Quick update
over 2 years 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 3 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!
about 3 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 3 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

October Update!
over 3 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