KickStarter Vagrus: The Riven Realms - post-apocalyptic fantasy caravan master RPG - now with Old Acquaintances DLC

[luj1]

What these devs don't understand is that "system-heavy" doesn't auto translate to "good"

 

[Sztaszov]

God I love this forum keep finding more awesome games. Where can I give you my money to buy this intriguing game?

Hey Chaosdwarf, we have a crowdfunding campaign running at fig.co/vagrus (the link includes our special $5 discount we offer to all our RPGCodex fans, in appreciation of all the support and valuable feedback we have been receiving here ).
Every Backer gets access to the current alpha build automatically via our Discord server. Look forward to seeing you there.

What these devs don't understand is that "system-heavy" doesn't auto translate to "good"

Hey luj1, fully agree that adding systems/complexity does not necessarily mean a game is gonna get better. One of the reasons we opted for sharing our early builds with our Backers was exactly to get their opinion on what works and what doesn't. Some mechanics may get scrapped, while for certain, others will be added based on our players' feedback. We have tweaked things more than once already based on what we learnt from them.

Also, just to be completely transparent here, we are first and foremost TTRPG players ('been playing on the setting of the Riven Realms for 25 years now), and only became indiedevs two years ago. Most of the game mechanics we implement are inspired by the setting itself. Many of them - admittedly - serve to help immersion rather than to add to the gameplay (if that makes sense). Like, delivering news between settlements have a very low impact on the gameplay but since it's one of the core purposes the caravans fill in on the wastelands of the Riven Realms, we added it. Some players will ignore the option, others will never smuggle contraband, but maybe they will do in their second or third playthrough.

In any case, we are bound to make mistakes but hopefully you guys will not shy away from calling them out so we can fix them in time.

 

[Infinitron]

 

[toro]

Coming 2020.

 

[Sztaszov]

SplatterCat playing the introductory story (Pilgrims of the Wasteland) of Vagrus


Open-world patch release scheduled for Q1 2020.

 

[Infinitron]

https://steamcommunity.com/games/909660/announcements/detail/2989758706133436269

Project Update - December 2019

Hey All,

it's been a long time since we posted a project update, and we have a number of important news to share so here we go!

Lost Pilgrims is 2 Years Old

It is hard to believe that we founded the studio two years ago - who would have thought that time was going to fly so quickly. We have achieved many things and learned a LOT about game development. We lived through highs and lows alike, but the most important thing is that we persevered. Just to give you an idea, here are a few highlights:

• Founded Lost Pilgrims in 2017 December
  
• Hired Szonja in March 2018
  
• Published the demo of Vagrus in December 2018
  
• Show-cased Vagrus for the first time in Dubrovnik in April 2019
  
• Since then we attended: DreamHack Summer (Sweden), PlayIT (Hungary), GameDevDaysGraz (Austria), and most recently AdventureX2019 (United Kingdom)
  
• Kicked off our crowdfunding campaign at Fig in May 2019, and since then raised over $50,000
  
• Our narrative designers have written close to 400 thousand words of story and lore
  
• Our graphic designers created hundreds of amazing art assets
  
• Nobo has written approximately 113 thousand lines of code
  
• We released six patches for Vagrus, the content and improvements of which our Fig Backers and Patrons can enjoy via the Discord library

It sounds quite exhausting even just to think of all the work that was involved. Therefore, a HUGE THANK YOU is definitely due to the team. So, what comes next?

Spoiler

Open World Patch Scheduled for Q1 2020

We worked really hard to get the first Open World region of the game ready by the end of 2019 but truth be told, we are not happy enough with the overall experience just yet. We did know that it would not be as tested and refined as the Pilgrims of the Wasteland story was (which is currently included in the available Alpha build) but wanted to reach a similar level of polish. Achieving that is going slower than expected, however. It is partly because even just this first region is over twice the size of Pilgrims - in terms of narrative and content -, and way more complex due to its open-world nature. Thus, reaching the same level of stability and gameplay experience has proven to be a task that needs more time and effort.

We want it to be a positive experience right away, so that even if players encounter bugs and incomplete features, the overall look and feel of the game would be very much to their liking. We want them to feel that the available content and gameplay holds so much potential that they just have to come back and play again, or better yet, tell their friends about it.

The Last Patch of 2019

One of features we have spent more time with than we had originally planned is Crew combat. We always wanted to have something like that but its overall importance increased significantly when we decided to give it a more prominent role in gameplay. The key trigger for that was the insights we received from our Alpha players: that while they liked the Companion combat look and feel for key moments, for the recurring bandit and Jhakra attacks they felt it was taking to long, keeping them away from progressing the story. Thus, we decided that those random encounters will mostly occur in the form of Crew combat but players who like the thrill of Companion combat will be able to switch to that (more on this in a future post).

That change in direction brought with it the need to design a system that allows for a more rapid progression of combat encounters, but one that players can still enjoy visually and that still presenting a fair challenge. We iterated the design many times, and finally came to something that we are happy with. That increased complexity, though, took its toll on our hours, and it is still not yet finished. However, we do want to share where it stands now so we are planning to release this first version of the crew combat in our next Open Access Fig patch still this year. Hopefully, people will like it and share ideas how to improve it further.

A big shout-out to Nowhere Prophet

Before we conclude this post here's a game we can wholeheartedly recommend you to try out. Nowhere Prophet is a roguelike deck-building game. It is set in a post-apocalyptic world inspired by indian culture and sci-fi literature. In this broken world you lead a desperate band of outcasts in their search for a safe, new home. With two new leaders added in it's recent patch it is definitely worth to check out.

In Conclusion

Hope you guys enjoyed this post with its mixed topics. As always, there are no words how much we appreciate your continued support. Happy Holidays to you, your families, and friends!

Gábor, Lost Pilgrim
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

 

[Infinitron]

 

[Lares Hill]

[Source: Steam Store Page]

In the meantime, Patch 0.4.9 went live mid-December and all the goodies it brought can be checked out below or in-game, of course! I hope you enjoy the fixes and additional features, we'll be back soon with more.

New Features

- MS 6: Crew Combat Alpha
- MS 14: Unrest and Obedience Mechanics (Partial delivery): Liberate or Discipline Slaves to
gain Obedience. Unrest will be added in a later update.
- Butcher beasts or mounts for supplies
- Warning triggers if an action would result in cargo loss

Here is a short video featuring the Crew Combat:

Additional milestones delivered that will only appear in the main campaign

- MS 10: Chart Exploration
- MS 11: Companion Select during Events
- MS 13: Hidden Stash and Smuggling Contraband

New / Updated Content or Game mechanics

- New sound effects for a number of creatures
- Camping without guards decreases Obedience
- Radial menu icons automatically pop up on the campaign map
- Node sizes increased for Point of Interests to better indicate them
- Goods tooltips now show more trade information
- Merged a few perks to make them more impactful

Fixes

- Passenger destinations are now generated correctly in new games (thanks for catching and reporting this!)! Old saves remain bugged.
- New Day save now works after combat encounters in the Fighting Pit event
- Cargo slot changes are now applied immediately
- Fixed tutorial pins for closing the Journal and the Codex
- Fixed a bug causing Companion conversation portraits to be empty
- Healing companions no longer triggers the incorrect Event result text
- Fixed the Journal entry order for The Black Knight chapter V, Eliminating the Abolitionist Camps
- Clicking on the Journal or Codex during "Hold space..." tutorial/narration is up now does not open them

Coming Up Next

- More Sound Effects
- Vagrus Creation for the Main Campaign
- Companion Combat tweaks and additions
- Factions UI
- Animations for all characters
...
- Open World Prototype

The Lost Pilgrims Team

 

[Infinitron]

 

[luj1]

Wow, they're really bringing new meaning to feature bloat. At this point they should make a 4X.

 

[Infinitron]

From last month: https://www.fig.co/campaigns/vagrus-the-riven-realms/updates/1147

Two Years Anniversary - New Milestones Added - New Build is OUT!
POSTED: 01/24/2020

The Story Behind the Patch
Lost Pilgrims is 2 Years Old
It is hard to believe that we founded the studio two years ago - who would have thought that time was going to fly so quickly? We have achieved many things and surely learned a LOT about game development in that time.

We lived through highs and lows alike, but the most the important thing is that we persevered. Just to give you an idea, here are a few highlights of the last 2 years:

• Founded Lost Pilgrims in 2017 December (with Nobo, Geri and Gabor at the time)
• Hired Szonja - our super-talented graphic designer in March 2018
• Published the demo of Vagrus in December 2018
• Show-cased Vagrus for the first time in Dubrovnik in April 2019
• Since then we attended: DreamHack Summer (Sweden), PlayIT (Hungary), GameDevDaysGraz (Austria), and most recently AdventureX2019 (United Kingdom)
• On those festivals the game received seven awards
• Kicked off our campaign here at Fig in May 2019, and since then raised over $55,000
• Our narrative designers have written close to 400 thousand words of story and lore
• Our graphic designers created hundreds of amazing art assets
• Nobo - our lead programmer - has written approximately 113 thousand lines of code
• We released six patches for Vagrus, the content and improvements of which Fig Backers can enjoy via the Discord library

It feels quite exhausting even just to think of all the work that was involved. Therefore, a HUGE THANK YOU is definitely due to the team. So what comes next?

Spoiler

New Milestones Added
Thanks to all your pledges and efforts to spread the world about Vagrus, our campaign has reached $55,000, which allowed us to map out the next batch of milestones for our journey.

• Milestone 16 — New Feature: Vagrus Creation
• Milestone 17 — New Feature: Manual Save Option
• Milestone 18 — Feature Update: Companion Combat AI improvements

Read more about them on our Vagrus Roadmap. Huge thank you to all of YOU for supporting us to create a game of this complexity and depth!

Special thanks to SplatterCat for his terrific impression video setting the new record for a Vagrus Youtube let's play with close to 70,000 views (as of Jan 24, 2020).



So What's New in this Open Access Build?
Milestone 6: Crew Combat Alpha
It was a long and difficult haul but as we are writing this, the new Crew Combat feature (in which you can have the whole comitatus fight against a more numerous foe) has been added to the game. To 'Pilgrims of the Wasteland', too, so you can run into all kinds of trouble while out among the dunes of Arenas Vorax in the latter part of the scenario.

The video below is a little peek into how Crew Combat works. At first, you can - as the attacker here - set what you wish to accomplish by assaulting the foe. Then a 3-round fight commences where you can decide which type of your crew and which companions fight. You can see the chances of a successful round above between the current Combat Strength of each side, and the casualties after each round are allocated based on that roll. Later on, we'll be adding special actions that you can perform each round to bolster your chances.

Let us know what you think of Crew Combat as you take 'Pilgrims of the Wasteland' for another spin!



Milestone 14: Unrest and Obedience Mechanics (Partial Delivery)
Obedience is a stat describing how disciplined (or disgruntled) the slaves owned by the comitatus are at a given time. It was implemented to give a rather fluid drawback to owning slaves: they might provide a free workforce but keeping men and women enslaved does have its risks even if it is 'part of the system'. You typically lose Obedience if you do not guard your slaves well enough (too few fighters to look after them), if you get or buy a lot of new slaves, if you do not feed them enough, if you arm them in Crew Combat, or keep choosing options in Events that endanger or embolden them.

With a high Obedience, your slaves over-perform and you can end up with some small surprise Events (with a positive outcome). This is in addition to the fact that you won't get a headache thinking about what can go wrong. Low Obedience is where it all goes from bad to worse. Slaves start to steal, escape their bonds, or even commit more serious crimes. You can try to punish all the slaves in this case in the hopes of raising Obedience but it can backfire.

So how can you keep slaves in check? Well, a thoughtful vagrus might consider liberating slaves from time to time, which raises the Obedience of others to a great extent - if there is a chance of becoming free, they will work more diligently towards it. Nevertheless, it is a very expensive route to take, as slaves cost a lot of coin. Then there is the Deputy role of Slavemaster who allow punishing unruly slaves more reliably, making a critically low score very unlikely. Some equipment also has similar effects. Additionally, certain Events can positively affect Obedience and it behooves you to pay attention to those.

A Bundle of Smaller Milestones Implemented
We realize that detailing all milestones here in this post would just make it impossibly long. So we'll just leave you the link to a summary post we published on Steam, and so anyone interested can still delve in (here) while the others can reach the Patch Notes section without further ado.





PATCH NOTES v0.4.9
New Features

• MS 6: Crew Combat Alpha ️
• MS 14: Unrest and Obedience Mechanics (Partial delivery)
  • Liberate or Discipline Slaves to gain Obedience
  • Unrest will be added in a later update
• Butcher beasts for supplies
• Warning triggers if an action would result in cargo loss

Additional Milestones that only Appear in the Main Campaign ️
You may find the summary post about these features: here.

• MS 10: Chart Exploration ️ (See video here)
• MS 11: Companion Select during Events ‍ (See video here)
• MS 13: Hidden Stash and Smuggling Contraband (See video here)

New / Updated Content or Game mechanics

• New sound effects for a number of creatures
• Camping without guards decreases Obedience
• Radial menu icons automatically pop up on the campaign map
• Node sizes increased for Point of Interests to better indicate them
• Goods tooltips now shows more trade information
• Merged a few perks to make them more impactful

Fixes ️

• Passenger destinations are now generated correctly in new games - thanks for catching and reporting this! (Old saves remain bugged. ‍)
• New Day save works after combat encounters in the Fighting Pit event
• Cargo slot changes are now applied immediately
• Fixed tutorial pins for closing the Journal and the Codex
• Fixed a bug causing Companion conversation portraits to be empty
• Healing companions no longer triggers the incorrect Event result text
• Fixed the Journal entry order for The Black Knight chapter V, Eliminating the Abolitionist Camps
• Clicking on the Journal or Codex while "Hold space..." tutorial/narration is up now does not open them

Coming Up Next

• More Sound Effects
• Vagrus Creation for the Main Campaign
• Manual Save option
• Companion Combat tweaks and additions
• Animations for all characters
• ...
• Open World Prototype

 

[Lares Hill]

[Source: Steam Store Page]

One of the last big additions to Vagrus' Open World Campaign that is now coming very close to being released is the character creation sequence at the start of the game. That is the feature that allows you to customize and set up your own vagrus by selecting a variety of options in subsequent steps. To give a quick idea of the many amazing options, here's a little rundown:

Race

The first such choice is Race. The Riven Realms is home to a lot of unusual creatures - some may be found in other fantasy games though probably quite different from their counterparts on Xeryn - while others are quite unique. Initially, you will be able to choose from six Races and we'll be adding new ones later on.

Background

Another way to spice things up a bit is character background. These are former professions or occupations (for example, aristocrat, veteran, criminal, scholar, or priest) and they provide additional Perks and resources to your character. Of course, not all combinations are possible - you won't see an Orc Slaver, nor an Imperial Savage.

Calling

Trader, Mercenary, or Explorer. Though there are only three options here, this choice has a much greater impact on your starting crew, Leadership Perks, and some other stats. You are by no means locked in such a game-style later on, however, as character progression for your vagrus is very open-ended.

Ambition

This choice sets your victory condition for the game. Initially, you will only be able to start freeplay (no victory condition) but later on you'll be able to choose from Wealth (you win by becoming rich), Knowledge (you win by learning everything possible from the Riven Realms), Renown (become well-known), and finally - towards the end of the dev cycle - a story-based Ambition.

Perks

With all starting Perks calculated (deriving from Race and Background), you will now be able to spend your starting Insight on rounding out your character further.

Customization

At the end of character creation, you will be able to customize your character by giving it a name and selecting a portrait (later on also a banner to represent your comitatus).

A big shout-out to Rising Lords

Before we conclude this post here's a game we can wholeheartedly recommend you to wishlist here on Steam! Rising Lords is a medieval turn-based strategy game with card and board game elements. Send your serfs to fight and die in your name... or let them prosper, and use them to your advantage!

Wishlist it to get reminded about Rising Lords' release on 29.05.2020.

The Lost Pilgrims Team

 

[Grotesque]

I just found out about this game
When is it coming out?

Wow, they're really bringing new meaning to feature bloat. At this point they should make a 4X.

Stay true to your vision devs!
And bring as much as "feature bloat" as possible.

 

[Sztaszov]

I just found out about this game
When is it coming out?

Wow, they're really bringing new meaning to feature bloat. At this point they should make a 4X.

Stay true to your vision devs!
And bring as much as "feature bloat" as possible.

Thanks a lot Grotesque! Appreciate the supporting words.
The game is currently in Open Access which means all our crowdfunding backers get immediate access to its alpha version. In fact we just opened up the Open-world prototype to our Backers to test it. The final release of the game is further out in the future, no set date yet.
Hope this helps. Cheers!

 

[Lares Hill]

[Source: Steam Store Page]

Huge Announcement!

The Open-World Prototype of Vagrus has been released to all our Fig Backers. It is a major step towards getting the game ready to eventually bring it to here on to Steam for all of you to enjoy.

What It Brings

A ton of stuff, really. This is the game we've been working on, compared to which 'Pilgrims of the Wasteland' was only a small appetizer. That said, this large segment is only the beginning, and areas (with their content) will be added later on at intervals. We have discussed this an other details of the Open World Campaign here.

In short, a gigantic area with

• dozens of settlements and points of interest to explore,
  
• six Companions,
  
• over 20 new enemy types,
  
• five new soundtracks,
  
• character creation,

and a ton of story content for you to discover are coming in the build.

We are very excited to see and hear your reactions, how long it takes you to find all the content, and of course to find out how difficult it is to stay alive for players in the cruel wastelands of the Riven Realms.

See you soon on the dark continent!

The Lost Pilgrims

 

[Lares Hill]

[Source: Steam Store Page]

The Riven Realms has been around for over two decades now for us who created it for our tabletop campaigns, and the setting has quite a lot of currencies, even if one only considers the continent of Xeryn. When we set out to develop Vagrus, we picked three coin types not to overcrowd the UI: the Lyrg, a copper coin; the Bross, a silver coin; and Draka, a rare and very valuable golden coin. These are all coins that are used fairly often in large-scale commerce on the continent, and they are also fairly easy to identify as the copper-silver-gold trio of currency is fairly common in historical and fantasy settings.

Problems arose soon from the fact that a lot of common, everyday things are bought and sold for a smaller currency called Changers. For example, food for a day typically goes for around 2-3 Changers, or the daily wages of a worker are also typically around that sum. However, we had no Changers, so we implemented Supplies to represent 10 points of Consumption each. Individual crew wages were raised to 1 Lyrg - the absolute minimum - but this started an internal inflation that led to the rise of a lot of goods and services to make ratios match the world and to allow vagri to earn enough to pay upkeep. Unfortunately, this led to a situation where Drakas became very common, even in the beginning of the game, which in the metal-starved world of the Riven Realms goes against the lore and atmosphere, eroding immersion.

Recently, us Lost Pilgrims decided that Changers have to make a return, and they have to do so before the Open World campaign launches (otherwise the change would mess with saved games later).

At first, you might think this is a simple decimal shift, but it sent ripples out that shook most areas of the game in one way or another.

On the technical side:

Code had Lyrg/Bross/Draka hard-burned in several places, which had to be altered.
Our databases, however, store prices as numbers only, so it was fairly straightforward to have prices shift (for example, if something used to cost 1 Draka, 2 Bross, and 5 Lyrg, now automatically costs 1 Bross, 2 Lyrg, and 5 Changers).
On the design side, things were looking much more complicated:

• The silver trading goods used to cost one or more Drakas per unit, but now only cost one or more Bross, so we had to make them more expensive (it did not make sense in world or any other way to have a bar of silver cost a few silver coins). This of course inflated the prices of all metals further, including Scrap Metal, which you know very well from Pilgrims of the Wasteland. This caused further changes in that prologue section because now you have no funds to buy the metal for the main quest.

• Naturally, making metallic trading goods more expensive resulted in all gear, equipment, and items becoming more expensive, too. We'll have to tweak these prices as we go on.

• Now that we have Changers to work with, we could de-scale the Supplies-Consumption situation explained above and eliminate the decimal multiplication. One Supply is now indeed one meal, which equals one Consumption. However, this causes Supply goods stacks to now be much less effective, so we are raising the number of Supply goods in one stack significantly to make up for the multiplication loss.

• Then there is the question of Drakas, that are now effectively eliminated from the game. It is not a problem from a lore perspective, because gold is indeed very rare and mostly only extremely rich people see them with any kind of regularity. Now that said, your vagrus may indeed become such a person in the game, so we will probably add Drakas in some form or another later on.

Overall, we are happy that we went with the change (of Changers, heh...) despite the added work, especially because it would have been much more problematic later on. Additionally, our tabletop RPG souls are now at rest that the setting and the game are not at odds.

The Lost Pilgrims

 

[Lares Hill]

[Source: Steam Store Page]

A Huge 'Thank You!'

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.

So What's in the Current Patch?

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.

What's coming next? We listened to You

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!

PATCH NOTES v0.5.04

New Features

• 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

New / Updated Content or Game Mechanics

• 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

User Interface Improvements

• 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 ️

Fixes ️

• 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!

Coming Up Next

• Trade Tasks
  
• Factions pane and Faction rewards ️
  
• Hunting and Foraging
  
• ...
  
• More Sound Effects
  
• Companion Level Up and Progression

 

[Infinitron]

Short trailer for the new open world build:

 

[Whisper]

Is this game good? When it is released in Steam?

 

[Sztaszov]

Is this game good? When it is released in Steam?

Hey Whisper,
We might enter Early Access on Steam and GoG this summer. Final release is further out.

I am obviously impartial about the game, so gonna leave it to the others to comment on that part.

You may want to try the - somewhat outdated - demo available on our discord server. Though, that does not have the Open-world part in it.

Cheers

 

[Whisper]

Is this game good? When it is released in Steam?

Hey Whisper,
We might enter Early Access on Steam and GoG this summer. Final release is further out.

I am obviously impartial about the game, so gonna leave it to the others to comment on that part.

You may want to try the - somewhat outdated - demo available on our discord server. Though, that does not have the Open-world part in it.

Cheers

Sadly, i am not FIG backer.

I've just learned recently from Vault Dweller (Iron Tower Studio. He recommended it. Must be good.

When is final release planned?

 

[Sztaszov]

Sadly, i am not FIG backer.

Well, you can change that at any time. As opposed to traditional crowdfunding campaigns ours is open-ended = still open. So you may still Back it and get instant access to the alpha via Discord, then at the time of the final release pick your game key for the platform of your choice (Steam/GoG/etc.) [campaign link]

I've just learned recently from Vault Dweller (Iron Tower Studio. He recommended it. Must be good.

Aye, Vince is superb guy, and what he created with Age of Decanded is immensely inspiring. Their new creation Colony Ship has just released a demo on Steam and we can wholeheartedly recommend giving it a go to everyone.

When is final release planned?

It mostly depends on how far we go. While the current alpha has about 50 hrs of playable content already, we just feel there are so many stories we want to tell, features to add, etc., and player have been demanding more too. As Q4 is all about AAA games our final release might slip to 2021. Will see.

 

[Lares Hill]

[Source: Steam Store Page]

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

 

[Infinitron]

 

[LESS T_T]

This also gets a demo as a prologue app.