January Update: Crunch Time Edition
3 months 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!

October Update: How we're progressing, and where the finish line is
6 months ago – Mon, Oct 30, 2023 at 02:01:17 AM

Good news, everyone! We're kinda close to being finished!

Relatively speaking, anyway. Since we get asked about it a lot, today lets focus less on what's done and more on what isn't done.

We're somewhat close to what you might call a "release candidate" which you could think of as meaning we theoretically -could- release it, and it would be a full game, but it's not quite as good as it should be. There's still a solid chunk of the last few hours of the game which needs to be fleshed out, so we're not there yet, but it feels like we're awfully close.

Here, maybe the updated progress chart will explain it better.

Story Implementation

First big change, all the story dialogue is now written and a lot more of it is implemented either as conversations or cutscenes. No more blue squares on the chart! 

Making cutscenes is a little slow and there's quite a few left but I can make about 2 of them on a good day.  So those aren't the biggest obstacle by any means. 

Some of the non-implemented cutscenes are waiting on special assets though, such as our newly completed giant capybara inconveniently blocking the path you need to take. 

No, you can't just climb over him. This is a video game after all. Anything above knee-height is an insurmountable obstacle. 

Special thanks to our friend and long-time supporter Dakota Dean who stepped up to take care of some our remaining art needs that I either couldn't do as well as I'd have liked, or was running out of time to do.  The big capybara up there was his first work to be implemented in-game.

He also did our Halloween art this year!

It's Captain Rafael and Princess Katarina dressed as... well, a pirate and a princess! They're not the most creative Trick or Treaters. But Marisa's got candy and they want it!

Character Portraits

You may notice that the chart says we have 86 out of 83 portraits. What the heck happened there? Well, we originally had portraits planned for even more characters, but as development took longer and longer, we started to scale back areas of the game. And as part of that scaling back, some of the planned portraits got cut until we hit that 83 number. But Kale reached 83 portraits faster than we finished the other parts of the game, so she kept going. Additionally, Dakota also contributed some portraits!

I thought I was going to have a ton of character portraits to show you today but there was a debate at the last moment about possible changes to portraits for two characters, so I'm going to hold off on the bulk of them for now until that's settled. 

So please forgive me but today we're only showing Kana, our very sad child. Art by Kale E. Rion

Kana tends to be a bit expressionless. I don't want to spoil too much of her story, but the past few years have been very cruel to her and she's had to grow up far too fast and too soon. 

However, Marisa and Kapi can get a reaction out of anyone, and you can speculate what kind of ridiculous thing they might have done to get the reaction on the right out of her!

Seems like a huge bummer if she's sad for the entire game though, doesn't it? There's still time, maybe she can get a chance to smile by the end!

Music

We've got 2 music tracks remaining for the full OST (although Rob says -maybe- a certain princess might get her own theme song if there's time, fingers crossed) which are the music for the final zone, and the music for the final battle. 

Here's a little peek at some of the recent additions to the soundtrack. Please note that these clips may or may not be 100% final. Rob's already asleep as I'm writing this so I can't ask him. And of course these are just tiny fragments of 2 much longer songs but Rob might actually come fight me in the morning if I posted the entire tracks.

Bosses

I'm very sorry but I literally can't show you any more bosses without major story spoilers. Every boss past dungeon 3 is a big plot reveal. But we're currently at 5 bosses complete or mostly complete (Poor Aete had his voice lines recorded forever ago but still uses Alemoa's because I haven't gotten back to him and one of the spoiler bosses still needs extensive testing) with 2 big ones to go and one mini-boss. 

Since I can't show any of that, please enjoy this footage of me playing the game very poorly. There are unfortunately some visual bugs as well as problems with projectiles being destroyed early when fired near walls. These are either fixed already or soon to be fixed.

This one below had a little bug where the Krokas couldn't see over water tiles and so they never shot at me. Since fixed, but I still like this footage.

In this next video you can see 2 new types of enemies: A rock-throwing variant of the Jurupari, and a horrifying jumping spider. Because I don't completely hate myself or you guys, the spider only jumps away from your attacks, not toward you. They also only have 4 legs because 8 was uhh... a lot.

Misc. To-do

So probably the biggest one in this category would be minor NPCs. All the big names are added but many of the background extras are still these bald men standing around in their underwear. 

That one gives me anxiety every time we let anyone play the game because people will go "Why are you showing all these NPCs looking like this? This looks really unprofessional!" but then if I try to fix it, other people will go "Why are you working on these unimportant characters? Finish the game!" 

And then back before we had the dudes in their underwear, it was "The world feels too empty! Where are all the people?" I just can't win one this one!

Some other brief mentions:

-Item upgrades: We have various upgrades planned for certain items, most of which are not yet fully implemented. We'd like to get in as many of these as possible but likely not all of them will make the cut. Some could possibly be patched in post-launch if there's enough interest. 

-Item Rework: One of our puzzle items was actually just awful to use because it depended on some very unpredictable physics interactions and precise aiming. Like, we're talking about the sort of mechanic you might see in a game like CrossCode, but this simply isn't CrossCode. So that item is getting a bit of a rework. It's an item you can't get until almost the end of the game, so fortunately there was not a ton that needed to be remade as far as puzzles that use it. 

-Books: The library could stand to be filled out some more. Writing the mini-books for the library is my favorite part of the whole game, but its sadly been a low priority. I have a list of ideas for books I'd like to add, and one day soon I'm going to sit down and write as many as I can in one go.

-Quest Locations: The map menu is currently missing locations for roughly half the quests. Honestly, this takes anywhere between 10 seconds to 1 minute per quest (depends how fast I can figure out where the quest is on the map) but its been a low priority.

-Cutscene Skipping: I really, really want this to be available on release because I fear nobody will replay the game without it. However, this is a feature that will require a lot of setup and testing because a lot of changes happen to the playable world during cutscenes. Those changes would have to happen automatically and I need to verify every individual cutscene works before this feature can make the cut. 

-Capybara Houses: Yes, capybaras live in houses. But all their houses are placeholder art to this very day. Perhaps Dakota can help solve this?

-Multiplayer Testing: So... in theory Arkanya has a functional co-op mode. In reality, much of the game has not been tested thoroughly in co-op play. Some of it hasn't been tested at all. We want you to play this game with a friend so it's critical that we make sure the co-op experience is as good, if not better than the single player experience.

-Enemies: There are 2 more non-boss enemies that are planned to be added. Thankfully, these enemies are fully drawn and animated already, which is a big relief! One of them was actually drawn over 2 years ago and just never implemented. But these guys fill an important niche (and they're in the launch trailer) so they have to get done! One of them requires a slightly unusual interaction with the environment, which was why it's the last enemy to be added.

-Lights: There's a decent number of torches, windows, and candles that don't have lights associated with them. Small thing but very noticeable if its not there!

-Credits: If it was just me, Rob, and Kale I'd slap our names on the title screen and call it a day. But you were all a part of this, too, and you need to be recognized! And since there's too many of you to fit on one screen, we're gonna need a credits reel. There's over 1500 people that need to be credited (most of them Kickstarter Backers) and I've been debating if I can somehow quickly automate the creation of that, or if I should just accept that life is hard and start typing.

So that's it, that's the birds-eye view of the work we have left to making Arkanya a full game. Naturally I'm sure many of you are asking, how long? Why won't you just say a date, Bean? Well... you know how we've given multiple estimates on that in the past, and they've all been wrong? If I say a number or a day right now, several people are gonna line up to kick my butt. People who I need to be on my side. But there's a number in my head that I really wish I could just blurt out that I'm pretty darn certain about. 

Since I can't, I'll say this instead. Thank you so much, to those of you who are still here with us and still believe in us. I know it hasn't been easy being patient for this long and watching us go through setback after setback. But we're almost there and before much longer, instead of talking about dev progress, we'll be talking about all that sweet merchandise we need to mail you guys. I hope you didn't think we forgot about that part! 

-BeanBandit, Arkanya Dev

August Update: Super Late Update Edition!
8 months ago – Fri, Aug 18, 2023 at 05:23:14 AM

Hey guys! Tremendous apologies for the very long wait, but I’m finally back with more!

Want to start off with some nightmare fuel? Our community manager Chris was going to contribute some art to this update, but then he got mid-way through and his markers ran out. So he said "you people don't pay me enough for this" and sent me this.

Honestly, fair seeing as we don't actually pay him at all. 

Like I mentioned in our previous update (which was sadly very brief) life got very hectic for me for a little bit and something had to give. Unfortunately, the only thing I could afford to slow down on was Arkanya’s marketing, which wasn’t super fair to you all, but I am only one guy and did what I could.

Let’s see if we can make up for it here though!

Here’s a fun little chart that shows some important stats about the current state of The Girl from Arkanya. And also a few numbers that just seemed interesting, like the current cave count.

Hopefully this will give you a decent overview of where we’re at in Arkanya’s development. In a nutshell, we’ve got 1 and 1/2 dungeons left to build, 30 cutscenes to animate, 2 bosses to design, 3 songs to compose, 1 zone to finish, and 8 caves to map. As long as this project has gone on, and as difficult as its been, it’s actually kind of surreal to see those numbers. They feel very doable! I no longer wake up in the middle of the night thinking “Oh God, there’s so much left!” It’s honestly quite the relief.

That’s not to say I can afford to rest yet. You’ve all been patiently waiting for the game you so generously funded, and we certainly went far beyond our original time estimates. The end is in sight though.

New Enemies

Here we have the full array of skeleton enemies, known as Nekrokura. There are some similarities to the Pirate enemies, such as the bow and sword variants which function almost exactly like their pirate counterparts.

Also similarly to the pirates, there are elite versions with variant colors. However, unlike the black pirates which only use swords, the golden nekrokura can use swords, magic, or no weapon at all.

These elite variants move faster, hit harder, and have more health. However, as a trade-off, they are much more vulnerable to fire.  And Marisa and Kapi have a whole lot of ways to make fire.

Nekrokura can benefit from the presence of Sacrificial Altars, which use Xolotl’s dark magic to empower his undead minions. When a nekrokura enters the effective range of an altar, it will gain a red symbol under its feet like this:

While the nekrokura is under these effects, it gains a temporary shield. This shield absorbs a few sword hits worth of damage, and will come back every time the altar sends out a new wave of magic. When fighting large groups of nekrokura, it is advisable to either draw them away from the altar…

Or alternatively, destroy it with a bomb, or a strong gust of wind.

Against a single nekrokura, as long as its not one of the nekromages, you should be able to simply overpower the shield through brute force.

Enemy Improvements

Some issues came up involving the old way that enemies were populated in the world, and it was always a bit clunky to begin with. In a nutshell, enemies were placed in the world via the editor and would all be loaded together when the level loaded. Not only did this needlessly increase load times, it created an issue where each enemy needed to remember the state it was in when the level started, so that it could reset to that state when the player would leave/enter a new room.

Unfortunately, the process to reset an enemy to its original state wasn’t always super clean, and the code needed to keep it stable was piling up. Also somewhat annoying was the fact that enemies needed to be disabled right after the level loaded, but only if they weren’t in the active room. This was competing with other systems that rely on enabling/disabling enemies, such as puzzles which require you to kill waves of enemies as they spawn. Again, the code required to resolve these conflicts kept getting longer.

So now, as you enter a room, all of the enemies for that room are generated in that moment. This has the nice benefit of spreading out the work the game has to do to load enemies, meaning your loading screens will be slightly shorter. They’re not long to begin with though, so only people on very low-end hardware will likely notice any difference.

As the player exits a room, all of the spawned enemies are deleted. However, the spawners remember whether the enemy was dead or alive when it was deleted. That way, when you return to a room where you killed an enemy, that enemy will not spawn again. Unless its a Sprite-type enemy, which respawn every time.

I like the world to appear in my editor the same way it appears for players in the game, and so for a long time I was stubborn about using runtime enemy spawners like most similar games do. But after realizing that was the obvious solution to most of my problems, I said heck with it. And so I spent a day creating spawners for every enemy in the game, minus three: The Red Palempuku, the Type 2 Fire Sprite, and the Urkin. These enemies have predetermined paths they follow, and I haven’t yet decided how I want to handle those with spawners.

It is very likely that I will be able to have the spawner store a path, and pass that path to the spawned enemy. I need to experiment with it though because truthfully, the code which manages enemy pathing is mostly not my creation, so modifying it always takes some trial and error.

Because it was very convenient to do, and much simpler than the previous way, I also made the decision to delete active projectiles at the same time that enemies are deleted. Because there are now projectiles which follow the player, this became especially important. We wouldn’t want one to follow you into another room!

Story Changes

I made two major changes to the story since I last spoke to you, one which I will tell you about and one which is going to be kept secret for now.

Essentially, both changes involved merging a handful of side stories into fewer but more substantial side stories. Both of these changes are very similar in nature, but for different areas of the game.

So for the one that isn’t a secret, I’ve removed multiple characters that were going to originally be minor cast members, and replaced them with Kat. This has a few major benefits:

1 - Kat now appears much earlier in the game and will be a major part of your journey. This lets me explore the character a lot more and give her more room to develop as a character, rather than trying to tell you everything about her in one go halfway through the game.

2 - There are now fewer unfinished art assets. By giving Kat responsibility for multiple side quests, half a dozen NPC models are no longer needed, most of which were unfinished or not started. Scope reduction!

3 - The side quests are now more memorable. I don’t know if any of you would have remembered Ernust from Pomerania, but I am certain you will remember Kat.

The other one is basically the same thing, just with a different character and a different section of the game. I will probably tease that one eventually because it’s one of the best screenshots in the game IMO, and I will definitely be using it for the Steam page. But I’m waiting on a dialogue portrait first to complete it.

A few parts of the main story got touch-ups as a result of these changes, too. Most notably, Dungeon 2 got a new room and some extra content, and the way you obtain the Bomb Bag has actually changed!

Dungeon 2 will probably get one final update at some point because Rob keeps bugging me about how long it takes to swim out to the Rum Distillers and back. He's looking out for you guys, I was just gonna let you suffer.

Also, we’ve got dialogue portraits for Indira now! Check these out

Indira has the most dialogue portraits of any character, at a whopping 10 portraits. She originally was tied with Marisa at 9, but Kale sent me an extra portrait she thought was funny and I ended up using it.

I don’t remember if you guys got to see Yaritza yet or not, and I don’t want to stop to check, so here’s her portraits as well.

I’m currently waiting to get back portraits from Kale for Kana, the Ice Shaman, as well as Kloe the Alchemist, and one other surprise character you’ll see probably around release time. Maybe. I dunno how we’re gonna handle that but it’s related to my favorite screenshot of the game I was telling you about a few paragraphs back.

(BEAN NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: Kale just sent me Kana a few minutes ago!)

Museum Updated and Completed!

Well… sort of. Some items still have placeholder text. But the whole thing functions and generates income!

Once Marisa has unlocked the museum feature, not only will she receive an initial payment for each exhibit added, she can pull money from the donation box! That’s right, you get to keep all of the money the museum makes, all to yourself.

While the exact formula may change before release, the core idea is that each museum item generates a certain amount of donations for the museum per minute. Actually, it’s per 150 seconds because each in-game day is 2 hours, and the math worked out easier that way. So its every 2.5 minutes.

The more items you unlock in the museum, the faster it generates money. You can collect the money by opening the donation box, like so.

Careful, the box has a limit! Make sure to check back at the museum every couple hours you’re playing. The donation limit is still subject to change, and it may be adjusted so that it starts low and increases as you get more items. Just so players don't do something crazy like leave the game running for days to get infinite money.

Other Stuff

What else can we put in this update… hrmmm…

It’s kind of tough to think of things to throw in here when so much of what I do now is in our “no spoilers” zone. Rob doesn’t want me showing any content after dungeon 3. I don’t think that’s going to be a set in stone rule because we already have a trailer made with multiple scenes from after dungeon 3, but we'll burn that bridge when we get to it.

ANYWAY! Theres more Renzo locations now! 

Originally there were just two, one in Arkanya and one in Marajo. That got a little frustrating and there wasn’t really a point. Originally we envisioned players having to fight their way back to civilization with a full treasure bag and an empty health bar. In reality, it just ends up being a pain in the butt. If you’ve already made it to Windberg, there’s really no reason to make you continue on to Arkanya.

So Renzo now has shops in 5 locations: Arkanya, Costa Verde, Windberg, Marajo, and Puru Puru. It remains to be seen if he will have a location in the final zone, as it doesn’t make sense from a story perspective. But Renzo sort of defies the laws of reality as he pleases, so maybe!

Another interesting tidbit: You’d probably assume the final zone is the one we don’t have done yet. Actually not the case! The final zone is, in many ways, pretty close to done.

It’s actually Puru Puru, one of the ones toward the middle, that still needs a lot of work.

Also speaking of Renzo, I did a huge wave of rebalancing treasure values and drop rates! It involved spreadsheets and distribution curves and all that awful mathy stuff!

It’s not perfect yet but these changes really smoothed out the progression curve. Before now, the game usually went one of two ways, either you’d be filthy rich by the end of the first dungeon, or completely broke, and there wasn’t much in-between.

I almost completely forgot! The weather system is back!

Remember a million years ago when Marisa could dance to change the weather? That’s actually partially back in the game again, though its not connected to dances. A little backstory for those who are confused:

So originally in the wee early days of development, we wanted to do something like Oracle of Seasons where the map would dramatically change with the weather, and Marisa could control that. WAAAAAAY too ambitious for our first commercial product. I mean, this whole thing has been too ambitious at every step, but here we are. So we reduced that down to not changing the map, but just certain effects on the map.

And that was cool, but then the dance system got reworked, and Marisa could change dances whenever she wanted. And in fact, you’re even encouraged to swap dances often, to maximize Marisa’s strength. And to top it all off, Kapi benefits from the dances now, too!

So you’re dancing a lot. The problem with that? The weather was changing every 10 seconds and it was annoying. Not to mention the music would change too…

The weather system got removed “temporarily” until we could come up with a new plan, and then it just got forgotten and “temporary” became permanent. …Or did it?

Long story short(ish), I had to finish the in-game clock to make the museum work, and the clock contained a bunch of old code that used to be involved in the weather system. And I said, you know what? We can pretty easily randomize this and just have a normal weather system that isn’t tied to dancing.

(weather and daylight changes massively sped up for demonstration)

So I did! It looks very cool and it only took me one Saturday evening. I probably would have spent that evening drinking beer and watching bad anime otherwise, so this was really a win-win. 

The weather as shown in the video isn't 100% polished yet so expect the final product to have a bit more variation and look a bit nicer.

Thats all for today! Thank you all for reading, and I will see you next time!

-Bean, Arkanya dev

Quick update
10 months ago – Tue, Jul 04, 2023 at 01:04:09 PM

Hi guys! Sorry to keep you all waiting. Things have been pretty hectic recently and I've had to frequently choose between marketing/communication and actually getting the game done. Obviously I usually choose the second option.

Thank you all for your patience. A real KS update is not far off. I'm just stretched a bit thin at the moment. 

I sincerely apologize for the recent silence on our end, but please look forward to hearing from me again soon.  I'll be showing off parts of the museum side quest, the completed weather system, and a chart showing roughly how much development work is remaining on the game!

    -Bean, Arkanya dev (who had to re-type this tiny 2-paragraph update SIX TIMES because kickstarter's text editor kept deleting it while he was typing???)

April Update! Let's talk about polish and QoL!
12 months ago – Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 03:05:15 AM

Hey hey! Hope y'all like in-game collectables, because that's what we're talking about today! Mostly.

 Before that though, question for all of you: How many of you are interested in getting a new closed backer preview in a month or two? I'm considering some possibilities for how we might do that. The big thing is I really need tester feedback, and a lot of you paid good money to get tester access so I assume you'd at least be somewhat interested. Let me know in the comments if that's something I should spend time on!

  I keep getting told that I put too many spoilers in our marketing/KS updates, so I'm trying to cut down on that. Which is a real bummer because most of the development progress the last two months has been dungeons, story, and a new boss. I've actually had a lot more time to devote to Arkanya recently, so it's been moving along pretty well. Well enough, in fact, that even without any dungeon spoilers, I can share a pretty good amount of new updates!

 SWORDS!

First, let's talk about some power progression. Marisa conveniently lives next door to a strapping young blacksmith named Heinrich. Heinrich spends most of his day cranking out nails and horseshoes, but he loves working on a sword when he gets the rare chance. And if you're brave enough to let him practice on your blade (and rich enough to buy materials for him) he'll gladly upgrade the Messer for you. In the video above, we upgraded the sword all the way from level 0 to level 5!  

 Two things to note about that though: Firstly, Marisa's father does the upgrade from level 0 to level 1. Level 0 means you don't have a sword, but I wanted to include it in the video so you can see what your inventory looks like without a sword. I think a lot of people will never notice it because you get the level 1 sword before you ever need to open your inventory for anything.

 Secondly, level 5 is not the final sword! So please try to complete the sword when you play and see how high it goes!

 Also, if you're super detail-oriented (not me), you might have noticed this symbol next to the sword when the menu was open:

That's actually one of the most interesting aspects of upgrading your sword! And we'll be going into depth on that... next time! 

 Sorry, I really want to show you guys that feature in a specific way, but it just slightly wasn't ready for today. It involves a super cute NPC though so look forward to that!

Gotta go fast!

While I'm on my way to the next feature, check out how fast you can swim by combining the Wave Dance with a consumable called Aether Wine, both of which increase your movement speed in water. (Aether Wine actually increases all movement speed, to be clear. And makes you hit harder. And some other things. Trust me, you want to unlock Aether Wine.)

In the later part of the game when you reach the big river, this is by far the best way to get around the map.

It's just a book!

Now then, do you like reading? Do you like big walls of text dumping page after page of lore that answers questions literally nobody asked? If so, wow you are going to like The Girl from Arkanya a lot! If not, then good news! You can just open the book to get credit, then immediately close it and move on. 

WARNING: This book contains (very) minor story spoilers

You can probably tell its actually pretty hard to move indoors with all those speed buffs on... Lots of tables to run into... But anyway, the book system was a bit of a doozy to add. What seemed like a really simple task ended up being a 2-day coding nightmare due to some existing systems not playing nice with it. But that's all sorted out now!

Which means I can get back to filling out all the text for the hundred million random NPCs standing around everywhere...

Once you've gotten credit for opening a book, you can find that book any time you want (and any time you don't, too) in the second floor of the Rathaus, where the Arkanya library is kept!

The book will appear both in its original location, as well as in the library. The Rathaus Clerk makes a copy, and returns the original! We're just borrowing them without asking. It's different than stealing.

Still don't care about the game lore? No problem! If collecting in itself isn't enough reward, the Rathaus Clerk will pay you a nice little fee for every book you bring him to transcribe. Collect all 20 books, and you'll get an extra heart!

While you're at the Rathaus, be sure to make your way up to the third floor and brush up on the local politics. They're very animated!

I'm the map!

Alright, twitter tells me this next feature is the one you guys care about the most, so lets talk about map menus!

I guess this isn't an actual collectable from your perspective, but it is from mine because it's programmed like one. You "unlock" a map piece each time you enter a new zone or dungeon room, much the same way you unlock the library books by finding them. Just roll with it, alright?

Many of you probably noticed at some point or another, either in our first preview version of the game or in some of our game footage, that we had placeholder art for the map for seriously almost 2 years. Well, it's no longer a placeholder! 

So in the overworld and most interiors, the map functions in the following way

Overworld zones you have visited will be displayed in their entirety, like above. The current zone will, by default, be highlighted with a white border, and a little Marisa head appears on the section of that zone you are currently in. 

Down below is a text box which gives the name of the zone you currently have highlighted.

A red X appears over the location of every quest objective you currently have, even if those objectives are in zones you have not reached. All of your objectives display simultaneously.

But that's not all! 

When you are inside of a dungeon, a dungeon map becomes available! Similarly to the overworld zones, dungeon maps only show the rooms you have explored.

Look familiar to anyone? Marisa likes to make her maps pretty darn detailed! And by Marisa I mean our musician and co-developer Rob who drew the short straw on this job.

It belongs in a museum!

Next up, we have museum collectables! Similarly to books, these are items which you can find out in the world, that are then collected into a dedicated building. But instead of a 1-room library, these items go into a 3-story mansion! 

 Apologies in advance, I didn't have very many museum collectables ready yet, and the interface for examining them is also still in progress! But I can at least give you a little peek at what the facility looks like.

Marisa's grandfather, Adelard, is a wealthy merchant from France who moved to Arkanya many years ago, and who came to absolutely love the people and culture. Now in his old age, monetary wealth has lost its appeal to him, and he seeks to build the cultural wealth of Arkanya instead. To this end, Adelard has chosen to turn his estate into a museum dedicated to Arkanyan history! But... he has nothing to put in it. Lucky for him, his granddaughter is the world's greatest treasure hunter!

 As with the books, there are money rewards for each treasure found as well as special rewards for collecting certain numbers of objects.

Some of these objects blend in pretty well with their surroundings, so I've done two things to help you find them in the overworld:

1) They are not effected by environmental lighting

2) They have a big ! above them

  Unlike the books, these will actually disappear from the overworld once you take them. 

 There are 48 collectable lore items between the library and the museum! Please try to find them all!

 That is all I have for you today, thank you so much for reading and I'll see you all next time! (Or much sooner if you drop by our discord...  https://discord.gg/GadHNKYBcu)