The time is upon us! As we have previously announced, new versions of Vagrus' free Demo is going to be published to GOG.com in the next couple of days or so (perhaps it is already out as you are reading this). You will probably be pleased to know that this incarnation of the Demo will have a small set of achievements you can complete!

'You know the saying: Only and idiot looks directly at the sun. Now, just so you know, only the king of the land of the greatest idiots looks directly at the calerus in daylight.'

- Valkhor, local guide of Lumen, to a group of newcomers

Nestled at the border of the South Calerus, the town of Lumen sprung up many decades ago when the Empire decided to try and emulate the successful crystal harvesting operations of the Kalani people of the east. To date, the settlement is indeed the most successful such operation outside of Sargot Kala.

TL;DR: A new, extended Demo is coming to Steam and GOG so that those on the fence can take Vagrus for a spin and see what we've been cooking for a while now. This all comes at the tail end of over a month of hard work with the freshly released Open-World prototypes.

Now, let us see in more detail all the things that happened recently around the game.

We have always planned a fairly elaborate system of healing mechanics but when creating 'Pilgrims of the Wasteland', we first focused on getting the main features ready and implemented a more streamlined, placeholder set of healing rules.

Out with the Old

The PotW system simply had you use a relatively valuable resource - medical supplies - to fully heal one Companion at a time during camp. This is not only too 'gamey' but also very obtuse and not what we intended for the game or the setting.

Initially, we built Companion Combat without too much focus on the combat AI, knowing full well that it would be a massive task to code and having most of the combat features locked before we do so would make it overall a more efficient undertaking.

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.

There were a number of project milestones that we managed to unlock recently over at fig. Some of these are quite big and we are very excited to be able to work on them as they make the game better and deeper by what they bring to the table. Let's take a quick look at what is being developed currently:

One of the last big additions to Vagrus' Open World Campaign that is now coming very close to being released is the character creation sequence at the start of the game. That is the feature that allows you to customize and set up your own vagrus by selecting a variety of options in subsequent steps. To give a quick idea of the many amazing options, here's a little rundown:

'What draws them to this place, I wonder. Is it the utter sadness that permeates this forsaken expanse? Does it call to them when they begin to feel the chill breath of death? Perhaps there is a wordless language spanning all species that speaks as the realm of Ahskul starts to beckon.'

The decision to add the small portraits of Companions to the steps of Events where they appear was an easy one: it added a lot of character to the texts and was an easy addition due to the portraits being derived from the already existing art assets (idle combat images of said Companions).

But then in true Lost Pilgrims fashion we felt that this could become so much more if ALL major NPCs received a similar portrait, or 'chat head' in Events and so we started producing a few to see what they looked like. Most of these were based on friends to honor two decades of roleplaying together and they turned out so cool that we decided to open these up for Backers and influencers as well. So if you want your mug in the game as one of the many NPCs, here's the chance. :)