Vagrus: The Riven Realms – Settlement and Crew UI Update

Lost Pilgrims Studio brings us this new developer blog for their post-apocalyptic fantasy RPG Vagrus: The Riven Realms that primarily focuses on the game’s recently-overhauled settlement and crew UI. In short, the game should now look prettier and be more intuitive to navigate.

And here’s more on that:

This week’s devlog post is about the shiny new User Interfaces for settlements and crew.

Settlements

There are a large number of settlements (cities, towns, villages, outposts, encampments) that you can visit in Vagrus, all of them unique locations even though they share some characteristics and features. For a long while now, we have planned a rework for the original UI – as we usually do with all UI elements, really.

The most apparent change is that we did away with the tabs on the side and introduced buttons on top that now match other UI elements (but kept the stack of papers design that everyone knows). This allowed us to fill out the larger available space and show more on one screen.

The Stories pane now also has hover effects (in the same way as the Event choices) and numbering, so you can use the keyboard to select from the available stories. There have been other changes in the background, too, like the subtle substitution of a better-quality parchment under all of it, or tweaks to scrolling, among other things. With all these, we feel that the settlement UI has become more user-friendly and intuitive with some QoL elements you can personalize in the menus. We hope you’ll like it!

Reworked Crew UI

In the long line of UI reworks, our next stop is the crew UI where all the panes will now receive a lot of changes and upgrades. We planned to make these changes earlier but the design was in motion all the time – with new stats and mechanics being added – and so other things were completed and added before these in the end. And so now, so close to 1.0, we finally got around to implement the new crew UI.

Apart from tweaking the visuals, there were technical considerations as well. Most importantly, we had to have UI elements on a single paper instead of four overlaid ones, with buttons switching between different contents of the page. This is not only more efficient with resources but also solves issues with the overlaid pages getting stuck, leading to soft-locks, which had us blocking this UI during settlement resting. The redesign solves this issue at last. Additionally, the buttons on top now share the same design as on other UI panes, resulting in a more unified look, which boosts usability.

The most spectacular changes appear on the Crew Pane since new stats were added to the display here. Among these is the workforce requirement and production of crew members, as well as their Combat Strength and Defense scores, along with the usual Upkeep and Consumption values. The same is true for Passengers, too, making it clearer when some of them pay with work beside coins.

The other vastly reworked part is the Companion Perk sheet. The formerly tiny and crowded Perk pane now opens onto the larger sheet and is thus easier to see and navigate. We love this new, clean design and we hope that it’ll be well-received.

As ever, we are grateful for the continued support – this game would not have been possible without you, the players.

Stay tuned and conquer the wasteland!
The Lost Pilgrims Team