The Girl from Arkanya | A pixel art treasure hunting RPG
Created by Arkanya Games
A top-down, 2D action RPG following the journey of an ambitious young treasure hunter and her capybara companion.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Important update about high-tier backers! (Plus some more product pics!)
about 1 month ago
– Thu, Jan 22, 2026 at 03:21:35 PM
Hello again! Just wanted to say real quick that today I sent out emails to 16 individuals who backed at the Capybara Pillow tier or higher. If that's you, please check your inbox (and spam folder) to see if you got my email! If you didn't, contact us at [email protected] at your earlier convenience! It's time to start designing your custom NPCs so we can get them in the game before the console launch.
Some of you have already spoken to me about your custom characters. I apologize but the way we handled that was messy and inconsistent, and we've added new options since then. So please fill out the questions even if you already talked to us about it.
Finally, here's some pics of the physical copies for PC! Just came in earlier this week:
That's all for now. See you next time!
-Bean
Reminder to update your address in Backerkit! Also some KS reward previews
about 1 month ago
– Wed, Jan 14, 2026 at 11:10:26 AM
Hello again! We're about halfway through January so here's another reminder to please update your address in Backerkit if you've moved within the last few years!
Last time I mentioned this, pretty much everyone started emailing me directly. I just want you to know that you can actually update your address directly via your Backerkit account, since we haven't locked addresses yet. Saves me a bit of a time!
However if for some reason you don't have access to your backerkit account, or you can't figure out how to update your address, then you can still email us at [email protected] and I'll make sure to get you sorted out.
If you already emailed us, then you don't need to worry about it any further. I was contacted by something like 70 or 80 of you, and I ended up not replying to every individual person. However, I did get through every email so if you emailed us, I took care of it already.
In other news, a whole bunch of KS rewards showed up at my house recently! We're still waiting on a few things but I wanted to share some pictures of everything that has come in so far.
One last thing: Sometime next week I will be emailing out a question form to everyone who backed at the "Design a Capybara" tier or higher. This info will be to help me create your custom characters before the next Arkanya patch. Please keep an eye out for that!
That's all for today. Until next time!
Backers who pledged for physical rewards - Please let us know if your address has changed!
about 2 months ago
– Mon, Dec 29, 2025 at 02:32:38 PM
Hi! Just wanted to put out a really quick update wishing you all a happy new year, and letting you know that I sent an email out to every backer who was supposed to receive physical rewards. In this email, I have asked you all to let me know if your address has changed in the past 4 years, as we will soon be mailing out physical backer rewards.
I will be doing weekly reminders here on kickstarter until February 1st, at which point we will be locking addresses and begin mailing packages.
If you believe you purchased physical rewards, either via a kickstarter pledge or a preorder on Backerkit, but you did not receive the email, please contact us at [email protected] with either your full name, the email you used to pledge, or your pledge number. Any one of these will be sufficient.
Many of the backer rewards are on their way to my house right now, so please look forward to getting some preview photos once they arrive!
-Bean
Two weeks ago we released a game. Let's talk about how it went!
6 months ago
– Thu, Sep 04, 2025 at 02:53:27 AM
I thought I'd have a little bit of a break after I released this game. Nope! No breaks were had! Let's talk about the release and future of The Girl from Arkanya!
Before I go off on a long and ramble-y story about how we got to this point, here's the bird's-eye view:
How has the game performed? It's a mixed bag! We've moved over 2000 steam copies in 2 weeks, which means I won't be buying the yacht just yet, but I can probably remain a full-time indie dev for at least the near future. Reviews have been fantastic, with a 98% positive rating, but we need more! More reviews! Additionally, we gained over 18,000 wishlists since launch! That's a LOT. Currently we are sitting just under 29,000 total wishlists, which means that people are definitely interested in the game, but don't want to gamble $20 USD on an unknown indie title. So we're looking forward to some potentially very strong sale performance during discount events.
Console ports? Still nothing to announce but I do believe we have selected who we will be partnering with to make them. Should hopefully know for sure very soon.
Backer rewards? First off, let me mention this again: If you have not received a Steam Key and believe you should have, contact us at [email protected]! If you chose a console version but wish to change your preorder to Steam, contact us at [email protected]! I will be happy to assist you and it only takes a few minutes. We also recently distributed both DRM-free and Steam copies of the Arkanya OST to everyone who ordered it. Robby Siva worked really hard on composing the music for this game so I hope you will take the opportunity to enjoy the OST! If you haven't received it and believe you should have, same thing! Contact us!
With the Digital Artbook + Manual I am still waiting on files from my artist, at which point I can complete and distribute those products. Please accept my sincerest apologies for the long wait on these items.
Physical rewards are still more or less ready to go to print, but we're waiting to get our first payment from Valve so we're not struggling for cash. More on that in the coming weeks!
Will you be updating The Girl from Arkanya? Sure will! Currently I am only working on fixing bugs which were reported after release, but we have some pretty exciting Quality of Life and New Content updates planned for the future. I'll be discussing those plans further down below so feel free to skip forward to those if that's what you're most interested in!
Alright, now for the long ramble-y story. So the last month of development was absolutely nuts. I partly brought this on myself because while we were seeking a new publishers back in late spring/early summer, I sort of put Arkanya on a slow-burn while I focused on contacting every industry person I knew (and dozens I didn't know), and when I wasn't firing off 10,000 emails, I spent a lot of my time learning how to make 3D games in Godot. The publisher hunt was pretty rough but the Godot time was an absolute blast!
But then we made the big decision to self-publish, and for some reason my gut kept saying "August 21". Looking back I think my gut was actually saying "Hey Silksong is gonna get a release date after Gamescom on August 21, avoid that day" but most of the message was getting cut off. Anyway, as soon as the decision to self-publish was made, I went back to full-time dev on Arkanya, and by full-time I mean like 12-14 hours a day. It was brutal, it took forever, I didn't leave my house for a month and a half except to buy groceries. And boy did I wish I had those two Godot weeks back!
So I had a checklist of everything which absolutely had to be done before August 21, and a list of things which I would just prefer to have done. By working morning-to-night every day, I was able to easily knock out all of the required tasks with time to spare, and it was looking like most of the secondary tasks would get done as well. But then disaster struck! Multiple game-breaking issues were discovered in the last 10 days of development, with one of those issues being discovered literally the night before release. It was critical that I fix all of these before launch, so one by one, secondary tasks kept getting moved to the "post-launch" section of my to-do list.
By Monday of release week, I was absolutely spent and running on fumes. Really debated if I could just release the game as-is at that point. But I kept at it, and while I was super exhausted, I was at least very optimistic about our launch success. Way too optimistic, in fact. See, we had started getting between 500 and 1000 wishlists per day for the week leading up to release, and where before we struggled for months to get from 9000 to 10,000, suddenly we found ourselves at 13,000 practically overnight. Interest was clearly strong! The future was looking good!
There was that one fear looming over my head though: Team Cherry had announced that they had an announcement (yes, an announcement for an announcement) planned for August 21. I knew it was unlikely, all the industry people I talked to said it was unlikely, yet I was still so convinced that Silksong was going to shadow-drop (suddenly get released) a mere 3 hours before my game. My game which I had devoted the last 5 years of my life to. Which was about to crash and burn because a much much bigger and much much better funded studio suddenly had a fun surprise for everybody on the same day. I probably would not have slept that final night if I wasn't absolutely exhausted.
But morning came, 10am rolled around, and no Silksong! Well, mostly. They still announced a release date which drew all of the indie media attention, and did slightly steal my thunder. But my game was gonna be playable that day and theirs wasn't! So it was good, the worst case scenario had not happened!
I also want to take this opportunity to thank Missi the Achievement Huntress, who asked me if she could make an achievement guide for Arkanya before launch, and who coordinated with me the entire time she was doing it. Missi discovered a lot of the major bugs that I had missed, and devoted hours of her time to helping me recreate those bugs and test fixes for them. Withou Missi's help, Arkanya would have launched in a MUCH worse state. So thank you once again to Missi! You can follow her here if you want to check out her work: Missi the Achievement Huntress - Game Reviews 🇳🇱 (@MissieThe) / X
Launch day was a bit... quiet. I always imagined there'd be this great sense of accomplishment when I pressed that "Release Game" button, but I actually barely thought about it in the moment. I had gotten only a few hours of sleep beforehand, and my anxiety was pretty intense, so there wasn't really any popping champagne or anything like that. I had planned to save any sort of celebrating for the next day, because I figured I'd be putting out launch-day fires for all of the 21st. I was still very much in developer-mode at that point.
But there really weren't any fires. Other than some rather minor bug reports, launch day was about as smooth as it could be. The only struggle was hitting the 10 review mark required to hit the front page of Steam. We had plenty of sales but we were struggling to convince people to leave reviews. But 10 reviews did come, and we got to the top of New & Trending, and we stayed there for a good long while.
While sales were honestly around half of what I believed they would be, we did gain several thousand new wishlists that day, which was pretty amazing. Future sales! I hope, anyway. When it was finally clear to me that there would be no fires to put out that day, I decided to relax a bit and watched Twitch streamers play Arkanya for the rest of the evening. That is when I finally was like "oh nice, I did it. I released a game, and people are playing it. Not because they're testers but because they just want to". So I ran over to the local Aldi, grabbed a bottle of wine, and settled down for the evening, watching some amazing streamers genuinely enjoying themselves playing our game.
And then a few days later some more game-breaking bugs were discovered and I had to fix multiple people's save files, and there were almost 200 emails from people who wanted to swap their game version to Steam, and two weeks went by in a blur and now I'm here writing this KS update that I meant to do a week ago.
Really surprised you're here reading this instead of playing Silksong.
Post-launch Update Roadmap
Did you think we were gonna release Arkanya and be done with it? No shot! It's still not exactly how I want it to be and I plan to fix that.
This is all still in flux, so please take it with a grain of salt. However, here are the current plans for updates to the game in 2025:
September:
Continued bug fixing
Minor Quality of Life changes
Jukebox in Inn Rooms to change music tracks
Rest of 2025:
Sword upgrades reflected on Marisa's sprite (perhaps Kapi's too?)
Way to upgrade treasure bag to add additional inventory space
New content for existing zones (I'd love to expand Lower Windberg further southward, for example)
New collectathon content: Fishing!
Map menu overhaul (this one might roll over to 2026)
2026:
City of Arkanya expanded (some of you asked about the Chapel you can't currently go to...)
Boss rush
New, BIG Overworld Zone (bigger than any currently in the game)
Multiple new dungeons
Maybe more?
Some of this will be part of a paid DLC. The good news is, as Kickstarter backers, you're all getting the DLC for free! Plans are well underway for what we're doing in 2026, and while I won't share much beyond this right now, I can say that you'll want to definitely return to Arkanya next year, especially if you're a Princesa Katarina fan!
Promoting another game I like just because I can:
Okay, one last thing before I fire this off and try to get some sleep - Max Mraz, the creator of Ocean's Heart (a game that heavily inspired The Girl from Arkanya) just announced the release date for his newest game, Tombwater! You will be able to play Tombwater on November 12th! Please watch the trailer:
Max did not ask me to promote his new game, I just think it looks awesome and I want to support him as much as he has supported me over the years. I will 100% be playing this game on release day and so should you!
That's it, that's everything for now! Have a great weekend!
-BeanBandit
The Girl from Arkanya will be releasing for PC on August 21!
7 months ago
– Tue, Jul 22, 2025 at 09:12:15 AM
I have been sitting on this trailer for YEARS
Hey guys! As promised, I am back again to announce the upcoming release of The Girl from Arkanya, on August 21 of this year!
I was going to drop this trailer last Thursday actually, but Rob was talking to me about the new Donkey Kong game and it suddenly occurred to me that it was coming out on the same day we wanted to release our trailer! Now, if you know anything about Zelda-likes, you probably know we rely heavily on Nintendo fans for attention since, y'know, they're mostly the ones who are nostalgic for this type of game.
So the fear was that if we announced the same day that Donkey Kong came out, all of our audience would be too occupied with monkey business to pay us any mind. So we pushed back the announcement to today, which seems to have worked out reasonably well!
You can also like/share our trailer on youtube, which probably helps us out even more actually!
Alright, one more tiny bit of news. We are currently in talks with a couple interested parties about getting The Girl from Arkanya on to console platforms, and it looks like we're going to have a handful of options for that. I can't really say anything beyond that yet, but it's going well!
That's all I've got for now! I'll be back in a few weeks with an update about your Steam keys!
