October Update!
about 2 years 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-

 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.

So now we have a radial menu.

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!

We also have bonus health! 

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
about 2 years 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 2 years 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

Also kinda jittery, but that will improve over time.

Alright, well that's all I've got for you today! Thank you and I'll see you next time! Have a wonderful weekend!

~BeanBandit, Arkanya dev

July Update: Treasure hunting with friends!
over 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!

If for some reason the image doesn't work, you can find the download here:  https://arkanyagames.itch.io/the-girl-from-arkanya 

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!
over 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: 

And here's a baby version just because it's cute

Thanks everyone, and have a wonderful day!

-BeanBandit, Arkanya dev