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:
February Update!
about 1 year ago
– Thu, Feb 23, 2023 at 01:52:04 AM
Hello again, friends! It feels like our last update was so long ago. It's only been two months, right?
The last two months have been a bit rough in terms of development, if I'm to be totally honest. Our final sprint has turned out to be less of a sprint and more like pulling a huge boulder across a field. I won't divulge info about the personal lives of the other team members, but I've been picking up web development work to keep the lights on while we finish Arkanya, and recently that's eaten up more of my time than actual gamedev has, which is unfortunate.
However, I have a strict policy of no zero-progress days for myself, and I've fully stuck to that! Even if its just an hour some days. Despite the slower pace, I've made some great progress in certain areas, so let's dive into it!
Fan art!
You all know I need fan art to live, so let's start off with some fan art.
I absolutely love Dakota's take on Marisa every single time.
He also did a brilliant character sheet for Captain Rafael Fidalgo Diaz de Castilla, which is incredible because the captain has never had art before! Kota drew this purely off my pixel art, and it's spot-on!
Fire got an update recently, allowing it to spread to nearby flammable objects and even enemies! Additionally, fire may spread from flammable objects to enemies. However, enemies may not spread fire to each other, because in certain fights it created an infinite loop of fire spreading back and forth between the same few enemies, making some encounters trivial.
You may also notice that the fire sword can now ignite flammables, rather than just adding fire damage to the attack. This gives it a lot of redundancy with the lantern, to be sure, but I think the lantern will still see use because other dances such as the Storm Dance and the Frost Dance will make you want to not turn on the Solar Dance all the time.
Previously there was no fire spread because of concerns about performance, but I spent one night this month optimizing the heck out of what we refer to as "Destructible Objects" (bushes, tall grass, thorns, boxes, etc) to the point where they have almost zero impact on performance unless they're being directly interacted with. This is pretty exciting because we've already added over 10x as many objects as we had before, and enabled fire spreading on them all!
What's more, I was able to configure Tiled Map Editor, along with SuperTiled2Unity, so that I could place bush tiles (among other things) in the map editor, and they would automatically be replaced with bush objects in the engine! And what a huge time-saver that's been!
One downside is that now I need to go back and reduce drop rates for treasure on all these objects because with 10x as many, that's just too much free treasure!
Unrelated but I just wanted to show off some progress on our jungle zone. This is a slow one to build out because of how much detail is required, but have you ever seen a better jungle in a game like this?
That's a serious question by the way. Please tell me if you've seen a better one so I can improve ours!
I'm not sure I've ever explained the concept of a Lunar Chest, but it's essentially a treasure chest which can only be seen by using the Lunar Dance.
The location of Lunar Chests is marked by a Moon symbol, like so:
Something that was surprisingly tricky was making it so that these could be hidden under objects such as rocks or bushes, and then only activated after the blocking object has been cleared. That sounds really simple and I thought so too, but believe me it was not!
I was a bit of a dummy here and went to a chest that had already been cleared, which kinda ruined the video, but you can see how it works at least! In a future update, empty chests will be made to automatically appear rather than hide. These Lunar chests reset 1 hour of gameplay after being emptied, so be sure to check back later! Let's go find a fresh one now.
This chest has two requirements: first, you must have the Swimsuit to cross the pond. Second, you must have a bomb to clear the fractured block. Like the other one, you can come back and do this again each hour of gameplay. I suppose if you wanted easy money you could simple leave Arkanya running and grab the same chest hour after hour, but I promise it's easier and more fun to just play the game!
Irodori Puzzles
You know those puzzles in Zelda where you have a switch that goes from red to blue and makes red/blue objects react in certain ways? Anybody know what those are called? We sure don't, but in Arkanya they're called Irodori. The Munuane (aliens in Arkanya) have a slight Japanese flair to them, and Irodori is japanese for "coloring". In Irodori puzzles, you use buttons and switches to control different colors!
This level is a little unpolished so please forgive any broken visuals...
Pretty neat, right? You can probably tell I struggled a little bit here. I didn't personally design the Irodori puzzles (though I did code them) and I find them pretty challenging, but they're certainly fun!
In case the video doesn't really explain it, the concept here is that you have two switches, a red/blue one and a green/yellow one. Objects activate or deactivate depending on which colors are currently visible. All switches of the same color are linked as well, meaning that every red/blue switch will match every other red/blue switch, etc.
It's Kat!
Art by Kale Rion
Here she is, the final main character to be announced for The Girl from Arkanya! Princesa Katarina Maria Sancho de Castilla! Although you've probably heard references to her already. If you've played our beta tests, you already know pretty much everything is her fault! It's frustrating how little I can say about this character, because almost everything about her would be a big story spoiler... But I have a prediction! I think for many of you, Kat will be your favorite character of the entire game. But just as many of you will hate her! Whichever side you fall on, I hope you enjoy the chaos she introduces to the story.
The Kickstarter editor doesn't like how much media I've put in here, and is starting to crash repeatedly, so I guess that's my cue to wrap up!
Sorry for the lack of any real news this time. I'm hoping I'll have something to actually announce in the next update, assuming the coming month isn't quite as difficult as the last two. Either way, thanks again and I'll see you next time!
-Bean, Arkanya dev
Merry Christmas everyone! Time for an update!
over 1 year ago
– Wed, Dec 28, 2022 at 02:37:19 AM
Hello everyone, I hope you've all had a Merry Christmas! And for those who don't celebrate, I hope you've had a generally chill weekend! We certainly had a "chill" weekend here, though not exactly the kind with good vibes. It got down to -30F/-34C here, in the middle of the day. Lowest I've seen the temperature go in my lifetime has been about -40F, so this was pretty darn close! The wind started pulling down my Christmas lights, so I went outside fully bundled up, for less than two minutes! Worst two minutes ever. I immediately knew I'd made a mistake but fortunately those were not my last two minutes on earth, and I had some good coffee waiting for me inside.
Alrighty, let's get down to business.
So! By now you're probably wondering, where the heck even is Arkanya in development at this point?
Well good news! The answer is pretty darn far along. I'm going to go more into some of these but here's the bird's eye view first.
Things left to add:
2 dungeons
3 bosses
Half of 2 overworld zones
22 cutscenes
4 Dialogue portraits
5 Enemy AI types
1 Map menu
4 music tracks
Out of this whole list, the cutscenes give me the most anxiety honestly. Cutscenes are -slow- to make, painfully slow. But I'm getting faster at them over time.
Here's what a typical cutscene with minimal movement looks like in the editor
That's pretty mild though. Here's a real cutscene!
Of the 22 remaining cutscenes, about 18 are like the first kind, and 4 are like the second kind. I want to say... 17 are done so far? So a little less than half. A cutscene can take anywhere from an hour to a full workday to make depending on various factors. I think only the second one I posted there has ever gone over a day to make, but as you can imagine, not a lot of cutscenes get made early in development. It's more of a "finishing touches" sort of thing.
Got a couple of new enemy types that weren't functional before, but now are. Or they've been majorly reworked. So here's a look at those
I think you've maybe seen the bow pirates before? Well now they shoot in 8 directions! Reduces a lot of the awkwardness the enemy had before. Fortunately for you as the player, they can't change their aim once they start drawing the arrow back. Believe me, you do not want these guys to be super accurate, because rooms with 3+ of them are already terrifying!
Then we have the bombakuras, which have their AI functional now. I was hoping he'd explode next to the pirates and show you how they damage everyone around them (not just you) but I messed it up and wasn't about to set the whole thing up again.
The Kroka have also been updates to be 8-directional shooters. Additionally, their shooting is no longer random, but actually based on where Marisa is (or rather, where she was when they started shooting)
Snakes previously would run along a set path and not react to the player in any way. Now the snakes will patrol randomly around their area very slowly. When they spot a player, they will gradually approach, until they get into striking range. Then, they rapidly lung forward!
Alright next up, new portraits from Kale! I love doing dialogue so naturally getting dialogue portraits is my favorite part of any update.
These are for Kaegra (top left) Amanayara (top right) and Rafael (bottom left)
And hot off the tablet, Kale sent me a sketch for an Indira portrait while I was writing this
And finally, how about something I don't think I've ever showed before outside of Discord.
SPOILER WARNING: AHEAD IS GOING TO BE MOST OF THE OVERWORLD MAP! This is probably the biggest game spoiler we're ever going to show in a KS update, so stop here if you don't want to see it. This will be the final part of the update so you won't miss anything if you just close it right now!
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A little background info on this map. Firstly, it's our fourth(?) and final iteration on the overworld map. I'm really bad at saving old WIPs (and in July of last year my HDD with a bunch of the really old Arkanya stuff died suddenly) but I'd like to do a side-by-side with some of the old designs if I ever find any of them. Or I could just whip up an MS Paint drawing. I more or less remember what the first version looked like.
So one fun bit I can share is that the blue-ish bit at the bottom with a few red squares? That's called "Upper Jungle" in the game files (in the story it's called Puru Puru)
Meanwhile, the green-er area above it is called... Lower Jungle. Despite being both above the Upper Jungle on the map, and higher in elevation. Why is this? Well, because in version 2 of the overworld map, the blue-ish area was north of the green area. Their positions got swapped, but it was easier not to rename them.
Let's see, what other fun facts can I throw out here... The big brown area, known as Upper Windberg/Umarama (depending on if you're Arkanyan or Marajoaran) used to look dramatically different but was kind of the exact same aesthetic as the starting forest, but with cliffs. I actually completely remade that map in a single night when I couldn't sleep. It does still need some detailing, however.
Lower Windberg, the area below that, was originally the largest part of the whole map. It has since become, ironically, the smallest overworld zone. This is due to a number of factors. Some of the content was moved, some of it was delayed for the post-launch update, and some of it was just cut entirely. So now Lower Windberg is a teeny tiny road and Costa Verde (bottom right) is heckin huge.
Well folks, Kickstarter is beginning to do the thing where the editor is struggling because I added too many pictures/videos, so I suppose that's a good sign to wrap things up. Please look forward to our next KS update in February. Until then, thank you all for your continued support and have a wonderful new year!
-Beanbandit, Arkanya dev
October Update!
over 1 year ago
– Fri, Oct 28, 2022 at 06:10:08 PM
Hello again! Wow this month just zoomed on by. I'm half-convinced my calendar is gaslighting me and we're just skipping days. Anyway, I have no plan for this KS update so I'm going to start uploading content and we'll see where it takes us! I promised you a long one this time, so let's get to it!
Let's start off with some art stuff because that's my favorite part. Kale sent me some preliminary sketches of the dialogue portraits for Shaman Kaegra, and they look outstanding!
I want to point out again that Kale had zero experience with anime-style characters before Arkanya and learned the style only because I asked her to. What a legend
Speaking of-
Just a completely normal guide to drawing Marisa. Don't think about it too much.
And then finally for Kale we have... another sticker design! Did you get the sticker tier in the campaign? You're gonna get one of these!
Kale wanted me to let you all know this is a WIP and she's still working on it. Looks pretty good to me though!
Wow that ended up way bigger than I thought it was. Wonder if it'll be that big when you're reading this?
So I think I personally worked on like a million different little things these past two months, and a lot of it is kind of a blur at this point, but one huge part of that was taking a lot of our placeholder enemies and turning them into... not placeholder enemies
You might notice we're really bad at making really monstrous-looking enemies. Everything is pretty cute and friendly-looking. But maybe the real monster is you for killing them? I know you all come here for deep philosophy, after all.
You know what's super difficult, as I've found out recently? Humanoid ranged enemies. I don't have footage to show you yet, but those pirates with bows have some nightmarish decision trees. They have to first decide if its more efficient to align themselves with the player on the X or Y axis, then avoid obstacles while doing it. As they are now, they frequently fail at this, and the more complex the environment is, the more they fail. Enemy AI is something that continues to get tweaked over time and will probably receive changes right up until the end of development, so hopefully they'll feel a lot better by then.
Have you seen the Kokura yet?
These guys come in three variations: Young Kokura, Flying Kokura, and Elder Kokura.
The thing with the Young Kokura is that they attack in groups, but flee if they're alone. They're not very brave!
The frightened Kokura won't attack, so you can leave them alone if you're feeling nice. But their leaves are used in a very powerful potion, so its your call!
Let's see... oh, we brought back the animated flowers! Honestly I don't remember why we got rid of them. It was during a period when there was a lot of experimenting going on with how maps were created/imported/rendered so maybe it had something to do with that. But I missed them so now they're back!
I really hate when nothing on the screen is moving, because of how lifeless it makes the world feel. We don't really have the resources to do cool windy trees like some games have these days, but the flowers are a quick, simple, and fun substitute!
I'm pretty sure I didn't show you this one yet:
Due to feedback from a couple testers, including a certain Max Mraz (creator of Ocean's Heart, 10/10 game, go check it out) we realized that for people who don't play The Girl from Arkanya for hours each day, the Kapi controls were kind of hard to memorize. Too many similar but slightly different buttons all together in a close space. Lots of puzzles failed due to wrong button presses.
As you can see in the video, Swap, Teleport, and Follow/Stay are all mapped to a single context-sensitive button which brings up a radial menu!
"BUT BEEEEEAAAAAN!" you respond. I can hear you saying it right now. "THAT'S SO MUCH SLOWER!" yeah tell me about it, I couldn't stand it the first time I used it. But good news! In that half-second before the menu appears, if you already know the direction for the option you want to pick, you can just do it without waiting! The action will execute the moment you press the right combination of buttons, regardless of if you can see the menu.
"BUT BEEEEEAAAAAN!" you say again because I assume you're like our discord users, "WHY NOT HAVE THE MENU BE INSTANT?!"
Good question, I actually asked myself that a few times. But it was really annoying to have it that way, because for experienced users who can do the button combo without looking, you had a menu flashing in your face for like 1/10th of a second for no reason. So there's a little delay baked in to give those users time to do the action without having the guide appear.
Let's see what else I've got in the ol' gameplay footage folder...
Here's the shop where you can upgrade (some of) your bags! That was a pretty major feature we'd been lacking until recently, but it's finally ready! Note that some bags are upgraded at other locations, so you'll need to find those!
Bonus health (the blue hearts) is extra health that slowly degrades over time. Because of their temporary nature, bonus health items are much more potent than regular health items! Additionally, you can use them to exceed your maximum health value, making them valuable to use before periods where you expect to take high damage, thus preserving your normal health pool!
There are currently plans to make one of the shaman dances interact with bonus health, but its not certain which one yet. It's possible that it will be the Earth dance, because that one currently is only used outside of combat, but we'll see.
And then here I want to show off a very WIP look at how certain quest interactions work. Please note that a LOT of the visuals in this video are either placeholders or unfinished.
What's important about this video though is that it shows a situation where certain objects in the world appear as a result of a quest the player has, and those objects can be interacted with. That really doesn't sound like a big deal now that I'm writing it down (it's a basic feature of any RPG in the last like 25+ years after all) but it's actually kind of a big deal to implement a system like that, and have that, the quest system, and the save system all working together properly.
Next up, we have a (sort of) new music track to show off! If you played to the end of our demo build, you've already heard this one, but for everyone else, please enjoy!
I hope you like it, because while it only makes a brief cameo in the demo, this song gets used a LOT in the full game.
Finally, I hate to end on a bit of a low note but it's been requested that I reduce our KS updates to every other month going forward. We're rapidly approaching the end of our development time, and apparently I spend too long writing these. That and, admittedly, its getting harder to come up with content for them without spoiling the entire game.
So that's what I'm going to be doing. The next update will be around Christmas, and the one after that in February. If that's not enough Arkanya news for you, please join our Discord and you can ask me whatever questions you want!
We'll have to see how we're doing on time once development is done, but its likely that I'll go back to more frequent updates between then and our release date.
Thank you and please have a wonderful week!
~BeanBandit, Arkanya dev
Quick update: Arkanya KS update postponed to October
over 1 year ago
– Tue, Sep 27, 2022 at 08:30:23 AM
Good morning, everyone! Unfortunately I have to inform you that the new update will be next month. The workload this month has been quite a lot, both with Arkanya and my other job, and there just hasn't been time to put together an actual update letter.
I will be setting aside time in October to ensure that we put together a very lengthy KS update, so please look forward to it!
Until then, I hope you have a wonderful month.
~BeanBandit, Arkanya dev
August update!!!
over 1 year ago
– Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 02:01:26 AM
Holy cow this month flew by! I meant to get this to you much earlier in the month but, well... I wanted to show you guys some cool stuff and by the time it was ready, most of the month had gone by!
First off, thank you so much everyone for making our Backerkit closing almost entirely painless! I just about had a heart-attack when we initially closed it out and my goodness, hardly any of the money came in!
I thought to myself, oh no, they're going to cancel their orders. They've lost faith in us and now we're in a pickle...
I worry over nothing! Obviously our backers are the best there's ever been, and you've supported us through everything. Within just two days, almost every single failed order had been corrected, and we got the money we need to produce everyone's Kickstarter rewards! Plus we got a bunch of new last-minute orders!
Speaking of which, Kale has been hard at work on completing the designs for those, when she's not working on in-game portraits. Go check out what she's been up to! >>> https://twitter.com/Pinkedalink
Here's some of her latest portraits:
It's the Ocean Shaman, Amanayara!
Thank you to everyone who tried the Arkanya multiplayer!
55 of you downloaded the updated Arkanya demo with multiplayer over the last two months! That's honestly not bad!
Not as stunning as our previous build which totaled almost 200, but I feel like a lot of you are tired of this demo and just want to get to the full game. I'm right with you on that! It's gettin' there.
Anyway! Little more fluff content, August 31st is Marisa's official birthday!
Here's a very early sketch Kale did of Marisa, that feels practically ancient to me now...
Have I told you all before that Marisa predates the Arkanya setting? By like a lot? Her design has evolved a little bit but she's been my most-used OC for the better part of 10 years now. She starred in two previous game projects, both of which got scrapped pretty early on, but which created the foundation for Arkanya. We often joke that I came up with Arkanya purely to get people to make more art of Marisa, and there's honestly a little bit of truth to that!
So happy birthday, Marisa! I hope everyone looks forward to half the art book just being about you!
The Man from Castile
Please note that this fight is still incomplete and unbalanced, and some of the visuals are placeholders (such as the barrels locking the room). Additionally, the boss voices are placeholders, and we actually have a session scheduled with Rafael's new VA tomorrow! You'll be hearing his true, glorious voice very soon!
With that out of the way, I present Captain Rafael Fidalgo Diaz de Castilla!
Creating Rafael was quite the ordeal, and of course there are still improvements to be made. Unless the previous 3 bosses, Rafael is much less of an 'on-rails' experience. Other bosses have tightly-controlled movements and attack patterns, and will behave more or less the same every time you fight them. But Rafael, much like the Stormwitch, is given a kit of abilities, and a decision tree to decide which ability he wants to use. He is the first boss in the game which changes his behaviors depending on what the player is doing. Which is why, despite being pretty easy at the moment, I find him to be the most enjoyable boss yet.
And then we have the finished model for Amana, the Ocean Shaman (Which you may recognize from the portraits further up)
Alright, now that the fun stuff is out of the way, let's dive into something really technical and boring!
How to build a better monkey
So one of the things which has always plagued Arkanya's development has been the awkwardness of enemy navigation. Enemies have always had a really hard time moving around corners, handling walls between them and the player, and avoiding things like deep water or holes. Also, their patrol routes were all pre-determined, which took forever to configure on each enemy.
While things weren't too bad with non-humanoid enemies, it always really bothered me how humanoids would bumble about like idiots, and I couldn't give them interesting patrol routes for fear they'd get stuck. Humans should be smarter than monkeys! We'd like to think, anyway.
But I remembered this video I saw awhile back, and I decided to revisit it.
BTW This is not a cross-promotion but I still encourage you to go follow GameEndeavor. He makes awesome dev logs and they're just fun to watch. Here's his twitter if you wanna see his game he's working on: https://twitter.com/GameEndeavor
Anyway, I'm not really a math guy, so this whole Dot Product thing was a foreign concept to me. I also just don't like working with raycasts, but I was so intrigued by how he was using them.
Now, this isn't a tutorial for devs so much as a dev log targeted at his fans. So the info is pretty light on the technical side and is more geared toward entertainment value and showing off his game. But there was a surprising amount of info that could be learned just from watching his visuals (and I watched it probably 50 times) and dissecting what was happening. GameEndeavor is a Godot user, but the ideas transfer over to Unity just as well.
Before I dive into the code, here's a video of some monkeys chilling around some rocks, so you have some reference for what I'm talking about.
Red lines represent "dangers". This doesn't mean they're dangerous, that's just what they were called in the literature linked by GameEndeavor in his video. A danger is any direction which leads the enemy into an obstacle, another enemy, or takes it further from it's goal.
Yellow lines are undesirable paths. These are paths which could be taken, but much better paths exist so they're not considered as much.
Green lines are desirable paths. These are weighted more heavily because they are clear of obstacles, and they get our enemy closer to it's goal!
So we have all our lines, now what?
Well, our enemy needs to make an informed choice based on all the info it's gathered. The 'Resolved Array' is the result of subtracting dangers from interests. This means that even if a direction takes our enemy toward it's goal, but there's a 'danger' in that same direction, that direction will score lower.
Once we get all of these values, we simply add up the values of every direction, average them out, and that gives us our chosen direction! In the monkey video, that's represented by the blue line.
Now here's where I had to get really clever, because nobody else was talking about this. That's the Wall Problem.
What a predicament! So here we have a monkey, a rock, and Marisa. The rock is directly between monkey and Marisa, so he can't go forward. He doesn't want to go backward, so his options are left, or right. But both left and right are equally desirable, so what happens when we average them together? Yup, the monkey runs straight into the rock.
Maybe I could have done something fancy here. But why? Fancy is scary, I like simple.
All this is doing is looking in the direction the enemy has chosen, and seeing if there's a wall there. If there is one, the enemy will instead go in the direction of the first green line in the list. In the future, I'd like to randomize that a bit more, so that directions lower in the list aren't prioritized so much.
But this was about making humanoids look better, so let's check out some pirates. Now for some reason I think humans look better if they prioritize cardinal directions instead of diagonals. Maybe I'm biased because of Link to the Past soldiers?
Please appreciate how they DONT walk into corners and start spinning. They used to and it took SEVEN HOURS to fix! They're still a little jittery but worlds better than before!
And last but not least, here's the system in action when the player gets involved
