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:
Arkanya's page is up on Steam, mates! Go check it out!
about 2 years ago
– Fri, Apr 22, 2022 at 05:29:17 PM
A special update today as we bring word of something well-anticipated and longed for... it's Arkanya's Steam page! With some cool snazzy new screenshots and a full-on description to help give you a lay of the land about the game (although you probably know it already, considering), consider giving us a hand by throwing us a good ol' wishlist on Steam. Just click here!
Each wishlist tells Steam that Arkanya's not only a game that people are after, it also tells Steam that Arkanya is indeed, a real game, and not a piece of shovelware! It's kind of tragic that even has to be said, but the platform is inundated with such a volume of... not very good things that there's certain activity metrics that need to be met before Valve now considers a game "real". A bit annoying, bit it is what it is! We appreciate all of you for backing the game and also giving us a good ol' helping hand here too.
And a final word on a shoutout...
And finally, a quick shoutout for another Zelda-like currently running a Kickstarter campaign, 'cos we know we all love Zelda here! Toasty: Ashes of Dusk is a Zelda-Earthbound mashup RPG, following the story of Marshall the Marshmallow Knight as he travels across the world to fight great evils, make weird friends while travelling parallel dimensions and... discover why he's a talking marshmallow.
Announcement! Demo live stream on April 23, demo backer preview available April 25
about 2 years ago
– Mon, Apr 18, 2022 at 04:05:56 AM
Oops! Spoiled the reveal in the title. Yes, our friend HourADayGamer is going to be streaming the official demo for The Girl from Arkanya on Twitch.tv this coming Saturday, April 23rd at 1pm Eastern Time!
At least one dev will be there answering questions and providing commentary (probably me but Rob too if I can get him tied to the chair in time), so please stop in and say hi if you can!
For those who aren't familiar, my man Hour is a legend in the indie game community, and he works hard to bring attention to underappreciated indie games. Hour was one of the first people to really see potential in Arkanya and publicly support it, and so once again we are giving him first dibs on our new content!
But you can play it too!
The current plan is to put the demo in our itch.io page, and send you all a link and password via our next update. This isn't just for the beta tester tier, but for all of our backers. The Steam version, which will be open to the public, is also on the way, and our Steam page is currently under review.
That part I can't give an exact date on because it's largely up to our publisher, and they've gotta run all their 9000 IQ marketing strats. I just make the game. They said I could give you all the hook-up though since you've been patiently waiting.
Anyway I gotta get back to bug testing so this demo can be super smooth for you guys, but first check out this art Kale is working on for the intro cutscene!
Bean that's not pixel art! Yeah I know, we're experimenting a bit with the style. The intro cutscene tells the origin story of Marajo, and sets up a lot of the premise of the Arkanya story. This, along with a handful of other images, will play at the start of a new game and give the player a little info about the land they're stepping in to. As you may have noticed, we took a lot of inspiration from the opening of Wind Waker, and game Rob and I have always greatly loved and I'm sure many of you love as well.
Kale does pretty much all of the non-pixel art and a lot of the pixel art as well for Arkanya, and you should totally give her a follow on her twitter: https://twitter.com/Pinkedalink
That's all for now! I'll catch you again in a few days!
~BeanBandit, Arkanya dev
March update!
about 2 years ago
– Mon, Mar 28, 2022 at 04:44:34 PM
Hello again! This is going to be more of a check-in than an actual update. Truth be told, I almost forgot to even do it this month. We've been absolutely buried in finishing our upcoming Steam demo and I honestly wouldn't have realized what day it was if I hadn't gotten an email notification from kickstarter.
Demo Info
I have a somewhat involuntary vacation coming up in May so the demo needs to be finalized before then. I can't say exactly when it will be up on Steam because we still need to coordinate with our publisher on that, and our steam page still needs to be made, but the demo itself should be done in 3-4 weeks and we should have a test version up in our discord this week.
Demo Stream
We've arranged to have an awesome indie game streamer play the Arkanya demo live on Twitch.tv late next month. I'll be sending out another short update once we have the date and time set on that, and we'd love to see you all drop in! It will also be announced several times on our twitter page. We also plan to get a recording of the stream and use that for a future update, so you'll get to see it eventually either way.
There's unfortunately just not a whole lot to show off this month aside from some progress on the updated UI art. March was largely about game sequencing, which more or less means that I was setting up instructions telling the game what events should happen in what order, and what effect those events have on the game world.
So in Arkanya, we have something akin to a quest system. If you've ever played an RPG where you talk to an NPC and they say "Go kill 5 squirrels and I'll give you 30 gold", that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. For Arkanya though, that's all done behind the scenes. It's presented just like a traditional Zelda game would be, but inside the program we have a list of "quests" the player can be on at any time. These quests can be set to Unassigned, Assigned, ReturnToNPC, or Complete.
On many, MANY objects throughout the game world, we have "Quest Listeners" which get notified every time the quest list updates. These quest listeners have instructions to react in certain ways depending on which quest changed, and how. So for example, here we have a merchant and his cart blocking Marisa's path outside the city of Arkanya. This is because she has not yet completed the first quest.
This gate is next to Marisa's house, so there was a high chance of new players just wandering off into the wilderness before they could understand the game or their goal, so we needed a way to keep everyone focused for at least a short while. You are, however, still free to roam about the majority of the city at this time.
But when we complete that first quest and return to the gate, we can see the merchant has finally left.
This is because the merchant had a quest listener on him, telling him to delete his character model (as well as his cart) once the first quest is complete.
There are hundreds of examples of this, with many being changes you won't even see, such as cutscene activators disappearing after the cutscene completes, stuff like that. And they take a little while to set up. Its a massive improvement over our original system though, where things like this had to be manually programmed and it was a really messy web of code that didn't always work. These days, it's all drag-and-drop for the most part, and it's 100% reliable (so far) which means it took about a week and a half to sequence one chapter worth of gameplay, as opposed to our original Kickstarter demo which had a fraction as much content yet took months to sequence.
Aside from that, the rest of the month was spent finishing cutscenes and bug-hunting. Arkanya is in a fairly stable state now but there's still a lot of polishing left to do before we launch this new demo, and we've still got 2 required music tracks before that goes out. Here's some updates on the UI elements I was teasing last month:
For those of you with the tester role in our discord, you should be able to go hands-on with the demo toward the end of this week. Bug me about it if you don't see it posted. It's basically ready to play right this minute, but I want to get more of the building interiors fleshed out first so you can explore and test more maps. However, sometimes I get so deep in my work that I forget about our testers, and next thing I know another month has passed. So don't be afraid to let me know you're waiting for it.
For everyone else who backed the game, I believe I can give you the PC version of the demo as soon as it's done, so you won't have to wait for the official release. Obviously things have not always gone according to plan for us, so please understand that this is what we are trying to do, not what's set in stone. However, the demo stream in late April is pretty much a sure thing at this point, and I see no reason why we can't give our backers the same version the streamer is getting.
I'm kind of just rambling now so I guess I'll get this wrapped up! Thank you all once again for your patience. I know you've all been waiting a very long time for this, so we feel truly blessed that this community has been so overwhelmingly supportive of us, still to this day.
You should be hearing from me again soon. Have a wonderful day!
~BeanBandit, Arkanya dev
February update let's do it!
about 2 years ago
– Wed, Feb 23, 2022 at 11:11:34 AM
Hello again! It's that time. Once again though I will try to go fast because I have to draw a bag this morning. More on that later!
This update includes a lot of audio that I really want you to hear, so please grab some headphones or wait until you can crank up your speakers, if you can! We've been working hard on our sound design and I think you're gonna get a kick out of some of these.
I apologize for two things in advance though:
1) These videos are kinda quiet, even after bringing up their volume a lot. This is because I am not very good with OBS and my audio settings were weird, but I didn't realize it until after I'd already recorded everything.
2) The floor in one part looks like it's sort of moving, or like there's a line going across it. Once again, this is an issue with my recording settings. I will try to learn to record better in the future.
Okay, here we go! First video!
The options menu is back!
We finally have an options menu! ...Again. Well, it's back and better than ever!
About 10 seconds in you get to hear Marisa singing (sort of, mostly humming) which was going to originally be used as a gag in our trailer, but we ended up going a different direction with that. However, we fortunately still got to use it in the audio options menu! Also, every day that I'm not allowed to show you guys our trailer is pain. I've been sitting on it for I think about 5 months now. It's so beautiful and I'm always thinking about what you'll all say when you see it. But you know the thing about marketing. Timing is everything.
...Alright Bean, get back on topic.
Wait no actually first-
Oh hey, actually, speaking of Bean and being off-topic, I wanted to tell you all about something super cool that happened to me. So for those of you who wonder why I always sign my name as ~BeanBandit on these, BeanBandit is my user name in Discord (join ours here!) and I started using that back when I was still slightly anonymous on the internet and Kickstarter didn't literally tell people where I live. Although to be fair, a lot of people see "Peru" and assume I'm from South America... Anyway, Bean Bandit is a character from the coolest manga/anime of all time: Riding Bean, by Kenichi Sonoda. When we were setting up the Arkanya discord, I had just recently come back from a signing with Mr. Sonoda, with a few new items to add to the uhh... shrine? So it was very on my mind at the time. Anyway I'm not even 1/100th as cool as the actual Bean Bandit but the name sort of stuck.
So why am I telling you all this? Because this happened:
Yes, the man, the legend himself, followed Arkanya on twitter. Now, let's keep things in perspective, he seems to follow just about anyone who talks about his work on twitter. But still! My favorite manga artist/director has at least seen Arkanya! That just feels so good.
Alright, thanks for letting me nerd out for a moment. Back to our scheduled content.
Options menu!
Okay, so make sure you look at the controller on the right when you watch this. I went through the menu twice so you can look at both sides
See how the buttons light up when you select them? How neat is that!
These menus took an unholy amount of time (pretty much nonstop working on them for... 5 or 6 days?) because I more or less had to create my own UI framework. See, originally I was using the Unity UI system, which technically has tools for all of this, but a lot of Unity's legacy UI system is really wonky, and their new UI system isn't recommended for production yet.
So where things went bad was in two places. First, Unity's legacy UI system is primarily made with a mouse and keyboard in mind. It can certainly work with controllers, but you can actually run into situations where nothing is selected and there's no way to recover from it. The other thing there is that button navigation is primarily done by "which button is closest to which other button", which is fine, except that there's no way to segregate buttons from each other. So your selector might just go off to another menu entirely, if it feels like it.
There are, of course, workarounds to those issues, but they involve a lot of coding. At that point, my thought was, well I can either program the Unity UI to avoid unwanted behaviors, or I can just make my own UI that is only capable of wanted behaviors. Basically, Unity made a UI that is meant to work for every game, but I wanted a UI that worked specifically for Arkanya.
But the last straw, the second thing, was the Scroll Rect component in Unity. As you can see in the video above, the controls list moves up and down as you move through it. This would normally be managed by a Scroll Rect, and for awhile it was. But I always had one of two issues, and they liked to swap back and forth. So the problem is you need something called a Content Size Fitter to make the group properly scroll. The Content Size Fitter would also, for some reason, force the entire group to the center of the window. I didn't want this. But whenever I did something to force it to stay where I put it, it would just stop scrolling.
I'm sure a Unity rep could have told me a hundred things I was doing wrong, but after like 5 or 6 hours trying to learn how this stupid thing worked, I said "heck with this, I could program the part of this I need in like 30 minutes."
And so I did. And then I proceeded to do the same thing with basically the rest of the options menu. The programming part really didn't take much time at all, it was mostly hooking everything up, and bug testing. Oh, and the UI art. We absolutely agonized over some art decisions.
And on the subject of art
Thank goodness, we finally replaced our super ugly save game slots. This just feels good to look at.
I had sort of wanted files to be nameable but that would require adding an on-screen keyboard, and that would eat up a lot of time that could go toward more useful features. So instead you pick a color for your journal.
Additionally, this screen shows which dances, you've obtained, your max health, what outfits Marisa and Kapi are wearing, how much money you have, and how many Words of Mara you've found. Words of Mara function sort of like heart pieces in a Zelda game, except they increase your stamina.
I also just finished this just yesterday, so it's not in the game yet, but this is the new background for when you open treasure chests. This might be my best pixel art ever? Turns out I can draw a heck of a box. My father is a bit of a carpenter and I've watched him create a few chests, so I had a lot of first-hand experience to pull from with this. Which brings me back to the bag. We have this cool background for chests, but Marisa's inventory still looks plain and boring. So I'm going to try to draw this in the same style:
Marisa's seemingly bottomless leg pouch where she somehow stores 20 weapons/tools/drinks and 40 assorted gemstones. This will probably be my biggest pixel art challenge in awhile but I'm feeling confident after that chest.
But wait! There's more!
Let's head down and visit Renzo. We're going to be talking to Renzo in the testing room, because I'm doing something in the city market I don't want to reveal just yet.
He's trying his best to fit in.
Now, behold! Renzo's table!
Isn't it marvelous? Now you might be thinking, "Wait, he's sitting in a field! Where's this table?"
Fair question, but we're in the testing room here. At his stall in the Arkanya market, he's got a table with a red cloth. And now it's the sale interface! This is still something of a WIP, because I'd like to add some gems and gold coins sitting on the table (you can probably see where I left room for them), but for now I'm absolutely delighted with how this came out.
More Alemoa footage!
As you may know, our very generous patron, Mr. Abdulla Ahmed Alzaabi, designed what ended up being the boss for Dungeon #1, Tia Iandara. This is the third, and fortunately, final time that we've made a boss for that dungeon, and I can say that with great confidence because I've tested this boss for hours and it's pretty awesome.
She also has grenades! The music was a bit loud here but I turned it down shortly after.
So much math went in to all of this. I actually needed calculus for the first time in my life. Why? Because her head rotates independently from her body, that's why.
Also you might need to full-screen to see it but we have on-screen health bars for bosses now, along with their name. The video player covers that with the time bar for me though.
After the robot politely informs you that you're about to die, things get pretty crazy.
This might look really hard but I promise you can beat it. It might take a couple tries, and you might need to go farm monkeys for treasure to get a few upgrades, if you really just can't dodge. But I have confirmed that with enough beer, you can get hit by every single attack in this fight and still win. As always, our aim is to provide enough of a challenge to players who want to speed through the content quickly, while also rewarding players who take a slow and steady approach. If you can't beat a fight, come back with better equipment and it'll be easier.
And then just like that, the boss explodes! I'm still waiting on the victory music from Rob so sadly there's no celebration dance today, but that's the gist of the fight! Thank you once again to Abdullah Ahmed Alzaabi for sponsoring this boss fight and being super easy to work with. I cannot overstate the influence he has had on not just this dungeon, but the entire game. And after hearing some horror stories from other devs about working with backers, we feel so blessed that he's been as great as he has.
And a little fan art to wrap things up
"Bean! You said you needed to go fast but this was one of your longest updates!" I can see the comments already. It did go fast though. I had a lot of material prepped and I was more excited to talk about it than usual. This was such a great month for development.
Anyway, I wanted to end this with a bit of fan art we got from GDN001 on Twitter who drew an adorable outfit swap between Marisa and their character, Kalia!
GDN is working on their own indie game, Kalia & the Fire Staff, which I just linked in 3 different ways so it should be pretty easy to find!
Reminder that the Arkanya team lives for your fan art and if you make Arkanya-related things, we will most likely share it on twitter and feature it in a KS update. Unless it's NSFW. In which case you'll have to settle for me privately telling you how awesome you are.
Alright, that's it! I'm being told to wrap it up, so that's all you get this time. Sorry I didn't do the enemy showcase I mentioned last month. The other stuff seemed cooler. We'll save that for a month where we don't have as much to talk about.
Take care, and I'll see you guys in the comments!
~BeanBandit, Arkanya Dev
January update: Kept you waiting, huh?
over 2 years ago
– Mon, Jan 31, 2022 at 05:23:59 PM
But seriously though, I do apologize for the wait. Any longer and this wouldn't be a January update.
Hello again and I hope you're all having a wonderful day! We're sort of playing things by ear right now over here, as we move into the QA and polishing stage of development for our Steam demo (and console demo as well!) so things have been pretty crazy lately. I'm putting a hard cut-off time on writing this update because there is still so very verymuch to be done today and tomorrow. So let's see how much I can write/screenshot in the next 3 hours. Things got a little weird with everyone's schedules this week and then we had some unexpected issues pop up in the game, so our plan to post a game build this weekend didn't go so well. But we're within a couple days of being able to do it, so it's not the biggest deal.
Internally, we've been testing almost nonstop for three weeks now, and you might be wondering why we don't just give everyone that build. Well, it's a little different when I, as the programmer, can sit down with somebody and set up scenarios for them to play through, as well as rapidly make adjustments to what they're playing. I can't realistically do that with all of you, but we are ALWAYS looking for more people to join our close-knit discord community and get more actively involved with the testing process. There are people in our discord who I will sometimes send a link at some ungodly hour of the morning like "hey fight this bad guy and tell me what you think" or "run through this cave and see if you get stuck". If that seems like the sort of thing that appeals to you, please get active in our community! Click here if you haven't joined our server yet and would like to. In addition to testing the game, we make small-talk, we post memes, we complain about how unbalanced Fire Emblem is, and depending on the day, you can even see me losing my sanity in real-time if our game engine is doing something weird.
But let's actually talk about the game itself now!
Most of my work this month wasn't very visual so you're going to get a lot of technical jargon from me, and Rob told me not to post any more music from now on because he cares more about keeping some surprises in the game than I do. Personally, everything I do is on the table. When you click on these updates you know what you're getting into. You know we're in spoiler territory.
Kale is here to save the day though, she's given me a bunch of new art this month.
First we have 2 new faces for Ari, a brand new portrait for Marisa's father, Barrett (God he's so handsome) and a portrait for our eccentric treasure-buyer, Renzo! Renzo may still be a work in progress so Kale please forgive me if I posted it early. The entire game is a work in progress though, that's kind of the point.
As you can probably tell, Kale has become a lot more comfortable with the art style we requested, and she's told me she wants to go back and re-do some of the earlier portraits, so we may eventually see a brand new Marisa or Kapi. However, right now she has far bigger things to focus on (such as our opening cutscene which we've recently finalized plans for) and we don't pay her nearly enough for how hard she's working, so I've told her to hold off on that for the moment.
She also sent me a new concept sketch which is super cute. If you're really good at remembering all of my various ramblings, you might recall that Ari looks up to Marisa as her role model, and wishes she could be a treasure hunter instead of a shaman.
For now this is simply concept art, but we've been tossing around ideas for a very long time now on what we could do with Ari in the future. At the very least, the current goal is to use one of Marisa's alternate skins to let you play as Ari, which is what this concept art was for. And I believe if I do some digging...
Yup! Here it is.
Way back when I had not yet realized just how long it would take to do all the different skins for Marisa (she has over 400 frames of animation that have to be redrawn per skin) I started working on a couple. Anyway long story short, let's get a working game completed and then we can add the cosmetics, huh?
Interface changes:
Something I actually just wrapped up yesterday (although it still needs one minor visual fix) was a pretty significant rework to how the equipping of items from the inventory happens, as well as how consumables as handled inside the inventory.
As I've mentioned before, a lot of Arkanya is built on top of the shell of what used to be Top Down Engine by More Mountains. I'm not sure it's creator would recognize it anymore, but once upon a time that's what it was. Well, in Top Down Engine, traditionally your equipped items and your inventory are two separate data structures that, though they communicate with one another, are treated as their own individual entities. Two problems came about as a result of this:
1) This meant that items were constantly getting moved back and forth between the inventory and the equipment slots, which would shuffle up your inventory and make it harder to keep organized.
2) There wasn't a very simple way to simultaneously track consumables in both the equipment slots and in the inventory, to make sure you didn't have duplicates (so say you had 2 things of beer in your inventory, instead of just 1 beer with multiple charges)
And then I was also getting feedback from testers saying they didn't like how they couldn't easily unequip all of their items. Why does that matter?
Well, you can't dance with the lantern out, meaning that for the first part of the game when all you have is a lantern and a sword, and you can't unequip the lantern, there's no way to dance. Our testers wanted to dance. And you know what? I wanted them to dance, too.
Now that's not to say that the Top Down Engine's system didn't already support unequipping items, it certainly does. But their system involves far more buttons than I wanted to include. They have a button for equipping, for unequipping, for moving, for dropping, for splitting stacks... And I said no, no way. That's too much. I want this to be simple, like most Zelda games. I want there to be one button to equip something, and then you press it again to unequip it.
There's only 2 buttons used here, X and Y. Couldn't be more simple. There is one further update I want to make here though, I want it to highlight the items which are currently equipped on their slots, and I want it to grey-out consumables which are at 0 charges. While our original inventory system was much clunkier and buggy, it did have both of those features, so it'll be nice to have them back on a version that actually works more often than not.
I added some tab icons to the top of the inventory screen. They look nice, right? I'd like to get the LT and RT buttons animated with the player's button presses but that's not majorly high on my priority list. These previously used written words which wasn't the best because different words have dramatically different sizes, and also it was going to require translating for different languages. I think these icons are pretty universal.
Music Player
I don't really have a way to show this but I made some pretty substantial improvements to our music player based on suggestions from Ivan at the Elementallis team.
We always had trouble with how our music would loop. There would always be a bit of a popping sound right at the loop point, which you might even be able to hear in some of the old builds we've put out. Rob and I fought over that a lot. I thought it was an issue with how he wrote the music. Rob thought it was an issue with how I coded the loop. If you didn't know, there's an inescapable fact about design teams which is that artists and engineers will fight. Pretty much always. But Ivan came in and saved our bacon here by showing us a different way entirely.
This is one of our music track objects, and it has a few key components. There's the intro, which is of course the beginning of the song. Then it has the body, which is the part that will play over and over. There's also an option for a tail, or the end of a song. We then have some time stamps.
How this works is that the intro will play for 31.47 seconds (for this specific song) and then the body begins playing. However, the intro does not stop. It carries on for another half a second or so, which allows all of the echo and reverberating notes to fully ring out before that clip ends, while the body clip is already going.
Then, when we reach 137.70 seconds, the same process repeats but this time with the body portion repeating. The original body gets to wrap up its business for another second or so, while the new body is getting started. This overlap prevents the aforementioned popping issue, while still allowing a looping point that is full of sound.
This process takes 3 separate music players all working together, to allow all of these tracks to properly overlap with one another. We also have a 4th "event player" which is used for when we want to play event jingles (like imagine you just opened a treasure chest) without interrupting the level music.
Traditionally what you'd do is your composer would carefully tailor loop points in a song to have as little "extra sound" as possible, so no echo, no reverb, no sustained notes, etc. In fact, the best thing is if your song straight up has a moment of silence somewhere in it, even if just for a fraction of a second. Chiptunes suffer a lot less from this because their sounds are naturally much more self-contained. But Rob loves him some reverb, so this solution was an absolute miracle for us. Thank you, Ivan!
Treasure!
Next up, I think we added 90ish new treasures? This is one of those tasks that's technically quite easy but nobody wants to do it. Each treasure needs a name, an icon, a price, a description, a rarity, and then a game object to interact with in the world. It's tedious labor but it had to be done eventually, and I finally got around to it late last month. I think by the end we want to roughly double what we currently have, so probably 200-250 unique treasures.
VisualUpdates:
I got some feedback that our torches were visually ambiguous and at least two or three people didn't understand what they were. I believe this was due to how dark and simple they were, they sort of just blended in with the scenery, especially in caves. This was a problem given that one of the first puzzles in the game requires you to light a torch to progress. So I spent some time looking at torches in other games and updated ours to be more visually striking.
This would have made a really good "before and after" but, you know, I always forget to record the "before" part.
As a side note, these torches are also the primary thing you'll be using to cross gaps with the grappling hook.
Marisa and Kapi also got new energy bar visuals. In case you don't recall, each character has an energy bar which allows us to more effectively balance items without giving them long cooldowns. So if you want to, for example, use the Wave Ribbon twice in a row and then immediately use Kaegra's Feather, you can do that, but then you'll be out of energy and have to wait for more actions. Most items use this system in some way, and you'll get a bigger energy bar as the game progresses.
Anyway, to get to the point, Marisa and Kapi's energy bars (they each get their own) have been simplified visually, while also using brighter and happier colors, similar to the health meter. We wanted the UI to match Marisa's personality a bit more, so gradually the whole UI has been getting reworked in this style. This is primarily just for the main HUD. The menus are going to get developed further but should roughly maintain their current styles.
SaveSystemUpdates:
This is another one that I can't really visually show you, but our dungeon instancing system is pretty much wrapped up and completed at this point. That's the thing that allows you to reset dungeons and run them over and over. Certain things have to be permanent, however, such as when you get a major item or get a health upgrade, otherwise the game would break. So there had to be a system for telling the game what progress to keep versus what progress to reset. This is all good to go now.
Additionally, we now have a system that can dynamically save the contents of randomly generated treasure chests. This means that if you find a chest but you don't have inventory space for everything inside, you can come back later and get the rest of it. Now what we haven't figured out yet is how we're going to have it decide when you've had enough time, and delete the chest. Obviously you don't want to have one chest permanently taken out of the spawn pool forever because you left it sitting with one nearly-worthless piece of junk inside it, right? So I'll be discussing that with our testers soon, and it will be resolved in time for the demo.
We also just the other day started work on the system which will allow player settings (such as volume, mainly) to persist between play sessions.
We've also added I believe 5 new enemies since our last update, but we've got 2 enemies to go before we've completed all of the enemy types for the demo, so I think what I'm going to do is save those for the February KS update, and do one big enemy showcase of all of them at once.
What's left to do for the Steam demo:
I just hit my 3-hour mark since I started on this, but part of that was me making breakfast and browsing twitter so I figure I owe you a few more minutes. Also I do apologize for how short this update is. I usually dedicate most of a day to prepping these but we are at a truly critical phase of development right now, and we have a very tight deadline to make.
So here's what we're doing in the coming weeks:
First, I need to make a real settings menu, something we've never fully had. I know, its insane that I put it off this long. But I hate UI work, I really do. I think most indie devs do, honestly. Next, we need to make adjustments to ensure that the player always properly transitions from gameplay to cutscenes, and back again, because the demo has a lot of them. After that the dialogue system needs audio. Things like character noises, confirmation sounds, etc. This is going to be an interesting one but shouldn't be too huge of a challenge. I believe most of the framework is already there. Several buildings still need interiors, although we may seal off some of these for the demo, depending on time constraints. Plus there's some random puzzle here and there which need sound effects, and we want to implement an event camera that shows you points of interest when you complete puzzles. And then last but certainly not least, we're waiting on Kale to complete both our company logo, as well as our big set-piece art for the intro cutscene. Once all of those things are complete, we shall have ourselves a Steam demo.
Oh... and we need to bug test like our lives depend on it. But almost goes without saying.
So once again thank you all for your continued support, and I will see you again soon!
