Our next character reveal - and related artwork - is that of the unfortunate mutant Crifta (literally meaning 'feathers' in Imperial). The player meets the cunning archer in the Prologue, where she debuts as a tough enemy. She can be recruited later in the game, however.

Crifta was born named Navassia Degado in the kingdom of Viran. She became an archer in the army of the northern continent after her brother got killed in earlier battles and she felt compelled to avenge him. Captured during the battles for Santo Lucadas in Viran, she became a slave in the Empire. She was forced to be a prostitute for some time in military camps, but in a year or so she contracted the Taint, and after her transformation she was not so attractive any longer. They moved her to a stone quarry near Deven where she was both a worker and a prostitute. There, she joined some slaves who organized an escape into the wastelands; they became fugitives, escaped slaves, but at least they were free.

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!'