A lot has happened since our last project post where we looked back on 2018 as a sort of a year assessment.

Prologue

We finished the year with releasing the Prologue section of Vagrus just around Christmas. Our hopes were high and the results were... even better! Let's delve into the details.

Superb news! Vagrus has been picked as one of the Top 10 upcoming itch.io #indiegames by 'ClemmyGames - The Best Of Indie Games'!

Have you met the kingpin Skornar in the Prologue? He's quite the colorful sort. Good news is: he'll make his return in the main game as a Companion you can recruit! Ten years older and much grumpier, the warrior has a serious grudge against those who ousted him from Avernum's criminal underworld. Yet his story arc will involve much more than that, with the central theme of coping with growing old - not an easy plight for a warrior and leader such as Skornar.

This time we would like to introduce a brand new game mechanic to you that you will see quite a lot in Vagrus: the acquiring and delivering of news across vast tracts of wasteland. Carrying news between settlements not only makes sense from a gameplay perspective but has its foundations in-world, too, that is, comitati are known to have a vital role in distributing news and taking messages all over the continent of Xeryn.

In the last part of the Combat Guide we took a look at defenses and their importance. This time, we'll delve into effects that involve movement or its restriction in one way or another. 

In the previous part of our Companion Combat Guide (Part 1: The Basics) we left off at discussing the Leader's role in combat after outlining the basic rules of an engagement. In this part, we'll cover the actions that Companions can take during their turn.

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!

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!

You may have noticed that Vagrus is pretty heavy on UI, being a strategy/resource management game and an RPG rolled into one. A lot of UI means a lot of buttons and icons, and drawing those is a challenge in its own right. Not only because of the size of the set but also due to the requirement of having them look right: easy to discern and to tell each apart from the rest.