Hey everyone,
the last few weeks have been slow. Most of our team is either on sick leave or vacation, while the rest of us have been trying to finish tasks related to our physical Vagrus products or were busy formulating plans for the future of Lost Pilgrims. Bear with us though, as we are getting closer to realizing these plans. For now, let us look at what we are working on in more detail.
We presented our design mock-ups for the reworked settlement and crew UIs in a previous post but now you can see them in-game in this short video, including the new crew stats, Perk UI, and settlement panels.
We're very proud of these changes as they are the perfect example of player involvement. Your feedback and insights were the basis on what most of the changes were built - like the info box that shows formerly hidden crew stats, including Ambush chance or Vigilance.
The greatest thing about running open development is receiving amazing feedback from players that helps improving your game. The hardest thing about open development is identifying what the actual problem is that your players are having an issue with.
The perfect example of all this is Crew Combat in Vagrus, which is an aspect of the game that players complained about fairly regularly. After adding the Flee/Appease option, it got slightly better but not as much as we had hoped. While digging for the reasons, we came to some interesting realizations. Whenever we heard someone getting irked about how they bled out against a much stronger enemy, we asked whether they tried appeasing them and they pretty much all said "No, 'Flee' implied losing big time".
What is this 'Dissonance Mode', you ask? Essentially, it is a game mode you can select when starting a new game and that shifts the experience toward a more narrative route, easing up on the management and combat mechanics to transform Vagrus into more of a visual novel for those that find the challenge too taxing.
As we teased in our latest devlog post about Mercenary Tasks, we are extending Crew Combat with a new feature: you can deal with the enemy from now on following a victorious battle. This simply means that you can decide the fate of the defeated foe.
The option appears on the Crew Combat UI at the end of the fight opposite your heal options provided that your enemy surrendered (remember, only humanoids can), fled or retreated but you caught some of them while pursuing them.
The long awaited rework of the in-game Events' UI is finally here! It brings a number of visual, gameplay, and QOL improvements, so let's have a quick rundown on what these are.
Choice Boxes
There is a frame around each choice now, and the whole box thus created is clickable while also providing visual feedback when hovered over, too. These choice boxes help differentiate the various choices better and contain everything you need to make the choice.
Hey Folks,
this patch is a beast in all sense. So many new features and changes have been added that if you ever considered starting a new play-through, this might be the perfect time for it. A shedload of tweaks has been applied to make the early game a little more forgiving (without making the late game easier), and we look forward to your feedback on the direction of these changes.
Hey everyone,
and first of all, Happy New Year! We made it to 2021 at last.
We hope you all had the chance to relax during the holidays. 2020 has been a challenging year for us at Lost Pilgrims as much as for anyone else but it also brought a number of things that we really appreciate.
Opening an indie game dev studio and developing a 100+ hour long, complex game right away comes with a lot of important lessons. One of which has been that we like to dream big and thanks to the abundant positive feedback from our amazing players, we like to make these visions even bigger. Thus we have felt since the end of 2019 that if we ever wanted to realize all the potential Vagrus has, we have to raise our core team's size.
We have hinted at the rehauling of several Combat Skills recently, and we are happy to announce that these improvements made their way into the next build of Vagrus. Moreover, we ended up with many more skills that now work much better or are completely new than we had initially thought. Here are a few of these with some commentary: