August Update: Super Late Update Edition!
over 1 year 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
over 1 year 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!
almost 2 years 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)

February Update!
almost 2 years 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. 

 From the tremendously talented DakotaDraws  we have two fan arts today! 

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! Lots of fire!

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!

Hidden Lunar Chests, changes to dance activation

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!

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!
about 2 years 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. 

These are the Urkin, they're less of an enemy and more of a stage hazard with a face

These little dudes are known as Bakabura, and they are basically bipedal groundhogs. They don't enjoy the above-ground!

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)

Little update to the snake enemy as well:

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