Fellow vagri,

2024 is coming to its inevitable end and so we are closing the books on this year’s adventures as well. For this occasion, we thought we’d look back on the past year and list some of the things that happened around Vagrus before signing off.

How It Started

We kicked off 2024 with a post about our plans for the year. In retrospect, wanting to release smaller bits of content at intervals while developing two very content-heavy DLCs with our tiny writing team was wishful thinking. Why it did not exactly pan out like that also involved a lot of other factors, like the many, many other aspects of the game we’ve worked hard to improve. Also, it seems that there’s no such thing as “smaller bits of content” when it comes to Vagrus. With millions of words worth of written content behind us, everything is interconnected and adding things can be very tricky. Also, players now expect meaty additions, so just any odd small story just won’t cut it. Still, this effort gave us Clandestine, so it was not in vain.

With an eventful year drawing to a satisfying close, we here at Lost Pilgrims would like to wish you all Happy Holidays! We hope you have a chance to take a break from whatever it is you do, get some rest, and, of course, spend some time with your family or loved ones. With our latest region DLC, At the Heart of Ruin, deep in development as well as other projects in their early beginnings, next year is set to be an explosive one at Lost Pilgrims – for now, however, we must rest, too.

Today’s post takes a short trek down memory lane. Long, long ago, before any of the team at Lost Pilgrims sported grey hairs, we set about creating the UI for the game – an indubitably difficult ask for any game studio. Yet despite any trepidation, we forged forward and created one of the first renditions of Vagrus’s UI.

Well, one lost pilgrim to be precise. On 7th September, I was fortunate to have participated in Fighting Fantasy Fest 5 in the UK, representing Lost Pilgrims there in exhibiting the City of Thieves graphic novel I’ve been working on with Chameleon Comix’s founder Gyula Szűcs and mega-talented graphic artist Krisztián Balla. We met and chatted with a lot of enthusiastic Fighting Fantasy fans, encountered living legends, listened to intriguing talks, and saw a ton of cool stuff, including the new gamebook The Dungeon on Blood Island by Sir Ian Livingstone himself.

Having deployed Old Acquaintances’ first hotfix, the team at Lost Pilgrims Studio has moved on to our next project: the regional DLC. The beginning of this process is iterative and requires intense coordination; it begins with the design phase, planning locations, and an overarching narrative. We need to understand what unique gameplay elements the DLC will bring to the table, which narrative beats we want to focus on, and finally, which characters or NPCs will drive that narrative.

The Outpost feature has been on our minds for a long time but with all the other pressing matters – namely, our new DLC and the related coding –, it kept getting pushed down our priority list. In the end, however, we were able to dedicate a week to making improvements, focusing on adding clarity and showing more information to players. Please note that these changes are actively being worked on and will first come to the Steam Public Beta branch. Later, after being thoroughly playtested, they will go live on the default branches on all platforms.

You heard it right: it’s back and it’s no surprise we’re involved. Lost Pilgrims Studios is delighted to work alongside some of the best indie developers in the industry to bring the Fest back. This time we’re in partnership with a slew of talented devs, including Terra Randoma, Trese Brothers (Star Traders: Frontiers & Cyber Knights: Flashpoint), Unleash the Giraffe (Seer’s Gambit & Obsidian Prince), and Curious Dynamics (Folk Emerging), who have been heartily involved with organization this time round.

This week we’re continuing in the same vein, bringing you another project update that this time relates to our latest hire, polymath and computer science major Zoli, who joined us in September 2023 in the role of Quality Assurance Tester. Zoli is a systematic thinker, problem-solver, and gamer with a well of knowledge regarding all manner of things game dev (such as code or design). When asked, he was adamant about describing himself as “a novice wizard surrounded by talented sorcerers”, and as someone who’s worked alongside him, I can testify that he is all this and more. Under the “more” category we pencil in things like “90’s gamer”, “child chess prodigy”, “math enthusiast” (yes, apparently that’s a thing), and perhaps in stark contrast, a man who loves the outdoors: he’s run more than 500km this year already, which includes a marathon in Athens! Below is a snap of the man himself in his element.

For the first time in a long time, we have a project update for you, and it’s a doozy. Although he already began working with us as early as June 2023, we’d now like to welcome one of our newest and most talented 2D and 3D artists: Bence Monori. Bence has a talent for many things, though he is currently focused primarily on a wide range of environmental art, some of which came to the fore during the expansion Sunfire and Moonshadow.

Hello everyone,

While the expansion is getting very close to the finish line, we've been busy making some quality-of-life improvements to enhance your gameplay experience in all of Vagrus. In this article, we wanted to provide detailed information on these updates, so here's a quick rundown of what's new and improved: