We have started almost every single project update with 'A lot has happened since our last update' but now the 'lot' of the past seems kind of tiny compared to the 'LOT' of today.

The Pandemic

Corona hit hard and unexpected. What we looked at with blissful ignorance and naivety in the early days turned our lives upside down in mere weeks.  Luckily, everyone from the team is safe and sound as of now, though being in the middle of the flu season we cannot be certain whether we've been exposed to the virus already or not. Either way, we  stay home to keep everyone around us safer.

• MS 6: Crew Combat Alpha
• MS 14: Unrest and Obedience Mechanics (Partial delivery): Liberate or Discipline Slaves to gain Obedience. Unrest will be added in a later update.
• Butcher beasts or mounts for supplies
• Warning triggers if an action would result in cargo loss

• MS 10: Chart Exploration
• MS 11: Companion Select during Events
• MS 13: Hidden Stash and Smuggling Contraband

• New sound effects for a number of creatures
• Camping without guards decreases Obedience
• Radial menu icons automatically pop up on the campaign map
• Node sizes increased for Point of Interests to better indicate them
• Goods tooltips now show more trade information
• Merged a few perks to make them more impactful

• Passenger destinations are now generated correctly in new games (thanks for catching and reporting this!)! Old saves remain bugged.
• New Day save now works after combat encounters in the Fighting Pit event
• Cargo slot changes are now applied immediately
• Fixed tutorial pins for closing the Journal and the Codex
• Fixed a bug causing Companion conversation portraits to be empty
• Healing companions no longer triggers the incorrect Event result text
• Fixed the Journal entry order for The Black Knight chapter V, Eliminating the Abolitionist Camps
• Clicking on the Journal or Codex during "Hold space..." tutorial/narration is up now does not open them

• More Sound Effects
• Vagrus Creation for the Main Campaign
• Companion Combat tweaks and additions
• Factions UI
• Animations for all characters

• Open World Prototype

Ever since we came up with the idea of Vagrus, a game where you manage a comitatus, we knew we needed to develop an elaborate, dynamic trade system that would serve as one of the major features of the game and would also aid in fleshing out a living world.

Basic Premises 

While trading was always to be one of the main sources of income for the player, we also wanted to avoid creating a pure trading simulator game. It's not that those are not fun for the right people - stories about Gabor dominating the Auction House on our server in World of Warcraft for a period of time still surface in conversations among friends - but because our strengths lie elsewhere. Our unique setting, The Riven Realms, and telling stories with memorable characters was the first and foremost motivation to create Vagrus, so it was also much more likely to excel in that rather than in a simulation - which we knew relatively little of.

As we are getting closer and closer to releasing the first playable build of the main campaign of Vagrus, it is perhaps a good time to talk a bit about the differences between the open world campaign and 'Pilgrims of the Wasteland'. The focus of this is going to be narrative design and stories but there are going to be implications on gameplay as well.

In this video, you can check out the upcoming Scouting feature in Vagrus in action. Essentially, you can gather information about neighboring nodes by sending scouts there. You can find more information on this in a previous post here.

We attended yet another game show, this time in Jönköping, Sweden, where DreamHack was born more than ten years ago. While DreamHack Summer is somewhat smaller than its big brother, DH Winter, it still blew our minds, with thousands of players moving in for three days... and by moving in we literally mean taking their PCs, chairs, and air-mattresses with them.

At long last, Scouting is making its way into Vagrus. It is a vital feature in navigating and surviving the many wastelands of the continent of Xeryn. 

Another crucial game mechanic that is being added to Vagrus as we are writing this is a system of Rumors. Rumors are short entries in your Journal that are meant to guide players to content and unlock locations on their Chart in order to help them plan journeys and find places. We have come to the conclusion during playtesting that not only do we need to differentiate these Rumor entries from your Objectives in the Journal but we also need to separate them entirely and move them to a different pane. As evident from this, Rumors have undergone quite a lot of change since their original conception.

The images above are from one of the starting regions of the main game, shedding some light on parts of the huge campaign map the player can traverse in Vagrus.

We can already hear you ask: 'But guys... why don't you show off the whole map?'

Interested in what's new? 
You can find it on GameJolt or Itchio, or below.