Based on the ton of feedback concerning initial difficulty and learning curve, we have listened to you, our players, and implemented Trade Tasks to make the initial experience smoother in the open-world campaign. While there, and because they are deeply intertwined, we also decided to include the brand-new Factions UI and the faction tier system. We were happy to see that everyone who tried it in the preview build loved it and we are also satisfied with the result. To top it off, we also have a long list of adjustments, fixes, and tweaks (see patch notes at the end of this post).
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 at Lost Pilgrims will always remember 2018 as the year when it all began to come together, the year when everything changed for us. It was the year when development on Vagrus got out of the preparation phase and into hardcore production.
Now that this crucial year is done and over with, we felt it would behoove us to recount how 2018 went for those of you interested (and for posterity!).
In the last part of our character design series, we talked about what goes into conceptualizing and designing characters and touched upon how Bazsó came up with distinct the art style for characters and how Szonja raised the bar when working with the majority of them.
Now it's time to discuss what actually happens after the initial phase of concepts and moodboards. Mind you, this will probably have information that is well-known by any graphic designers who work on 2D character art; yet others may find it intriguing.
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.
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:
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.