Vagrus - The Riven Realms News

According to players currently testing the open-world, it is hard to make a living as an independent comitatus in the Empire. That was an intended design choice, because almost all the trade is controlled by factions on the continent, be they Trading Houses, religious organizations or criminals. With their Imperial trading monopoly licenses or their raw negotiating power, factions buy and sell at significantly better prices. With that in mind, we have planned to include a Task-system from the beginning and we are now getting closer and closer to implementing it.

What we call Tasks now in Vagrus are essentially procedurally-generated contracts offered by factions. If you fulfill the Task, you get rewards and reputation with these factions. At this time, we are concentrating solely on Trade Tasks, though there are going to be other types later on.

The main goal of the Task system is to allow players to ease into the open-world part without having to have an extensive meta-knowledge of what can be bought or sold for a good profit in the different parts of the Empire. While completing these Tasks for a fixed commission, players also earn reputation with factions, gaining access to higher tier Tasks, better market prices, and one-time rewards.

The design considerations and building blocks we are using for Trade Tasks are as follows:

• Many Tasks have a time-limit to complete.
  
• Early delivery increases your reputation reward.
  
• If you failed to deliver in time, you lose reputation. It does not matter if you just tarried too long, lost the goods due to unfortunately circumstances, or sold it elsewhere like a true swindler. To make it less appealing, you lose significantly more reputation than you would have gained, and can not get a new Task from the given faction until you either complete the delivery or pay for the 'lost' goods.
  
• There is a limit to how many Tasks you can accept at any given time (though if it is in general or per faction is yet to be decided).
  
• Parameters for Tasks (like destination, cargo type, etc) are generated procedurally, though typically within certain boundaries depending on the faction that offers it.
  

Tasks are intended to be expanded in future milestones with Mercenary and Exploration type commissions, too. This milestone is to lay the foundation for those as well. We are hyped as a Jhakra in heat by the prospect of adding this feature set to the game, as we think it'll make it much, much deeper and provide a ton of things to do for players. What do you think?

The Lost Pilgrims Team

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[h2]TL;DR: Vargus has been selected by Valve for the upcoming Summer Edition of the Steam Game Festival.[/h2]


The Summer Festival is an online event between June 9 and 14, during which Steam promotes demos on its main page. It's a huge opportunity for a small developer studio like us: we can show our game to a wider audience, not to mention the chance of it being covered by press and other content creators. So you can imagine that we are really excited to be part of this event.

Now, let us see all the things that happened recently around the game in a little more detail.

The First Month After Open-World

It's hard to believe that we are the end of May already. The first month after revealing the Open-World campaign of Vagrus has been both amazing and exhausting beyond what we expected. We have received tons of feedback; some of you played the game for over a hundred hours. Based on that, we worked hard to patch out a large number of bugs and event script errors, as well as adding some quality of life improvements.

Milestone Changes

Most importantly and based on our players' insights, we re-prioritized our development milestones to ease the early game learning curve, which proved to be too steep for a lot of new players. Then, once we finished the combat AI improvements, we started working on Tasks. You can read about those two here (Combat AI) and here (Tasks).

Demo on Steam

Parallel to Tasks and developing content for the next large region to be added, we started to make preparations for our eventual Steam Early Access release and - as an important in-between step - for the release of our Demo on Steam. Turns our it was a good investment of our time as it was picked up by Valve for the festival!

The three main reasons why we believe publishing a Demo is a good idea:

• We get a 'temperature check' on how the current level of polish sits with our future players
  
• We can refine the messaging (if needed)
  
• It generates hype
  
• And uhm... buy some time so we can finish implementing the Task system in the background
  

What do these mean in practical terms? After we release the Demo, players will have the chance to provide feedback on it - what they liked and what they hated; and a lot in between. What captured their imagination and what felt lacking. There is no game that ticks all the boxes for everyone, we know that. We also know that it is better to have a game that some people feel passionate about rather than one most players classify as 'okay'. Nevertheless, it is important to dig into those reviews to understand whether it was a genuine problem that we do want to address, or a mismatch in expectation with what a certain player had. In the case of the first, we have the chance to make changes in the game before we release it into Early Access, while for the second, we need to tweak our messaging to avoid, or at least minimize, such mismatches.

Then there is of course the wish to generate hype. People playing the Demo will - fingers crossed - feel passionate about the game and sign up to be notified when it comes out, or even decide to support the development via our currently running crowdfunding campaign.

So in conclusion, we hope you check out the Demo at the Summer Festival if you haven't already elsewhere, and let us know what you think!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/909660/

[h3]Manual Save[/h3]

We have thought long and hard about how to deal with manual saves in Vagrus, because there are a lot of complications stemming from certain game elements. Do we let players choose mid-combat? Do we let them save mid-Event? Is there a point to Event tests if manual saves scumming works? These are just a few of the many questions that have arisen.

Eventually though, we could not imagine Vagrus without being able to save manually. We never set out to make a rogue-like and the Riven Realms can often slay even the best vagri quickly and cruelly. You might also want to replay certain quests differently and you should be able to load your game in such cases. So now that so many things are changing before the release of the Open World campaign, the time has come to implement manual saves and so you will see it pretty soon. That said, we will later add an Achievement to those crazy folks who can play through the game without ever saving manually.



[h3]Hunting and Foraging[/h3]

Keeping your comitatus well-supplied - or in some cases even keeping it from starving - has always been intended to be challenging in Vagrus, and it makes sense: you are the leader of a daring traveling company in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world where resources are often scarce and terrible encounters can turn a simple trip into a living nightmare.

But we also hear you, dear players, when you say that sometimes it is a bit too difficult to keep your crew from starving, and so we are working on a couple of small features that we have planned to include from the start and that would make life easier for you when it comes to supplies. Let's take a quick look at what these are.

Foraging

Foraging is a camp mechanic and you can use it to send out workers or slaves (or both) to gather supplies in the camp's vicinity. This yields supplies when the day is ended, albeit not a lot. Its role is to provide a relatively steady stream of supplies to help out with long journeys over the wastelands.

When sending out workers, the success chance is based on the yield of the region modified by the number of workers and their Vigor. In case of a critical fail, you can lose Vigor and even - very rarely - workers.

When sending slaves, Obedience is reduced, then depending on the test, you can have one or more slaves escaping.

In both cases, the Survival perk levels also factor into the test you roll.

Hunting

Hunting is a riskier business and it is a new way to make use of your scouts. The supply yield of hunting is either high or very little depending on the test roll that is based on the region's base yield, the number of your scouts, and your Hunting perk levels. The Venatoris deputy role also grants significant bonuses for this action. Hunting at the camp also tends to bring back secondary loot derived from beast kills, like hides, ivory, or chitin. There is also a chance that you will lose scouts when going hunting - the dangers of the wasteland are never to be underestimated.

Loot (yay!)

A very welcome side-benefit of both foraging and hunting that sometimes your crew finds and brings back loot from these excursions. Loot is mostly taken from fallen creatures of the region (like ivory or bone) but sometimes they can find other things as well. This loot is never abundant, mind, but can sometimes give you a nice little bonus.

Scouting

We are thinking about giving scouting results a new use: it would reveal the node's yield for hunting and foraging. These have a range for the region but individual nodes can be much more or much less abundant in supplies to claim. It is not sure when this will be added yet.

So that is a short rundown of what we are planning for this feature. We hope it will help with the cost of living and surviving the wastelands of the Riven Realms. What do you think?

The Lost Pilgrims Team

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🎉 Our crowdfunding campaign is LIVE ▶️Get instant access to the Alpha build at Fig

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Wanna get the game as early as possible with even more content? Please share our pages and posts with your friends through your favorite social media channel(s). Appreciate it!

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Initially, we built Companion Combat without too much focus on the combat AI, knowing full well that it would be a massive task to code and having most of the combat features locked before we do so would make it overall a more efficient undertaking.

Thus, vanilla Companion Combat AI was 'equipped' with nothing more but brute force, running thousands of random choices without any direction that were then evaluated in the back end by a not-too-sophisticated point system spiced up with a dash of random generation aiming to make the AI choose sub-optimal scenarios too from time to time. Otherwise it would have been much too strong.

That unfortunately had its share of drawbacks. It was either extremely slow (too many iterations) or dumb (not enough iterations). After some tuning, we went for the middle ground with a rather slow and occasionally irrational setting. Truth be told, it felt awkward every time we saw someone stream the game like that and initially planned to return to it earlier but our players felt more concerned about other areas of the game, so we moved it behind other open-world features on our priority list.

Now that the first open-world region is in the hands of our backers and patron testers, we finally got around to improve AI, too.

First Objective: Increase Speed

We introduced a number of new attributes for all characters to drive their behavior, such as:

• Row preference: Melee or range preference, or being versatile in both. That allowed to eliminate all simulations from non-preferred positions on the battlefield.
  
• Tactical level (TL): Only characters with higher tactical awareness look for high certainty of their available options, while the ones with lower TL could drop the iteration numbers in the simulation drastically.
  
• Expected damage: It is calculated based on the characters' average damage. Characters finding a 'good-enough' option stop the simulation and look no further. The higher the TL of a character is, the higher that imaginary bar of expected damage is set.
  

Second Objective: Optimal Positioning

When an AI - in any game - makes a dumb move, most of us feel lucky, even happy for a moment but then we immediately start to resent it. We want to beat the game with our superior strategy and not because of the AI's inferior tactics. Thus, we added new priorities for the AI:

• Row preference: It was already mentioned above but beside helping with efficiency it also increased the effectiveness of the AI as enemies naturally priorities moving into their preferred rows allowing them to use their most impactful Skills.
  

• Use cover: It is much harder to hit characters in cover with ranged attacks, so it only would make sense for the enemy units to use that advantage (even if only on higher TL).
  

• Use swap: Why spend two actions on shuffling around each other when you can swap? The players can do it, and so can the enemies now.
  

Third Objective: Colorful Skill Usage

Balancing a tactical game is very difficult and can barely ever be perfect - we knew that from the beginning. We are also aware that for a single-player game, variety and challenge is more important than being perfectly balanced, so when we design enemies, we do not mind them having a mix of stronger and weaker skills. On the other hand, we would like the AI to use all of them, even if not with the same frequency, so now the AI takes into account:

• Effect prop points: Our old AI gathered 'points' during its simulation for instant and overtime damage as well as heal, also for getting targets stunned, killed, or downed. In the new version, we plugged in buffs, debuffs, and impediments too, so those skills would be assessed on their true merit.
  
• Cleansing matters: We also take into consideration cleansing (meaning removing) effects, since those can be equally helpful or painful, depending on the situation.
  
• Choice pooling: To ensure that weaker skills are used occasionally, we pool all viable options, sort them based on their scoring, then pick from the top number of actions on the list, where the number is determined based on the character's TL. The higher their TL, the narrower the pool, resulting in better choices.
  

We have worked for weeks on these changes but are quite happy with the final outcome. The next build will include all these changes and we hope to see you guys try them very soon.

Gábor, Lost Pilgrim
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🎉 Our crowdfunding campaign is LIVE ▶️Get instant access to the Alpha build at Fig

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Wanna get the game as early as possible with even more content? Please share our pages and posts with your friends through your favorite social media channel(s). Appreciate it!

Fig | Website | Youtube | Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Patreon | Discord

[h3]A Huge 'Thank You!'[/h3]
We are grateful to everyone who has tried the game and shared their experience of the Open-World prototype. A very special thanks to Deviant, mithc, SomeCommonName, and TheBrightKing for all their testing efforts. With hundreds of hours of gameplay under their belts, their detailed feedback on the use of different systems, balances, and mechanics were immensely useful for us, helping to prioritize what we need to improve first.

[h3]So What's in the Current Patch?[/h3]
Most importantly, the Companion Combat AI improvements, about which we will release a separate post in the near future here. Also, various tweaks to the trading background systems to make the early game a bit more forgiving until we add Tasks. Beside those, we made a metric ton of typing and script corrections, squashed bugs, and added some smaller quality of life features.


[h3]What's coming next? We listened to You[/h3]
We have decided to split our Companion Combat improvement Milestone (milestone 19) into two. In this build, we are releasing the enhancements made to the combat AI speed and logic, while the part that was supposed to cover adding new skills to enemy units will return as a separate milestone later on. Instead, we are refocusing our efforts to some early game improvements, most notably: Trading Tasks.

Tasks are jobs commissioned by factions for a fixed fee. Players can take on these Tasks knowing the exact money they will receive without having to dig deep into the trading meta from the start. They are the best and most reliable way to earn reputation with factions, too.



So the benefit of placing Tasks to an earlier spot on our development roadmap is to allow players to ease into the open-world part without having to have an extensive meta-knowledge of what can be bought or sold for a good profit in the different parts of the Empire. While completing these tasks for a fix commission, players also earn reputation with factions, gaining access to higher tier Tasks, better market prices, and one-time rewards. You can find some more details on Tasks in the description of our Milestone 20 here.

Okay, time to jump to the patch notes so you guys can experience this new build yourselves. Enjoy!

[h2][h3]PATCH NOTES v0.5.04[/h3][/h2]
[h3]New Features 👀[/h3]

• Milestone 19 — Companion Combat AI improvements 💀
  
  • The AI takes its turn much faster ⌛
    
  • Opponents move between rows based on their preference (melee, ranged) ⚔️🏹
    
  • Enemy units take advantage of cover 🛡️
    
  • Enemies are now able to swap positions 🔄

[h3]New / Updated Content or Game Mechanics 🎁[/h3]

• Trade was made slightly more profitable in the early game with small comitati while significantly harder in the mid/end game
  
• Tweaks to Workforce and Guard requirements to make high-end comitatus size a little more costly (requires more crew to run one)
  
• A number of Perks have been merged to make them more impactful
  
• A shed-load of typos and event scripts corrected (anything you reported is supposedly fixed now 🤞)
  
• Carrying Passengers for longer distances is now slightly more profitable
  
• Scouting has a slightly better chance now (but still not justifies keeping scouts, that will come with Hunting and Tasks only)
  
• Added a few new visual and sound effects for enemy characters
  

[h3]User Interface Improvements 📝[/h3]

• Throw-out window can now be manually triggered from the Cargo pane (to get rid of contraband, unwanted goods, etc.) 🗑️
  
• Goods tooltips improvements (now shows both Buy and Sell prices) ⚖️
  
• Panning on the Chart with keyboard arrows added 🗺️
  

[h3]Fixes 🛠️[/h3]

• A number of bugs causing all kinds of grief fixed (left some in so you can keep reporting them)
  
• Fixed the bug that prevented crew combat to come up during camping. Expect to be ambushed during the night more often. Finally! 💀
  

[h3]Coming Up Next 📈[/h3]

• Trade Tasks 📦
  
• Factions pane and Faction rewards 🛡️
  
• Hunting and Foraging 🏹
  
• ...
  
• More Sound Effects 🔊
  
• Companion Level Up and Progression ⏫