specifically, the challenge was to convey the right kind of atmosphere and find the art style that is perfect for that. We agreed soon that cartoon-like or pixel art would not do, nor would any other more stylized imagery. We settled upon the more realistic, but painting-like look, which gives a feeling almost akin to observing an old and faded piece of classical art. The other challenge was that the world of Vagrus has been a living and detailed environment for a long time now, so often our fantastically talented artists have to follow very specific directions on certain elements of an image.

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. :)

Wow! We have not even released our first post and got some Patrons already. Thank you for jumping aboard so quickly! 

It means a lot to us to know that there are others out there sharing our vision and trusting us delivering upon it. 

So why have we started all this? Quitting our day jobs and jumping head on into indie game development?

Well, we could say it was destined, all roads leading to this point. Maybe. Or maybe it was just blind luck dealing us a good hand and we were -  finally - bold enough to say: 'All in!'