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.

The Riven Realms has been around for over two decades now for us who created it for our tabletop campaigns, and the setting has quite a lot of currencies, even if one only considers the continent of Xeryn. When we set out to develop Vagrus, we picked three coin types not to overcrowd the UI: the Lyrg, a copper coin; the Bross, a silver coin; and Draka, a rare and very valuable golden coin. These are all coins that are used fairly often in large-scale commerce on the continent, and they are also fairly easy to identify as the copper-silver-gold trio of currency is fairly common in historical and fantasy settings.

In short: GameDevDays was phenomenal. The speakers and the community made it an absolutely amazing experience for us.

It started off a little rough considering that we could not borrow a reasonable size car for the trip to Graz and with all the tech equipment we needed to bring along it was a miracle that everyone could squeeze in. In the end we did get there even if a bit cramped. The next hoop we needed to jump was a mix-up with our accommodation (someone was already in the room we booked :O ) but eventually we solved that, too.

In this post dedicated to character poses and skills we are taking a look at the sleazy Dwarven smuggler and budding criminal mastermind Garrik.

Garrik is ranged support character with some very unique mechanics, so he will not be very efficient in the frontlines. In fact, he does not have any melee skills but is still fairly sturdy. All his attacks ignore Armor and even though not all of these are direct damage skills, Garrik can be extremely devastating when used correctly.

In Character design - Part 1 we talked about the types of characters in Vagrus, focusing especially on Companions and their roles in the game. Now it's time to move onto the topic of what exactly goes into the graphic design phase of these characters.