Today’s post will take on more of a technical focus. We recognize that these kinds of updates are not for everyone – if, however, you are interested in our internal processes and how you might help us improve the game for all moving forward, we invite you to read on.

As we have discussed before, one of the key focuses at Lost Pilgrims Studio right now is bringing Vagrus to multiple new platforms and dealing with the challenges that arise therein. To address these forthcoming challenges, we have revamped our bug reporting tool in-game, as shown above.

We recently announced Turn-based Fest, an event that originated from the initiative and hashtag #TurnBasedThursday – a collaborative project we launched roughly one and a half years ago. The Fest itself was essentially a curated Steam sale that put a focus on turn-based games. With the first Turn-based Fest now behind us, we are happy to report that the Fest was both a blast and a resounding success among many participants! Imagining that the details may be of interest to many people, regardless of having partaken in the festival or not, we have put together some noteworthy insights about the event and its aftermath.

Hello everyone,

This one is going to be an update on localization. A while back, we cited the game’s complexity, size, and it being a niche game that resulted in a relatively low sales volume as factors that made any kind of localization unlikely. Despite that, we have been encouraging players to still wishlist the game and let us know what languages they would like to see it translated into in a dedicated localization thread and promised to reassess the situation after a while to see what is desired and viable and what is not. A year has passed since, and it is time for us to do just that, which led to a good and bad news kind of situation. The bad news is that sales figures and declining wishlists in non-English-speaking regions made the prospect of official translations not viable.

Hey everyone,

This time, we've got a new free DLC for you, along with revamped Scouting, a Glossary to clarify gameplay mechanisms and UI elements, as well as major backend improvements. It would be no understatement to say that this is a huge stepping stone for us and the Riven Realms.

Hello everyone,

Recently, we have published posts about several bigger and smaller features and other goodies, such as the Glossary, improvements, new Skills, and so on. There is, however, something else we have been spending a lot of time on, and probably most of our players won’t even notice the outcome.

The artbook of Vagrus is finally here (well, technically it is also on its way to everyone who ordered it) and holding it in our hands is indeed fantastic.

Admittedly, putting the book together was quite rough. Some of us thought that pulling it together from already existing artwork and writing texts around the art is going to take a couple of weeks. Turns out, compiling and writing something this big for physical publishing takes a handful of months, more like. All this in spite of doing a sort of a dry run previously with the smaller (A5) art booklet that went into the Collectors' Editions, albeit that had no texts accompanying the images. 

With the Finndurarth miniatures tucked away in Collectors’ and Emperor’s Editions on their way to their new owners as I’m writing these lines, I thought it would be prudent of us to write a bit of a painting guide. Well, two painting guides, to be exact. The first one uses some relatively advanced techniques while the latter goes for a sharper, more “box-art” style. The guides were written with the assumption that they will be used by hobbyists, so the techniques are listed along with the paints we used but not explained in detail. Luckily, the internet is chock-full of all sorts of guides; you can even learn about beginner techniques fairly easily should you wish to paint your mini without previous experience.

In the long line of UI reworks, our next stop is the crew UI where all the panes will now receive a lot of changes and upgrades. We planned to make these changes earlier but the design was in motion all the time - with new stats and mechanics being added - and so other things were completed and added before these in the end. And so now, so close to 1.0, we finally got around to implement the new crew UI.

Assassins (and Handjari Assassin variants) in Vagrus are lethal enemies from a Tarkian background or training. Since their stealthy abilities do not translate well to the direct combat in-game, we opted to arm them with skills that emphasize their deadly techniques, use of poisons and battle drugs, as well as their flashy, acrobatic fighting style.

Tor'Zag's Shelter is a vast, dark city in the belly of the Blackblood Mountains, carved out mostly by Imperials after obsidian became scarcer in the region and the fleeing armies of Warleader Tor'Zag, an Orc general, capitulated, leaving the tunnels beneath the mountain at the end of the Orc War. People who lost everything came here to share respite from the scorching sun of the Jagged Waste with traders who were looking to establish a way-station between Deven in the north and the Province in the south. Now, a couple of hundred years later, the Shelter is among the five greatest cities of the continent.