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:
July Update: Treasure hunting with friends!
almost 2 years ago
– Tue, Jul 12, 2022 at 10:34:18 PM
HEY HEY!
So technically I (Bean) still have covid, but I've been feeling great for a few days now and we finally got the newest build ready! Actually, it's been ready for awhile now but I needed a partner to test it with, and wouldn't you know it, Rob also had covid! Except his case was a big rougher than mine so he didn't want to come play until last night.
And we recorded one of our test runs! Check it out!
I left my mouse in the middle of the screen for the first quarter of the video or so, please forgive me for that...
Despite having been tacked on as a KS stretch goal, after spending several hours playing multiplayer (and countless hours solo) I can definitively say that this is the best way to play The Girl from Arkanya.
Anyway, same drill as last time! Click the image to go to itch.io, enter the password, and download the demo build!
NOTE: You must first meet Kapi in-game to unlock multiplayer!
Last time a whopping 144 of you downloaded the demo! Wow! I hope even more of you were holding out to play it in multiplayer!
For Rob and I, the demo ran almost without a hitch, but we have a habit of playing the game exactly how it was meant to be played. So please let us know if you find any weirdness with multiplayer or... well, anything!
Changes made in this update:
Multiplayer has been enabled! Note: You must first meet Kapi to unlock multiplayer.
UI adjustments have been made for both solo and multiplayer.
Marisa and Kapi have both had their primary attack reworked. This should resolve all issues with the attack hitboxes bugging out.
Stability adjustments have been made to the grappling hook.
A small portion of the zone Upper Windberg has been added to the playable area. This is due to a change in the flow of the overworld map.
An issue has been resolved where the context button for beer did not properly display in the Bierhaus.
Adjustments have been made to the Pora Iandara map to accommodate the new entrance to Upper Windberg.
A popup has been added to inform players when they have completed the demo.
Various minor systems adjustments
Thank you everyone, and I apologize for the unusually short update this month. Hopefully the 18 minute video and demo download makes up for it!
-BeanBandit, Arkanya Dev
Mini-Update: Bean got covid edition!
almost 2 years ago
– Fri, Jul 08, 2022 at 05:24:13 PM
Hi guys! Just wanted to let you all know that the release of the multiplayer demo might be a couple days late. As you might guess from the title, I got covid! Which has honestly not been a big deal so far. I've been pushing forward as planned as much as I can, but sometimes it gets a little rough and I either go to something easier like working on the overworld map, or enemy animations, or I'll just sleep.
Anyway, please don't worry about me because I have very mild symptoms and I'm pretty well chillin. But I don't want to promise that the multiplayer demo will be ready this week, and then I have a few unexpectedly bad days or something.
The new build is looking pretty solid, we just need to fix some broken UI elements and tune the multiplayer camera for several differently-sized rooms within Dungeon 1. I've also received multiple complaints that the demo never explicitly tells you that you've completed it, so I would like to get something in for that as well.
And so you at least get something fun out of this update, here's a WIP preview of Kale's next sticker for the Kickstarter sticker pack:
Art by Kale E. Rion
And here's a baby version just because it's cute
Art by Kale E. Rion
Thanks everyone, and have a wonderful day!
-BeanBandit, Arkanya dev
June Update! Let's go!
almost 2 years ago
– Wed, Jun 29, 2022 at 01:11:45 AM
Hello again to all of our wonderful supporters and boy do we have a lot to tell you this time!
I know some of you missed us last month, and I hope we didn't worry you with our brief absence. I debated for awhile whether or not we'd do an update for May, but with how hectic all our schedules were and how little I could show/announce at the time, ultimately I decided to put that time into the game itself. I've probably mentioned this before, but sometimes preparing these KS updates can take the better part of a work day, and we had a -lot- going on last month. Let me tell you about it!
Art by Kale E. Rion
So first off, congratulations once again to our artist Kale on her wedding last month! Rob and I flew to the opposite side of the country to attend, which ended up being an almost 2-week endeavor for us. Fortunately, a lot of that was downtime and I was personally able to 'stage' all of the remaining overworld map as well as another dungeon map, which we'll get into later. We also dealt with Rob moving halfway across the state which was a bit of a hassle, but ultimately there's not too much to report there.
I, on the other hand, had no major life changes these last two months, but I do have two important announcements to make today!
The Arkanya Backerkit will close on July 27th!
Oh our poor, neglected backerkit. We never really gave it the time we should have, there was always so much else to do. That's no problem for those of you who ordered products, by the way. It just probably kept us from getting as many orders as we potentially could have. But the end of Arkanya development is now in sight, and because of that we must soon tie up the loose end that is our backerkit. We need to lock in an exact number for all of the products so that we can budget for production, and of course any remaining money is going to help with getting us through the final leg of development. So if you have any last-minute merch wishes and would like to support us, please get those orders in ASAP!
So Kale and I have embarked on a little side-project together to try and pull in a bit more funding for Arkanya. So far met with little fanfare, but we're still optimistic. As you all know, development has gone well beyond our original estimation (and you all have the patience of saints, by the way, so thank you all once again for sticking with us!) and naturally we've had to stretch our budget much further than we thought we'd have to. Fortunately Rob is a very money-minded man and I somehow just don't spend money. So we've managed to stay within our Kickstarter budget literally this entire time. Thank goodness the campaign was so wildly successful, all of course due to you guys, but we have stretched that money as far as humanly possible I think. I don't know, maybe I could have eaten less cheese.
100% of the money we earn from this tileset will go directly toward getting Arkanya over the final development hurdle, reducing the amount of time we have to spend making money elsewhere. If you're a gamedev hobbyist, an up-and-coming indie dev, or you're just a diehard believer in Arkanya and you want to toss us a couple bucks, please give it a look!
The tileset is Arkanya-themed, and we're even working on a little backstory to go with it as we continue to update the set. However, the art is generalized enough that you can use it for almost any top-down RPG-style game, and purchasers are free to use the tileset in commercial projects!
As of writing this, we have not yet completed the character and enemy sprites, but those are on the way this week!
Back to your previously scheduled Arkanya content~
Hopefully I didn't lose you with all the self-promo up front. All for the sake of the game and the team, though!
So obviously you're here because you want to know what's going on with The Girl from Arkanya and there's a lot to say!
Co-op build of the Arkanya demo coming in early July!
Yup, we did it! Co-op is finally implemented in a fully-usable state! We've still got some stability testing to do but my goal is to have a new build available for you all by next week. You'll know because I'll make a follow-up post. I was originally planning to have it available this coming weekend, but I was recently reminded that I agreed to be in Chicago this coming Friday. I will still attempt to have it ready ASAP but first I have to finish the promised update for the tileset pack.
Before you watch the video, please forgive me for two things in advance
1) Its super loud
2) I was alone while recording this, and I only have 2 hands so it's not very interesting
Next time Rob is over here, I'll record some co-op with him. Or better yet, you can experience it yourself next week!
If you were wondering what happened to the bug fix update we promised a few weeks ago, this was what happened. I woke up one Monday morning and had a powerful urge to work on co-op more. And by that point I said, well heck with it. Let's get co-op in this next update. And here we are.
Before I send it out to you all, there's two remaining things that must be done. Firstly, Kapi's part of the HUD isn't activating during co-op, and I think I know why, but I need to section off some time to get to the root of that. And secondly, co-op stays active even if you exit to the main menu and load a different save. Which would be fine except for when its a new save that doesn't have Kapi yet, which breaks the whole darn game! And of course I have to test the heck out of it, which is tricky when I'm just one guy controlling two characters!
So I really hope you'll grab a controller, invite a friend, and give the Arkanya demo another go so you can experience multiplayer with Kapi, and provide us valuable feedback along the way.
Alright lets backtrack a bit here, what the heck did you mean by "staging" earlier?
That's a brilliant question, and thank you for asking because that helps me transition right into my next topic, map stuff!
So when we talk about staging a map, you can kind of think of that like creating the foundation and frame for a house. You can tell the shape of the house, and where the rooms are going to be, and how they're all going to connect to each other, but you don't necessarily see where the cabinets are getting hung up, or which rooms will have carpet. This step is mostly to determine the shape and flow of the overall map. Is staging really the right word for that? I have no idea but its the term we use internally.
My computer sure hated me taking this picture
As you can see, some areas are highly developed while others are more blueprints than anything. Now that it's all assembled, there's a clear development progression from right to left, save for a few heavily developed pockets on the left (SPOILERS! Those are areas critical to the story, hence why they got created first!) Until recently, this was all just a disorganized collection of maps with no finalized position in the greater overworld, but now everything has settled into it's final location, and our next major goal (aside from the co-op demo of course) will be to have the overworld more or less finished. I have a decent bit of travelling I have to do coming up, and that's always the best time to focus in on fleshing out the world map since it's something I can easily do from a laptop, where as work within Unity (system development, combat tuning, programming bosses, all that fun stuff) is much easier to do at my home station.
Even with the big swaths of undeveloped areas, having the overworld pieced together like this is really fun and satisfying for the team. We can drag-and-drop in all the things that previously were confined to the testing rooms, and we can walk around feely and finally experience Arkanya as a big open world.
Something you probably noticed is the big gaps in the map. When the game was in planning way back at the beginning of development, we envisioned a roughly square world that all fit tightly together, like you'd see in any 2D Zelda game. However, it's truly amazing how efficiently the Zelda developers (and Capcom devs for that matter) always use their space, and we could not match that efficiency. So it became much easier for us to do the map this way, and not worry about it being a perfect rectangle. It doesn't really harm the gameplay experience, in my opinion. It just doesn't look as nice when you see it all at once, I suppose?
I'm getting ramble-y again, so let's move on to the final thing for today.
SnitForSnat on twitter made this wonderful fan art of Marisa! Please show her some love and give her a follow on twitter if you don't mind! She's also currently doing a sticker giveaway for her followers, so check that out!
Well that's all I've got for today! You should be hearing from me again next week, so please look forward to that!
Thank you and have a wonderful day!
-BeanBandit, Arkanya dev
April Update Part III: Return of the Update
about 2 years ago
– Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 04:41:59 PM
Hello again! BeanBandit once more, did you notice the last update wasn't from me? Anyway I have something very wonderful to share with you today! Please stick around to the end!
But first, you know how I love fan art and fan artists? Well I do, so let's all take a moment to praise and appreciate Lemonie from the Arkanya discord server who painted this incredible portrait of our favorite treasure hunter:
Art by Lemonie
And I'm just now realizing she didn't sign it. You guys should sign your fan art! I like seeing the artist's signature, plus you should take credit for things you worked hard on!
Next up, as promised we have footage from HourADayGamer's stream of our new demo!
This stream had a -lot- of technical issues and Hour's internet provider was just not playing nice with us, but he did an incredible job given the circumstances! And I've prepared a sort of "highlights reel" that cuts out all of the internet issues and tries to focus on the most interesting parts of the broadcast. I believe the original stream ran almost 3 hours but I've condensed it into an action-packed 1-hour video, so please enjoy if you have the time!
HourADayGamer (follow him here on twitter!) has been a huuuuuuge supporter of Arkanya over the years and he came back from his streaming hiatus early just for us! So please go show him some love.
I remembered to package it in a zip folder this time because, as I found out the hard way last time, not everyone has Winrar! At one point we actually used an auto-installer but that apparently was alarming to some people so we were asked to just use a zip folder.
Please be aware that this is simply the preview version, and the final release of the demo will have the following improvements:
Better consistency on the sword hitbox
Additional NPCs
Reduced treasure spawn rates (They're crazy high right now)
Additional sound effects
Power upgrades from boss loot
Better stability on the quest log
UI Improvements including an area map
Along with various bug fixes. However, please do not let this discourage you from playing and enjoying this preview version of the demo. It should be completely stable and nearly (or completely) bug-free in normal gameplay. However, if you do find any issues with the demo and would like to get involved in our testing community, please join our Discord! https://discord.gg/GadHNKYBcu
That's all for now! See you soon!
-BeanBandit, Arkanya dev
Emergency follow-up update: "I sent you a broken build" edition
about 2 years ago
– Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 12:44:32 PM
Hi guys! Bean again! I messed up. Bad. But I also have the solution!
So I sent you all a very broken build, and I am incredibly sorry for that. Long story short, I messed up a few settings trying to fix one bug, and caused another much worse bug. One where the game could not save any quest data, resulting in the first quest just repeating forever.
To those of you who tried to play the game yesterday and could not, I sincerely apologize and I hope that you will give it another try now that we've resolved the issue. It was almost midnight when we were first told about the bug, but I moved as quickly as I could and got it patched up within the hour.
Please delete the existing file and download the new one here, by clicking the image:
Fixed an issue preventing quest progress from being saved, resulting in an endless loop on the first quest.
Fixed an issue preventing skipping on the opening cutscene from working as intended
Fixed an issue where the dungeon victory music would continue playing after the player had left the dungeon
I thank you all for your patience and hope this hasn't ruined your impression of our new demo. Please do not hesitate to DM me on discord or email me at [email protected] any time if there are further issues.
