The Girl from Arkanya | A pixel art treasure hunting RPG

The return of Arkanya KS Updates
16 days ago – Tue, Feb 04, 2025 at 08:30:18 AM

Hey guys! It's been awhile, huh? Though development on Arkanya has been ongoing this entire time, there hasn't been any actual announcements to make since our last update, and things have been a little difficult on our end. 

However, despite the difficulties, we're currently 5-6 weeks from finishing internal development. Meaning that's the point where we'll hand the full game off for final QA and console porting. I planned to wait until that time to do a huge update along with something of a post-mortem, but I was asked by our publisher to start making regular updates again. So I will do my best to keep you all in the loop from here on.

First, many of you may remember that we had previously estimated finishing development in the first half of last year. It's hard to explain exactly what happened there, but please know that we did our best to achieve that. Things simply did not go our way. That, and I probably overestimated what we were capable of in that time. Keep in mind that we are creating a game larger than Minish Cap in many ways, with only a single full-time developer and two others who have extremely limited time to offer, and a small budget that ran out years ago. With that in mind, I hope you will forgive us for failing to meet our previous time targets. 

So now I'm telling you we're roughly 6 weeks from finishing development, but why would you believe that when all of my other estimates have been wrong? Seems like a fair question. Fortunately, as those of you who follow our social media know, I've been publicly tracking my progress towards completion for the last two months. So let's look at how things have been moving along recently. 

First, here's where we were in early December:

And then this is what we were looking like at the beginning of the year:

And finally here's where we're standing today:

The final three cutscenes are going to be a bit heavy but typically a big cutscene takes the better part of one work day, so these might take up to two work days each on the longer end. We can expect all of these to be completed by next week. 

Once those are done, the only content left is mainly filling in various npc dialogues and side quests. There are also many bugs with co-op that must be addressed. Maybe I can start adding a bug counter to the checklist releases since there's a lot of space freed up on there now? I'll have to think about it though, because seeing the bug number go up (by a lot) sometimes might freak out people who don't know a ton about game dev.

Once all of this is complete, the game will be passed off to our publisher for quality assurance and console porting. At this time, there is no concrete timeline for how long that part will take. However, what I would like to do at that time is give everyone who purchased the game access to the Steam beta, regardless of what platform they purchased the game for. This beta will include the full game, and should remain available until the console versions go live. Unless I get told that's not allowed, that's the current plan going forward.

With all that out of the way, it wouldn't be much of a KS update without some game content. So readers beware, many gameplay spoilers lurk below. No story spoilers though!

There may still be some minor changes to the abilities showcased in the video. For example, I have often gotten feedback that the Solar Dance attack is too small. While recording this video, I REALLY felt that. Unfortunately, increasing the size involves re-drawing the sprites, so it hasn't been updated yet. However you can look forward to the improved version in the final game. 

Let's plan for another Kickstarter update roughly 3 weeks from now, so I can show you all the finished checklist and tell you how bug fixes are going. 

One final thing, I would like to share some fan art with you, both old and new. DakotaDraws has created a sequel to his "WHAM" art, depicting the beginning of The Girl from Arkanya.

The original:

The sequel:

Also by DakotaDraws, we have an ominous encounter with the Kurupira

Thanks everyone, and I'll see you all next time

-Bean 

Major issue with the demo - Now resolved! (I'M SO SORRY ;_;)
7 months ago – Tue, Jul 30, 2024 at 01:04:15 PM

Yesterday, when we released our new Demo, the version which was released was an older build - Approximately 2 weeks old - which was not meant to be given to players. It has since been replaced with the proper build, which you can get by updating the game.

For anyone who experienced issues with the demo or was not able to have the best demo experience due to this mistake, I sincerely apologize. I am absolutely kicking myself for the oversight.

For those of you who already played the demo but would like to experience a better version of it, today's update included the following changes:

-Better stability for Co-Op play
-All placeholder dialogue now correctly replaced with real dialogue
-General balancing changes to gameplay
-Additional side quest which streamlines the process of obtaining sword upgrades
-Side quests for the library and the museum
-A variety of minor bug fixes

Thank you all for your patience and understanding.
-BeanBandit, Arkanya Dev

Demo and trailer are live NOW!
7 months ago – Mon, Jul 29, 2024 at 11:25:48 AM

You remember what today is, right?

PixElated Festival is live, which means so is our demo! You can download it from Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1447820/The_Girl_from_Arkanya/ 

And of course we also have our new trailer:

If you're not already in our discord server, I highly encourage joining! We have channels for providing feedback and reporting bugs, which I hope you'll use while/after you play the demo!

If you absolutely do not want to join our discord, but you'd still like to ask questions or give feedback, feel free to comment on this update. I'll be checking the comments periodically throughout the week and responding as much as I can.

While you're on our Steam page, I know you all already purchased the game during the Kickstarter campaign many years ago, but please please PLEASE wishlist Arkanya on Steam if you haven't. If you haven't heard, the number of wishlists a game has is very important for success on launch day. The more wishlists we have, the more likely it is that Steam will show our game on the Recommended tab. 

If you won't have time to play the demo this week, but you'd still like to play it at some point, go ahead and download it now! I still don't fully know when we're taking it down, but if you already have it, you'll still be able to play it even if/when we do take it down. So get it while you can!

Lastly, just FYI, if you chose a console version when you backed the game, but you have a PC, you are still able to get the Steam demo. In fact, anyone can get the Steam demo, regardless of if they're a backer or not. Also, while we do not officially support the Steam Deck yet, some users have played Arkanya on Steam Deck and said it worked well for them. 

Thank you all and please enjoy!

-BeanBandit, Arkanya dev

Demo and new trailer releasing on July 29th!
7 months ago – Thu, Jul 25, 2024 at 04:10:56 PM

Hello again, everyone! Please accept my apology for my long absence from Kickstarter. I'm sure a lot of you are wondering what happened, and what the state of the project is now. I will be covering both of those things further down, so please bear with me while I do a few important announcements. 

PixElated Steam Festival + Arkanya Demo

The Girl from Arkanya will be participating in the PixElated Steam Festival! This will include a new trailer we've never shown before, as well as a free demo on Steam! 

PixElated Festival is a Steam event hosted by Brave At Night, the developers of Yes, Your Grace and Mind Scanners. The event will last for one week, and include discounts and demos for over 100 Adventure/RPG pixel art games.

We were lucky enough to be selected, and we're very excited to participate in our first official Steam event!

While the festival ends on August 5th, we intend to keep the demo available beyond that date. How long? No idea. Maybe until the game releases.  We're planning on participating in Next Fest in October so at least until then. 

Our demo will include local multiplayer, so bring a friend!

In order to access co-op, you must first complete the tutorial. This means playing all the way up to where Marisa meets Kapi. I wish I could go back in time and re-write the story so this wasn't necessary, but that ship sailed long ago >.<

Because of this, Player 2 will need to wait patiently for about 10-15 minutes at the beginning of the game, before jumping into the action. Otherwise, you will be given this message:

Co-op activation has been moved to a new menu, but it's pretty easy to find. Simply open the Inventory Screen, then navigate one menu to the left to reach the new Options Menu

I had recorded a short video to show you this process, but then I remembered that Kickstarter no longer allows me to add videos to these! I hate it here sometimes.

As mentioned before, we'll also be releasing a new trailer on both Steam and Youtube to go along with the event! So please watch it!

I will be sending you all another update on the 29th with links to both the demo and the trailer, along with some additional info. 

The demo includes all content available up to the end of Dungeon 1. Expect to spend 1-2 hours playing it (though I've seen one absolute lunatic complete it in 24 minutes!)

You are both allowed and encouraged to share footage/screenshots from your sessions.

Ova Magica has released on Steam!

For those who aren't aware yet, I've spent the last year and a half helping develop the "Stardew Valley meets Pokemon" faming sim Ova Magica! Well, I'm very excited to announce that the game is out now!

Don't let the Early Access tag fool you: Ova Magica is a polished game with a ton of depth!

In Ova Magica, you can:

• Build your very own farm from the ground up, with a fun and intuitive editor
• Collect, breed, and train your blob companions, with 66 base blobs and tens of thousands of possible breeding combinations
• Befriend and romance 13 unique characters, each with their own in-depth stories and unlockable gameplay elements
• Take your befriended characters on adventures with you in the Blob Worlds! Fight challenging bosses together, solve puzzles, and find valuable treasure
• Engage in blob battles with wild blobs or any NPC, using Ova Magica's Active Time Battle system inspired by games like Pokemon and Final Fantasy
• Use up to 3 blobs at once to take down stronger foes
• Find and unlock hundreds of collectable items, blueprints, outfits, and more!
• Participate in weekly festivals, each with its own unique mini-game
• Enter the Blob League, and become the Clover Cup Champion!

I have been spending all of my free time this week building my farm, raising blob companions, and going on treasure hunts in Ova Magica. While most of the credit for this gem of a game goes to ClaudiaTheDev, the mastermind behind it all, I am tremendously proud of the wonderful stories it allowed me to tell. 

I have grown to love this cast of characters so much, and it brings me so much joy to write about their daily lives. But it's not over yet! We have a lot more stories to tell, and so many more features we want to add to this game! So my request for you is this: 

Please take a look at this amazing game, and consider playing it so I can keep telling their stories!

Here's a look at what future updates will bring to Ova Magica:

If all of that sounds interesting to you, please visit the Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1299170/Ova_Magica/

I know you're all here for Arkanya news, but thank you for letting me share my other work with you. I am so grateful that Claudia hired me to work on this game, and I really do believe it's one of the best cozy farming games you'll ever see. 

Art Book update

Though its been difficult due to lack of funding, Kale has been quietly chipping away at the Kickstarter backer rewards while we've been finalizing the game. One of the things I asked her to do was to create a unique cover for the art book, so that it wasnt just a copy of the game box. Here's a mock-up she recently sent me:

This is going to look so wonderful when it's done! This is also the first ever official art of Rafael, seen on the far right.

We debated for awhile on who would be on the cover, but I think these four are really the heart and soul of the game, so I wanted a picture of them all together. From left to right, it's Katarina, Kapi, Marisa, and Rafael.

Kale would like me to remind you that this is very much still a work in progress, so please don't worry about the details for now! 

Kale has also been making some Arkanya-themed Twitch Emotes, just for fun. Could these become stickers in the future? Depends if you guys like them!

Kloe:

Kurupira:

Katarina (WIP):

And lastly for Kale's stuff, we have a chibi Katarina that she made just for funsies:

I also want to quickly shout out our good friend and fellow indie game dev Abnermtj (Abnermtj | Chronellium (@Abnerjr19) / X) who did some amazing fan art of Marisa recently

Arkanya art is just about my favorite thing in the world, so thank you all for letting me share it with you!

Why were there no updates these last few months?

I am under multiple NDAs at this point, but I'm gonna be as transparent as I can without getting my butt sued or fired.

So it's been a combination of a few things. Firstly, I've had a million things going on between finishing Arkanya, getting EA-required scripts done for Ova Magica, and trying to keep my bills paid with freelance work so we can continue development on The Girl from Arkanya

Then, the couple of times I actually had time to sit down and write an update, I always got stuck on what to actually say. There just wasn't any official news, and unfortunately I can't always publicly share what's going on behind the scenes. Even if I could, the plans always change so many times before we officially announce them, so telling you guys plans that aren't finalized would probably just cause confusion.

I kept hoping we'd have a release date nailed down soon and be ready to announce it or at least hint at it, but we're still figuring that out with our publisher. And unfortunately, that's more complicated than you might think it would be. Definitely more complicated than I expected. A bad release can absolutely kill a game's success, so we have to get this right. I spent too many years grinding away at this project to fumble it at the finish line.

So what's the status of the game now?

We're still working on the final dungeon, basically. The last boss of the game is definitely the most ambitious one I've ever attempted (although the Stormwitch was pretty crazy too) But I'm also working on it with years of experience under my belt now. So I would say it's going well. It has been very slow, however, because at the same time I have been debugging the absolute heck out of the multiplayer mode, to make sure that you can all experience couch co-op during out demo next week. 

There's also been just a massive amount of polishing work going into the game lately. I've been working on implementing changes that will help prepare the game both for porting to consoles, as well as localization into other languages. We want Arkanya to be available and accessible to as many people as possible, but some of the decisions I made early on were getting in the way of that goal. Mostly bad programming. So a lot of time has been dedicated to fixing these things. 

Some of you are probably gonna remind me that I said last time I thought the game might be completed around April or May. If you're wondering why that wasn't the case, well the first reason would be that it was a fairly optimistic estimate. Game dev almost always takes longer than you think it will (and then some), and internally we were already talking about it possibly going longer back then. Perhaps I should have never thrown out that April estimate? But I like to tell you guys what I'm thinking, even if I end up being wrong. 

The other reason is that priorities changed along the way. Originally I thought we would have the game "finished" in April or May, then go back and start polishing from there while we waited for a release window. However, there was a change of plans when it was decided that we would start applying to participate in Steam festivals, to help promote the game. If you're going to release a demo and say "hey guys, look how great our game is! Please wishlist it!" then it better actually be great. So rather than working on the end of the game, my focus shifted to making sure every part of the game felt good, ran well, and made sense. That never seems like its gonna be a ton of work at first, but it sneaks up on you quick!

Wrapping up

Okay, so I was hoping to show you guys some gameplay footage today, but I had forgotten that Kickstarter no longer allows me to upload videos directly to this page. Which means I probably need to start making Youtube videos, or cutting the footage down to gif-size. I still have some things to do to get ready for the 29th though, so I'm going to cut this off here with the promise that I'll be back soon. Expect to hear from me on the 29th, and then again at the end of the PixElated Festival. Updates will become more frequent going forward, so please look forward to that. 

If you've stuck with me to the end of this update (and through this entire project so far) then thank you so very much. Your support means the world to me.

Thanks for reading and I'll see you all next week!

-BeanBandit, Arkanya dev

January Update: Crunch Time Edition
about 1 year ago – Fri, Jan 26, 2024 at 12:34:17 PM

Woah, the Kickstarter text editor got an update! That's insane, I hope it doesn't crash every 10 minutes anymore!

Hi guys! It’s been quite awhile since there’s been a Kickstarter update, huh? Normally this is where I’d say “This will be an extra long one!” but… It won’t be. I’m actually going to try to keep this super short because the long Kickstarter Updates tend to take a full work day, and I just don’t have a full work day to give right now.

It's crunch time, my dudes! I wanna get this game done! 

The Girl from Arkanya is super close to being finished and I’m working around the clock to be finished, so that I can get an official release date from our publisher, and then I can announce that to you guys. 

The current timeline has the game finished in April, and I’m still reasonably confident about that. If not April, then very close to it. Until that time though, Kickstarter updates are going to come out when necessary, rather than as a periodic thing. If you’re worried that the project is “dead” (we’ve gotten a few comments to that effect), I strongly encourage you tofollow our twitter or join our discord. I post Arkanya content on twitter 3-4 times a week, and I’m active in our discord server every single day. Not to mention, if you send us confirmation of your Kickstarter pledge on discord, you’ll be able to play the game long before the official release.

So, very quickly, let’s go over what’s new with the game since November! 

First off, HUGE change: Dropping treasure on death has been REMOVED COMPLETELY

(Side note: When I was originally writing this, I forgot that this video also shows the new Personal Storage chest, which is available in any room Marisa owns/rents. All personal storage chests are connected across the world)

(Second side note: Kickstarter has removed my ability to add videos directly to the post, so all of today's media is gonna be posted on twitter and in the future I'll probably move to a youtube format)

Why did this happen? Well, its become obvious recently that the game’s economy was balanced around players never dying. What that means is that, on average, the amount of treasure you got while progressing through the game was roughly the amount you -needed- for each part of the game. So imagine you go open every treasure chest in an overworld zone, and then die on your way back to town. That treasure is gone, and you won’t have the chance to loot those chests again for at least an hour.

Since most of the player upgrades and consumables require money in one way or another, what this meant was that players who can afford the upgrades don’t really need them, and the players who need them can’t afford them. And not one time during any testing have I ever seen a player stop mid-way through a dungeon and go sell their treasure, so we weren’t even getting the desired behavioral outcome. 

In the end, treasure loss was a brutal, un-fun punishment for lower skill players, while higher skill players barely remembered it existed. And so the logical choice seemed to be removing it.

Finally, from a thematic perspective, Marisa is meant to be bold and brave. Worrying about losing your inventory is not something she would ever do in the face of danger.

Next up for quality-of-life changes, I’m currently working on a fast-travel system! No video of that yet but here’s some screenshots.

These Moonstones can be found in many locations around the jungle, and once they’ve been activated, you can travel between any two which are active. Using them is as simple as walking up to the stone and performing Ari’s Lunar Dance.

I was very hesitant to add this feature for most of the game’s development, but things got to a point where it was either that, or prepare to have the game be called a walking simulator. The game map is probably bigger than it should be, and many quests require you to travel back and forth to the same location multiple times. This was the least painful option.

Some of you will probably worry about this taking exploration out of the game. I worried about that too. But eventually I decided that it actually might HELP exploration. Arkanya was designed with lots of backtracking in mind. When you get a new power, you’re supposed to return to all the places you’ve already been to see if you can do anything new. For example, the tutorial area has content that can’t be completed until almost the end of the game! So you’ll want to return there often.

But I think a lot of players would have gone “I’m not going back there, it’s too far away!” and they’d never see that content. With Moonstone travel, you can return to any place you’ve been before within just a couple minutes. I hope this makes you more inclined to revisit those old places.
 

So you’d probably think that would be the biggest change to the game in the last 2 months, right? 

Hahaha

No.

Some of the designs for Shaman Dance abilities were either redundant or just didn’t play well with the overall combat philosophy. Believe it or not, the easiest solution was to give Marisa and Kapi new special attacks, and rework the Shaman Dances to modify those attacks. 

So now, for example, the Sun Dance doesn’t keep your sword on fire all the time. Instead, your Special Attack becomes a fiery spin!

Similarly, the Wind Dance causes your Special Attack to launch a gust of wind, which damages enemies repeatedly as it passes through them. It also puts out fires!

The Fire, Water, Wind, Earth, Storm, and Frost dances all have effects modifying the Special Attack now.

The Lunar Dance remains unchanged.

But wait, there’s more! Marisa and Kapi now have Combo Points that they build up with their normal attacks. Every 3 normal attacks, you now get a free Special Attack. This means that the energy cost is 0 for the next use of the Special Attack!

But you have to use it quickly, because your combo points disappear if you don’t do any attacks for 3 seconds.

That’s all I’ve got time for right now. Please don’t hesitate to tag us on twitter @ArkanyaGame or contact me @BeanBandit on the Arkanya Discord server. I’m always happy to answer any question that I’m allowed to answer. 

Kickstarter has made it harder to put videos in these posts, which means my little 30-second clips I usually like to share with you guys are now difficult to do. I'm debating how I want to handle that in the future, and I'm leaning towards making longer compilations on youtube and simply sharing those. I have an okay-ish streaming setup that I never use anymore, might be time to dust that off again.

Before I go, here’s some cool fan art from DakotaDraws! I find it both bizarre and adventurous…

Thank you all for your support! Until next time!