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. :)

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.

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.

Markets and bazaars are the throbbing heart of the rebuilt cities of the Riven Realms. Due to the isolation of many settlements and regions thanks to the Calamity, trade - propagated mostly by comitati - is key to the survival of these regions and thus to the survival of the Empire.

There's been a lot of character reveals for Vagrus - The Riven Realms here on our website and on our social media since we began posting about a year ago. We figured it behooves us to talk a little more about who these characters are and what their role is in the game.

The vast majority of the characters you see revealed are enemy characters, even if sometimes they can be allies in the game for short periods of time (or versions of them, anyways). Although Events will involve these enemy characters often, you will mainly see them as shown in the artwork in turn-based combat. All of them have their unique combat skills and synergies with other enemies.

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 to talk about the Journal. Even though I don't think most gamers are super-excited about the details of in-game journals or quest logs, it is still extremely important to get them right in a game as complex and as full of storylines, tasks, quests, and objectives as Vagrus, and gamers do appreciate quest logs that work well and aid them when they need information.

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!

Most fantasy adventures have an inn or two but in our case - in a game where you lead a caravan and its crew on all kinds of journeys - taverns and inns are vital and appear in almost every sizeable settlement.

The artwork you can see, the versions of which will serve as a backdrop for such watering holes in Vagrus, was painted by the amazing Péter Kovács. The image perfectly captures the alien feel of the world, the dark and hard fantasy elements, as well as the relatively peaceful atmosphere of an inn.

Quite a lot of you have asked us to provide a map for the continent of Xeryn, where Vagrus is set. The wait is over! Kind of.

Maps are awesome, beautiful things. As it turns out, maps are also complicated things, especially when you have to integrate them seamlessly into several game systems. So it's been in the works for a long time and it's now revealed in this video for the first time, to give you an idea how it'll work in-game.