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! 

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.

There's been a lot of talk lately of the Prologue, so much in fact that it's easy to forget about the rest of the game. We can assure you we haven't though, and been hard at work on the content that would feature in the Early Access release. The vast majority of the currently completed content is writing but artwork (both character and environment) is a close second.

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.

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.

2 months after our first devlog post about Vagrus yesterday we crossed 800 followers on GameJolt.com!

Huge thank you to Yaprak, Cros (co-founders of Game Jolt) and all our fans on this awesome #indiegame portal!

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.

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. :)