We at Lost Pilgrims will always remember 2018 as the year when it all began to come together, the year when everything changed for us. It was the year when development on Vagrus got out of the preparation phase and into hardcore production.

Now that this crucial year is done and over with, we felt it would behoove us to recount how 2018 went for those of you interested (and for posterity!).

In the final chapter in our Character Design series, we have touched upon how we come up with the stats and skills for the Companion characters and enemies in Vagrus. A great number of those stats come in to play in action, so in this new Companion combat series, we are going to walk you through how they work in the game. Let’s start at the basics!

Another character in the long line of non-human cast members is the Orc mercenary and master-at-arms called Gor'Goro. Even among his warlike kin, he is considered a paragon of martial prowess and a very promising leader, yet a strange doubt seems to be tearing at his heart about the fate of his kind. Thus, Gor'Goro has left behind his tribe and set out on his own, swearing to forge a destiny independent of other Orcs and their troublesome politics. For years now he's befriended all manner of warrior folk and settled down in Tor'Zag's Shelter to teach and train. Yet someone like Gor'Goro could never bear sitting on his hands forever.

It seems we are getting into the habit of sharing project updates monthly now - there is just so much going on. To make the best use of your time, let's jump right in!

Social Media

We have got an awesome two months behind us since our last social media update. The most important development was that we put additional effort into regularly publishing news about Vagrus on major gaming portals like Steam, GameJolt, Itch.io, and IndieDB. And it paid off! We have gathered over a thousand new followers on those platforms. Just during the four days of being featured on GameJolt, more than five hundred fans signed up to follow our journey.

The TIME is approaching! We are opening up our Prologue Alpha testing soon, folks!

   - So I can just apply & play the demo before everyone?
   - Well, you get to see the game early but you actually have to test & report bugs. 
   - OK! When?
   - When we get to 1k+ followers on Game Jolt. So go and share this!

In Part 3 of our Character Design series, we discussed how a character concept gets to its final artwork state that is placed into the game. In this last part we'll talk about how characters are given stats, skills, and roles in game, especially in combat.

Vagrus has turn-based combat because we wanted to capture the tabletop RPG atmosphere and flow we know so well. It is also a fantasy game which comes with a few expectations of what roles characters fulfill in a party of adventurers. The similarities to DnD and other roleplaygames can surely be seen when observing combat and related character stats. It was along these lines that we designed our heroes (even though few of them are actually heroic) and enemies.

In the last part of our character design series, we talked about what goes into conceptualizing and designing characters and touched upon how Bazsó came up with distinct the art style for characters and how Szonja raised the bar when working with the majority of them.

Now it's time to discuss what actually happens after the initial phase of concepts and moodboards. Mind you, this will probably have information that is well-known by any graphic designers who work on 2D character art; yet others may find it intriguing.

In Character design - Part 1 we talked about the types of characters in Vagrus, focusing especially on Companions and their roles in the game. Now it's time to move onto the topic of what exactly goes into the graphic design phase of these characters.

Hey everyone, let's talk combat. So based on the initial feedback and testing of the Companion combat, we have decided to revamp quite a lot of it. The process is still not fully complete, but you can already see the improvement on the images in the post.

There's been a lot of character reveals for Vagrus - The Riven Realms here on our website and on our social media since we began posting about a year ago. We figured it behooves us to talk a little more about who these characters are and what their role is in the game.

The vast majority of the characters you see revealed are enemy characters, even if sometimes they can be allies in the game for short periods of time (or versions of them, anyways). Although Events will involve these enemy characters often, you will mainly see them as shown in the artwork in turn-based combat. All of them have their unique combat skills and synergies with other enemies.