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.

As we are adding more and more characters to the game's combat, we thought you might be interested in how they appear there.

Anything a given character can do in combat (like blocking or dodging, being hit, attacking or using various skills, and even standing idle) has an assigned artwork (a sprite) that appears when that action is performed.

These two images here show some of the action sprites Sedarias has. Some powerful two-handed sword swings make up his offensive abilities, augmented by Bane (a curse he can cast on opponents).

Avernum is the most important city in the Northern Searing Plains. The reborn Empire moved back to the scorched and abandoned region soon after the Calamity and found it ideal to settle because of the new resources that can be found in the vicinity: salt, rare minerals, and even obsidian. Thus, Avernum was built at the center of the Smolderbone Flats. The city mostly lacks the religious apparatus of large provincial settlements, but has a fairly large military presence there under the direct control of the Prefectus, its governor. Rumor is that due to its backwater status, the city of Avernum follows Imperial regulations more loosely, and it has become essentially the private kingdom of the reigning Prefectus.

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.

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!

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:

Sedarias posed mightily on the Patreon high-resolution wallpaper reward back in January 2018. Now it is time unveil him to the public. Enjoy!

Meet Sedarias, one of the characters who can join your travelling company in the game. He is an Imperial human serving the Ordis Negras Solis (the Order of the Black Sun). Sedarias was knighted after a period of squire service under an infamous knight Konarius. Knights of the Black Sun worship Sergorod, God of Malevolence and Vengeance, and Ahskul, God of Death. The Order itself was created to bring the two clergies of these competing new gods closer in cooperation for the good of the Empire. Having been around for over 600 years, Ordis Negras Solis is the first and most powerful of the Imperial knightly orders. Its members are picked from the best soldiers, nobles, and warriors of the Empire.

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.