Well, we have just passed another major milestone in our content creation progress.

As mentioned in our post last week, with our Prologue ready from a content perspective, our writers have been already working on the Early Access stories for Vagrus.

In the Prologue we have well over one hundred thousand words worth of story and lore coming together from Events and Codex entries. Actually, even a bit more since the Narration and Tutorial texts are coming through another source and so are not included in the above numbers. Those two make up over four thousand words on top.

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.

Another non-human character joins our cast, this time a Dwarf! Dwarves are typically lonely, cranky, calculating fellows in the Riven Realms. Their homeland was utterly decimated in the Calamity and has remained uninhabitable ever since. All the magnificent achievements, inventions, and treasures of the mighty Dwarven kingdom went up in flames when it was engulfed in a volcanic cataclysm. And because the volcanoes are still very much active, there is little hope of reclaiming anything from the ruins. Most Dwarves were killed during the Calamity and today, only several thousand remain. For all intents and purposes, they are a dead race.

During the first wave of Alpha testing just recently, we've received a lot of useful feedback, especially on the UI (and Combat UI specifically). We've been keenly aware that these elements needed a rework and labored hard on improvements. We are happy to report on how far we've got:

The TIME is approaching! We are opening up our Prologue Alpha testing soon, folks!

   - So I can just apply & play the demo before everyone?
   - Well, you get to see the game early but you actually have to test & report bugs. 
   - OK! When?
   - When we get to 1k+ followers on Game Jolt. So go and share this!

In Part 3 of our Character Design series, we discussed how a character concept gets to its final artwork state that is placed into the game. In this last part we'll talk about how characters are given stats, skills, and roles in game, especially in combat.

Vagrus has turn-based combat because we wanted to capture the tabletop RPG atmosphere and flow we know so well. It is also a fantasy game which comes with a few expectations of what roles characters fulfill in a party of adventurers. The similarities to DnD and other roleplaygames can surely be seen when observing combat and related character stats. It was along these lines that we designed our heroes (even though few of them are actually heroic) and enemies.

The reveal of our next character marks an important moment in artwork development: Renkailon is the first character who's not going to appear in the Prologue and thus is exclusively created for the main game.

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.

As we've previously hinted at, parts of the game Vagrus has a narrator in the person of Agos the wanderer. An older man and a vagabond, Agos stumbles upon the player one evening on the road and begins telling stories of his travels (if you let him, that is). One such story is the Prologue that you can play through to be introduced to the world and gameplay at the same time, essentially playing through the story Agos is telling.

You may have noticed that Vagrus is pretty heavy on UI, being a strategy/resource management game and an RPG rolled into one. A lot of UI means a lot of buttons and icons, and drawing those is a challenge in its own right. Not only because of the size of the set but also due to the requirement of having them look right: easy to discern and to tell each apart from the rest.