Besides working on implementing new features into our Open Access build, we made great progress with prepping for the debut of the first Open-world region - Tor'Zag's Shelter and its surroundings -  which basically is about the first half of the main game. We are actually contemplating to bring its release ahead of polishing all the features.

We attended yet another game show, this time in Jönköping, Sweden, where DreamHack was born more than ten years ago. While DreamHack Summer is somewhat smaller than its big brother, DH Winter, it still blew our minds, with thousands of players moving in for three days... and by moving in we literally mean taking their PCs, chairs, and air-mattresses with them.

As we are cycling through and iterating the various UI elements of the game, we have now arrived to the Codex and gave it a neat little redesign. Many of you have enjoyed reading Codex entries (yay!) and we wanted to upgrade and update the experience, especially along the lines of your feedback.

A lot has happened since our last project post where we looked back on 2018 as a sort of a year assessment.

Prologue

We finished the year with releasing the Prologue section of Vagrus just around Christmas. Our hopes were high and the results were... even better! Let's delve into the details.

We have a big announcement to make: the Prologue of Vagrus is coming next week with First Access on Game Jolt in appreciation of our thousand strong community on this amazing indie game portal.

Follow us there, get done your Christmas shopping, clear your calendars and train your fingers on the Download button! 

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.

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. :)

Vagrus - The Riven Realms is a game rich in storylines and quests, and most of these appear in the form of what we call Events: text based interactions where your choices guide the story. There are a lot (and I mean a LOT) of these Events and due to their nature, writing for the game involves quite complex scripting and a non-linear narrative design angle. But what does this mean in practice and what does it involve?

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!

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.