Last week marked the third occasion that the annual Turn-based Thursday Fest showcased some of the best turn-based indie-games on the market. There were hundreds of participating RPGs, sims, grand strategy games, deckbuilders, 4X games, roguelikes, puzzlers, city builders, and much, much more to choose from. This year it was even bigger and more spectacular than the previous years, presenting well-known games such as Baldur’s Gate 3, showing that turn-based games are still very much “in”. 

Our aim at Lost Pilgrims is not just to create memorable gaming experiences, but also to introduce you to people who contribute to building our cozy community. Therefore, we have interviewed Ben the Human, who has been streaming Vagrus for a while now and recently arrived at a major milestone by concluding a run with over 250 episodes. This seemed like the perfect opportunity to ask him about his gaming journey and his experience with Vagrus:

We’re delighted to share one of Varnurud’s more inhospitable locales with you this week: Flamescar Cavern. “Delighted to show us something inhospitable?” you might ask. Well yes, because the Cavern itself represents a site of both danger and opportunity. A mere glance at its confines makes clear why so few dare to brave its interwoven passages and caves.

This week’s post covers the creation of our painted Campaign Map and the interactive Chart, starting from their humblest beginnings in our creative director’s tabletop role-playing game materials to their eventual manifestation in-game, covered by a node grid and expanded with interactive options.

Beginnings

To kick it off, let’s start by taking a look at how it all began for Vagrus.

Hey everyone,

This week’s update addresses several issues that we’ve been aiming to fix since our last patch. It also adds several new small Quality of Life features that further streamline UI and UX elements across the board. Alongside this, we are continuing to work hard on our coming DLC, and will endeavor to share more about it as we move closer to the end of the development cycle.

After last week’s feedback round-up, the bulk of the team has been focusing on delivering the quality of life (QoL) changes we spoke of roughly two weeks ago, which by now include a great deal of things. Among the most important of these is the ability to move on the campaign map by double-clicking and the extra information players will be able to view on their Companions’ character panes about Skills and summoned creatures.

This week we’re taking a look at an illustrative cross-section of recent feedback we’ve received about the game and highlighting some of the changes that are coming as a result. We pride ourselves on iterating Vagrus and improving the game at every chance we get, even if we can’t always fulfill the more extreme requests of our players and reviewers.

New Content

• The DLC ‘Old Acquaintances’ will now be unlocked to all its owners. It includes two Companions for the main campaign – Javek and Sedarias – with fully-fledged storylines including new enemies and rewards, their own Skills, Prowess progression, as well as four new Hirelings available at the Freelancers’ Guild in Tor’Zag’s Shelter, Deven, Avernum, Larnak, and (for owners of ‘Sunfire and Moonshadow’) the Onyx Outpost.

User Interface Improvements

• Clarified the visual guidance of Evading, including when you Evade to a position occupied by another character.
• Clarified the visual guidance of Javek’s Hypnotize Skill.
• We streamlined tooltip behavior while using a controller based on feedback and expanded their functionality.
• Changed the Move Skill in Companion Combat, giving it better feedback and a more streamlined usage.

Bug Fixes

• Steam cloud saves are now working and can store up to 200mb of save files.
• Tutorial windows no longer appear minimized under any circumstances.
• Owned DLCs will now always show up properly under ‘Extras’ in Vagrus games in GOG and Epic Games Store libraries.
• Event choices with an Achievement dependency now show the proper icon (chalice).
• When using a controller, the Chart tutorial no longer scrolls the same way as the Chart is zoomed in and out.
• Fixed a rare issue occurring on GOG and the Epic Games Store, causing players to be unable to select the Knowledge Ambition upon vagrus creation when owning the Vorax Free-LC.
• You can no longer turn back in the initial parts of Pilgrims of the Wasteland when using a controller.
• Fixed an issue caused by owning more than 10.000 Bross upon loading a game.
• Fixed an issue that caused the game to freeze in Companion Combat when Suppressing Shot would trigger an Evade.

Stay tuned and conquer the wasteland!

Hey everyone,

Our original plan was to kick the year off with a neat content update (more about it here) in early February together with a host of fixes but the team crushed so many bugs in January – some of them critical – that we decided to release the update earlier. So here we are. We’ll follow this up soon with what we originally intended. Very soon, actually. As always, the majority of the bugs we have fixed were reported by our amazing community. We can’t thank you enough for helping us improve Vagrus, but we’ll try with additional content in the future.

This week we have good news on multiple fronts; we will be able to reveal our expansion very soon (read on for more information) and we are pleased to announce that Lost Pilgrims Studio will again be participating in Tacticon, an annual digital convention hosted on Steam that celebrates strategy games from a wide array of talented developers. The convention is hosted by Indie strategy and tactics game publishers Firesquid and Hooded Horse and will run between the 11th and 15th of May. For full details of the event, you can visit Tacticon’s website here.