Some time ago we promised to invite you all to a virtual tour of our office, so without further ado, here goes:

First stop - Budapest, 13th district

Our office is located in an edifice built in the socialist era but kept in fairly good condition compared to how others fared. Back in the day when programming meant punched cards, the whole building housed a prominent company developing 'software' on those.

Avernum is the most important city in the Northern Searing Plains. The reborn Empire moved back to the scorched and abandoned region soon after the Calamity and found it ideal to settle because of the new resources that can be found in the vicinity: salt, rare minerals, and even obsidian. Thus, Avernum was built at the center of the Smolderbone Flats. The city mostly lacks the religious apparatus of large provincial settlements, but has a fairly large military presence there under the direct control of the Prefectus, its governor. Rumor is that due to its backwater status, the city of Avernum follows Imperial regulations more loosely, and it has become essentially the private kingdom of the reigning Prefectus.

As we promised few weeks back, we have put a significant effort into improving our hero combat and we are now happy to present you, dear patrons, an update on how far we've got.

Most importantly, we created a new UI and removed the placeholder at the bottom of the screen.

We have also added new characters and skills that they can use. Like in the second example, Sedarias strikes two Charred corpses at once with his Cleave skill.

Countless vagrants, opportunists, bullies, and broken men end up becoming highwaymen and bandits on the forsaken continent of Xeryn. These individuals are often organized into marauding gangs by the more charismatic lowlifes. Liberated tribes, made up almost exclusively of escaped slaves, also roam the Realms, taking what they will and can.

Truly, these men and women are a plague on the Empire, as there are neither enough resources to hunt them down, nor would it be entirely possible due to the many places where they can hide in the wasteland. Also, there seems to be an endless supply of people who end up becoming such lowly criminals.

The Brigand here is one such individual, and one of the first of many enemies the player can come across in Vagrus.

We are all extremely grateful and proud to share that we have just crossed the hundred dollars per month threshold earlier today here on our Patreon site.

It's your support and continued trust in our work that helped us to get this far, and we cannot say enough times how much we appreciate that. We hope you have been enjoying our updates, and kindle an interest in sharing the next chapters of our journey.

As we ramp up our graphic design and writing departments, as well as closing in on finishing our first prototype, which connects the different modules of our game, we could really use your help in shouting out, promoting your patronage and encouraging others to spread the word.

Thanks again and cheers!

The Lost Pilgrims Team

Well, we have been so busy that we skipped a beat in our originally planned monthly project updates. Which is actually good news if we are looking at it from a progress perspective. So what has happened since last year?

After returning recharged (and pot-bellied) from the holiday period we focused our attention on two things: 

• Creating additional graphic design capacity by finding more super-talented and like-minded artists to create environment and character art assets for us.
• Prototyping our hero combat to test its mechanics both in terms of graphics and game design.

The obvious intent behind choosing those focus areas was that we wanted to show more to our follower community on how the game is going to look like as well as display some of the game mechanics we're planning on using.

From the very first moment in art design and development for Vagrus, we knew that the game world's haunting, post-apocalyptic beauty is key to conveying the atmosphere we want to create. Of course, that may not be saying much, since most games today rely heavily on visuals, it comes with the genre. More specifically, the challenge was to convey the right kind of atmosphere and find the art style that is perfect for that. We agreed soon that cartoon-like or pixel art would not do, nor would any other more stylized imagery. We settled upon the more realistic, but painting-like look, which gives a feeling almost akin to observing an old and faded piece of classical art. The other challenge was that the world of Vagrus has been a living and detailed environment for a long time now, so often our fantastically talented artists have to follow very specific directions on certain elements of an image.