It seems we are getting into the habit of sharing project updates monthly now - there is just so much going on. To make the best use of your time, let's jump right in!
Social Media
We have got an awesome two months behind us since our last social media update. The most important development was that we put additional effort into regularly publishing news about Vagrus on major gaming portals like Steam, GameJolt, Itch.io, and IndieDB. And it paid off! We have gathered over a thousand new followers on those platforms. Just during the four days of being featured on GameJolt, more than five hundred fans signed up to follow our journey.
We posted our last update only six weeks ago but as we have just reached two important milestones, it felt pertinent to share it with you all.
1) We've passed our 1 year anniversary working on the game! We have been pushing so hard in recent weeks that we forgot to take notice - let alone celebrate. So that is something we will have to make up for later this week. :)
Time for another project update! Seventy-seven days have passed by and even though it was summer - supposedly calmer times - it felt pretty frantic. In the good sense.
A huge Thank You! and wishing all the best to Marci
As your might remember, our previous post started with the news of Marci joining the team to complete his summer internship with us for his degree in software development. Marci has been instrumental to the progress we made on the Codex & Journal functionality and UI, as well as to catching up on our design documents. Now that he has returned to his studies, we wish him all the very best for his goal of finishing his Bachelor's degree. We're pleased to see that he is on the right track to become a great game developer!
The Codex is a tool in Vagrus that lets players read up on the world, its inhabitants, locations, lore, characters, and whatever else that has an entry. The idea was to provide players who wish to know more a place to find it and to allow you to look up things you may have forgotten; but to make this absolutely voluntary. If you do not wish to read these entries, you can still absolutely play Vagrus, as this is basically additional fluff.
It's spring 1990 and I'm in elementary school. My best friend brings a book to school that he reads aloud to a small group of us during our big walks at lunch break. The book has a weird old wizard on the cover conjuring smoke from a crystal ball. More interesting are the illustrations on the inside: intricate black and white drawings of strange fantasy creatures and dungeon locations. The little book is Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson's Warlock of Firetop Mountain, translated to our native language. Most of you probably know that it's a gamebook that you do not read from start to end but in branching numbered chapters that make the story personal and add replayability. Yet they are much more than simple choose-your-own-adventure books because they include a stat and combat system you have to manage throughout the adventure - albeit a really simple one.
Following our game pages on Steam and itch.io, we have joined IndieDB.com and Gamejolt. These are also gaming portals that focus on indie games just like ours. You can check out the new pages here:
IndieDB.com
We are very excited to announce that as of now, we have our own Steam Store page!
In our crusade to get Vagrus to the players who would play it we are constantly looking for new opportunities. Game portals, of course, offer a good chance to present the game to as many as possible, so it was only a matter of time that we reached out to some.
A lot has happened since our last project update, so let's dig in without delay!
Expanding team
Beside Marci who has recently joined our ranks as an intern and is already working on implementing new features for the game in Unity + C#, we have also got two new writers checking out our self-developed event editor tool to ready themselves for mass content production once we plunge into that phase (right after publishing our playable demo). Rest assured that we will post details about them and their work when we get there.
Great news! The newest addition to the team, Marci has arrived earlier this month, starting his two months internship at Lost Pilgrims.
Marci studies software engineering at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics and being a life long gamer planning on working in the game development once he finishes his curriculum.