In the previous part of our Companion Combat Guide (Part 1: The Basics) we left off at discussing the Leader's role in combat after outlining the basic rules of an engagement. In this part, we'll cover the actions that Companions can take during their turn.

Movement 

All characters can Move to any adjacent position on their side of the battlefield. If they move into a position that is occupied by another character, that character is pushed out of the position it occupies and has to be moved into an adjacent free position (even to the position the moving character has just left).



Melee Skills, of course, can only be used from the front row. Additionally, not only do characters in the front row prevent melee attacks against characters directly behind them but also make them more difficult to hit with certain Ranged Skills (those that have the Line of Sight property), so moving and positioning is paramount in Companion combat. By extension, Combat Skills that move enemies can be extremely useful to get to pesky support or damage-dealing enemies in the back line or to prevent melee-heavy enemies from using Skills.

Targeting Basics

Skills vary vastly in what or who you can target with them. Some skills target an enemy (or several enemies even) while others your own Companion or Companions. There are also certain Skills that target empty positions and leave some kind of delayed effect on it (for example, a hail of arrows to strike anyone entering the position). Finally, some Skills only target the user, typically self-buffs.

Melee Skills can only be used from the front row. They can only target front row enemies that are adjacent to the attacker’s position or back row enemies if no front row enemy stands in the way.

Ranged Skills can target anyone on the given side of the battlefield. A subset of Ranged Skills have the Line of Sight property - these receive a flat penalty to Accuracy when targeting an opponent behind another enemy or an obstacle (thus gaining Cover).

Multi-target Skills

Some Combat Skills target multiple enemies in a set configuration from one of these:

• Two Adjacent enemies in a row (for example, Sedarias' Cleave hits two melee enemies next to each other in the same row).

• Both enemies in a Line which means a front row enemy and the one in the back row behind it. 
• All enemies in an entire row (for example, Garrik's gas bomb affects all targets in a single row).

• Up to four enemies in a square pattern (for example, Finndurarth Lightning Strike targets a 4-position square and hits everyone inside that).
• The whole enemy side. These skills are rare and extremely powerful (for example, the Jhakra Alpha's Roar potentially Stuns the entire enemy side).

Skill and Movement Combined

A lot of Companions and enemies have Skills that include some kind of Movement in the effects. The case is either that a Move precedes the Skill's effect or that a Move follows it. Javek's Receding Swing allows him to attack someone in Melee and then Move, which is ideal to bring the relatively squishy sorcerer to safety in the back line. 



Morwen's Strafe is another great example: she hits two adjacent enemies in Melee, then receives a Move to the side. This way she can often deal damage while repositioning herself either to protect someone in the back or to distance herself from dangerous enemies.



Beside Move and using Skills, Companions also have the option to forfeit their turn. This is not only useful when they have nothing to do but outright compulsory when they can not act (for example, because none of their Skills have viable targets and they are prevented from Moving by an effect).

With every Companion and enemy having four Combat Skills and such an emphasis on movement and positioning, combat is deeply strategic and has a lot of synergies even in the Prologue. We hope you found this useful or interesting. In the next part we will talk about defenses and how they affect actions.

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We thought some of you might be interested in watching gameplay videos of Vagrus - well, the Prologue chapter of the game to be precise.

So here's a brilliant recording by Nookrium which perfectly grabs the essence of the dark fantasy setting of the Riven Realms while remains well paced.
https://youtu.be/Zng0xcAClUY
The Prologue is the narrative exposition for the setting of the Riven Realms and also serves as the tutorial of the game, and so it starts off leading you as the player through a very narrow path and then gradually opens up both in terms of functionality and narrative choices. It reaches its zenith in Act IV, after you leave Avernum, from which point onwards you are free to lead your comitatus to almost any direction you want. Of course, success is far from guaranteed, so you need to carefully plan your trips considering all the information available to you, lest your journey end up in disaster, be it a deadly confrontation, financial ruin, or your own crew leaving you due to bad morale. Are you ready to try it yourself?

The story awaits you: Conquer the wasteland!

In the final chapter in our Character Design series, we have touched upon how we come up with the stats and skills for the Companion characters and enemies in Vagrus. A great number of those stats come in to play in action, so in this new Companion combat series, we are going to walk you through how they work in the game. Let's start at the basics!

Companion Combat is turn-based, where 1 to 6 enemies fight against your team of 1 to 6 Companions. You can use the Skills of your Companions to defeat your enemies, protect your Companions, and set yourself up in advantageous positions on the combat board.

Companion combat is made up of rounds. Each round, all the participants take turns to act, and when everyone has had their turn, the current round ends and a new round is started. This goes on until either all your Companions or all your enemies are defeated.



The Combat board is divided into two sides: the friendly side (left), where your Companions and occasional allies are, and the opponent side (right), where your enemies are. Both sides can have a maximum of 6 combatants. Each side has a front row (melee row) and a back row (support row). Each row has 3 positions. Certain skills can only be used when standing in a position of the appropriate row (for example, melee skills can only be used from the melee row).



The minimized Character sheet features the basic stats of your active Companion: their set of skill icons and the stats of said skills (more on skills in Part 2!). The Character Sheet can be opened to its full size, where you can see all the combat-relevant stats of the active Companion and consult the tooltips to learn more of each stat.

The Combat Log can be consulted at any time to see what exactly occurred. The log can be scrolled but if you wish to see more of it, it can be opened fully.

The order in which combatants receive their turns is according to their Initiative (INI): at the beginning of each round all active combatants add 1-6 (random) to their INI to determine in what order they will progress through the round (starting from the highest INI). The Initiative order (portraits at top left) shows the order in which combatants receive their turns. Wise leaders use this information to plan ahead.

You as a vagrus do not take part in combat directly but you can influence what happens in a very direct way nonetheless. The Leader medallion (top left corner) shows your Resourcefulness (purple bar) and Leadership skills. Each such skill can be unlocked by leveling up your vagrus, and each of these can be used to alter the course of combat using Resourcefulness. For example, Empower can be used to give Power to a Companion so that they can use powerful skills again, or Aid can be used to bring back Downed characters (who are essentially defeated and can't act in their turn). This brings a whole new strategic level to Companion combat.

In the next part of this series, we are going to go into skills and movement rules in Companion combat. Stay tuned!

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https://youtu.be/iiKBGW9B1zQ

This time we brought you a snippet from the Intro of Vagrus. We hope find it intriguing and watch the full video in the game itself when it becomes available.

We also wanted to share with you that we are soon opening up the closed Alpha testing of the Prologue section of Vagrus. It will not be here on Steam though, simply because it is too risky to share games too early on Steam as negative comments/reviews can ruin the rating of the game even before it starts to take shape.

Instead, we will start with opening the game up for testing in a smaller and more contained environment on an indie game portal. You guys are of course welcome to join that effort but if you preferred to play through Steam only, worry not: we do plan to bring the game here sometime in 2019.

If you are interested, please visit our website for more information. Cheers!

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- So, who are these gentlemen?
- They are our narrative designers, DZ and Ivan. Please welcome them!

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.

Which brings us to the topic of this post: Iván and Zoltán have been writing for Vagrus for some time now. Some of their texts you can find in the Prologue but most of their awesome work was penned for the main game. As we are moving more and more onto content creation for the Early Access, the writer team is picking up pace, writing and scripting great stories for Vagrus. There’s tons to do in a game with so many narrative content and their work has been indispensable for us. Please join us in welcoming them officially!

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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.

https://youtu.be/LYUD9CgCzeg
Another time Agos is used as a narrator is the game's lore Intro video where the world itself and the concept of the Calamity is first introduced to the player.

In concert with Agos' character, we wanted an older voice with some vitriol and theatricality, someone with a deep voice but also someone with a range and expressiveness required for a storyteller that Agos is. We feel we've found exactly that and more with Charles, who provides the voice of the old vagabond, so we are super happy with how the narration is turning out.

What do you think? Tell us what you like and/or dislike in the comments section!

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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 Basics

When we design a character for Vagrus, we first settle on who they are, where they come from, and what kind of a combat role they can fulfill given their background story, skills, equipment, and so on. Are they sturdy enough to be a frontline character? Are they good in a support role? Of course, sometimes it goes the other way round: we know we need a ranged damage dealer, for example, so we find a character in a long list of potential Companions who we can add to the game. This list comes from many years of tabletop roleplaying using the Riven Realms as a campaign setting, so there's plenty of material. This is also the time when we decide if the character will be able to fulfill a Deputy role or not.

Combat Skills

After setting the general idea and role of the character, we start developing its combat Skills. Each of them has four (some enemies have fewer), so the challenge usually becomes having to make these several Skills different enough as well as satisfying enough, plus even at this stage, we have to think about synergies with other characters, not only between their own Skills. Many combat Skills have what we call Effect Props, that is, secondary effects like bleeding, poison, stun, buffs, debuffs, etc. These are usually not set in stone at this stage but many of them are such a vital part of a combat skill that we have to agree upon what to include.

Statistics

Finally, each character's main stats are created and added. We do not dwell on this much and thus stats are assigned fairly quickly. I believe it is thanks to the fact that we've been playing RPGs and consequently designing encounters for decades now. That does not mean we get everything right the first time - extensive testing of combat helps us fine-tune character stats later on.

Follow-Up

This gameplay-related design usually goes hand-in-hand with the artwork and when both are completed, the character is added to the game where we can test their Skills, stats, synergies, and even their decals or effects, making adjustments if necessary. What takes much, much longer is story development for the Companions. We may have the larger steps of their quests and story outlined but expanding that takes time and these are often concluded only months later.

That concludes our series in which we discussed facets of character design for Vagrus. This was, of course, a mere cursory glance into what such work entails but we hope it was successful in at least giving a picture of how we go about designing our characters. Thank you for tagging along!


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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.

A Sketch

Often - but not always - Geri prepares sketches for the individual phases of a character. Other times we take photos where one of us poses as the character and these can be used as references. The sketch or photo is then taken by Szonja who makes several improved sketches and concepts before she gets down a primary that we decide to roll with.

Linework

Working in Photoshop, Szonja does the linework for the 'idle' position of the character. There are usually several iterations of this until everyone is happy with all the aspects of the sprite. This is also the phase when a lot of detail gets placed and parts get more definition.



Coloring and Shading

The idle phase image then goes through coloring. This is usually not something we iterate much, as most of the time the color scheme is already set during the concept phase. This is where a lot of surfaces get details, like textiles. Everything is done with hard brushes, no texture brushes are used.

Shading is the last step, following the guidelines set by Bazsó in his initial character art direction to achieve that specific comic-book look. This involves applying a shadow layer first and then subtracting parts of it being hit by directional light. Finally, contact shadows and highlights are added.




Further Phases

This above process is then repeated 4-7 times (once for each pose), depending on the number of poses. Short review rounds are between each phase before the poses are accepted. After all that, the character's base art assets are done. Except...

Finishing Touches

Once the images are finalized, they are exported to .png format and are plugged right into Unity, where pivot points are set, placements are tweaked, and effects/decals are added, which is a whole, complex process in and of itself.

Challenges

Currently, the most challenging parts of this process are encountered when a character - due to variations in apparel and paraphernalia like the elemental shamans or tribesmen - has to have overlapping layers in the source files, matching perfectly with the other layers.

The other source of considerable headache is that the idle poses have to be ready to be skeleton-framed and animated later, so we have to think about that and draw 'behind' the future moving parts.

In the last part of our character design series, we'll talk about how we design character stats and combat roles, as well as how we implement them. Be sure to check that out, too!

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We have been pushing so hard in recent weeks that we forgot to take notice, so we celebrated a little late but boy was it awesome. 😜

Also, three weeks ago we finally play-tested our pre-Alpha Prologue section with a few friendly testers and gathered tons of feedback. We got plenty of insights to which we directed our attention, figuring out ways how best to address them. Most of our findings concerned controls and how to introduce our players to all the features and functions available (i.e.: the tutorial).

Following a quick assessment - balancing the impact of changes and the time to complete them - we came up with around a dozen 'player stories' that we ticked off before going along with sharing the game with a bigger tester group (10-20 people). So last week we started our closed Alpha and apart from an issue concerning the intro video on Win7, there was not a single crash. That is rather good news. The initial feedback on gameplay is also very positive.

As the excitement mounts, we are still extremely grateful to you all for helping us reach these milestones.

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In Devlog #7 - 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.

Art Style and Animation

First and foremost, a few considerations on the choice of art style. Vagrus is a 2D game and character art leans distinctly towards a comic book representation but on the serious, more realistic, and darker side instead of a cartoonish approach. The reason for this choice is manifold and the primary one was that we liked it and it matches the setting. It is also relatively easy to handle and iterate, which is important when you have so many characters and enemies as we do. Bazsó helped with the initial choice of character art style and we also found Szonja who wanted to work with such a design so it was a match made in heaven.

Then there's the choice of the animation style. The use of parallax movements and effects instead of detailed animation for combat skills lives its renaissance now thanks to hit games like Darkest Dungeon. We love the way it looks and also meshes well with the more comic book look of the characters, so the choice was a no-brainer. With the right timing and effects it looks visceral, which fits the setting better, too. The exception is the idle phase of characters, which will be slightly animated to avoid a still-image-like rigidity.

So with all the design choices behind us, let's see how we approach character visual design at Lost Pilgrims.

Briefing

It all starts with a call for a character art asset to go with a character design established sufficiently by the designers. Because of the vast amount of lore for the world, there's already a good idea of how the character and its combat skills should look and feel. The briefing also includes background information on the character, about its intended role, and appearance.

Cultural Influences, Materials, and Mutants

People in the Riven Realms partially take after real world cultures more often than not. What makes it extra interesting is that since this is a post-apocalyptic world, we often have to start out with choosing one historical influence for the times before the cataclysm and then modify and blend that reference into another one that's more appropriate for the current times. You can see an example with the Sadirar, who were once similar to the ancient Greek civilization of real life Earth but were forced to live in endless deserts later. Their features may still resemble that old look but now as desert dwellers, their traditional apparel shifted to a more tribal-looking one. Of course, cultural influences are usually set for a roster of characters from the same background before working on them, and very rarely on a character by character basis.



We have strict rules on what type of materials are available in each region and in general as well (it's a metal-starved world, after all). We have to consider each environment from different perspectives. What kind of animals live there that people can harvest to produce armor? What resources and materials are available for crafting tools? While people of the Ashlands have huge snails roaming their lands, the shells of which they can integrate into their armor, the Sharduk would use the hides from their fallen giant lizard mounts to create clothing.

Since many beings were mutated or were mixed with other creatures, for example, the half-draconic Dragonkin or the Tainted, we often design fairly weird-looking characters that match the overall dark fantasy design.

Moodboard

For the most important characters and for distinct cultures, the next step is the creation of the moodboard with all the above in mind. Szonja gathers images and creates sketches that will serve as a basis for the look and feel of the characters or culture, and some of it will be incorporated into the character designs.



In the next part of Character Design, we'll talk about the steps and techniques involved in drawing the characters and placing them into the game. Be sure to check that out, too!

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