We met with the Vault 51 guys at PlayIT - a gameshow we attended with Vagrus - where we discussed how cool it would be to organize a fans & developers meet-up there some time. We exchanged numbers and unlike most things that get forgotten soon after, we followed through, and it was a blast.

Laurels All Around

In our endeavour to get Vagrus into the sights of as many cRPG lovers as we can, we applied for featured spots in a number of nearby game shows - successfully! Not only did we get invited to present Vagrus the game itself but our art design and developer pitch has been rewarded as well making it into the official selection of said shows (see above). That reminds us to bring to your attention the upcoming opportunities to meet us in person:

We are super excited to share some of our progress as we are getting closer and closer to releasing the build that has the new trade pricing system feature.

This short video demonstrates how the comitatus carries goods from one market to the other trying to make some profit. The quantity and price of goods are calculated based on their source location and the time spent on the road to get to a certain place. Will your comitatus be able to transport them quicker than the market flow to realize a profit? 

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.

You will most likely come across the artwork you can see here when wandering into sewers below Imperial cities in Vagrus' main campaign. This might not seem a very good idea since such places are typically neglected and extremely filthy. They are also most likely infested by mutated beasts or stray undead. Yet a vagrus needs to plunge into such vile places more often than not.

Besides working on implementing new features into our Open Access build, we made great progress with prepping for the debut of the first Open-world region - Tor'Zag's Shelter and its surroundings -  which basically is about the first half of the main game. We are actually contemplating to bring its release ahead of polishing all the features.

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.

We went to PlayIT game festival last Saturday and we are glad to report that we had a great time there! It being Hungary's largest gameshow, we knew what we had signed up for and though by the end of the day we had sore feet, we also had a lot of positive energy from the support and curiosity of the show audience.

April  and May were tough on us with a super busy schedule but it was well worth it. Let' see why in some detail!

We attended Reboot Develop Blue in Dubrovnik as you may know and talked to a number of press representatives. A great example of that is the video above, which was recorded as part of a longer discussion that you can read here: https://www.shacknews.com/article/111819/vagrus-the-riven-realms-interview-born-from-a-tabletop-world