June Update! Let's go!
over 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!
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!
https://the-girl-from-arkanya.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders
The Backerkit will be closed out one month from today, on July 27th
But before you do that, check out what we've got next!
We have a tileset pack on the itch.io store!
https://arkanyagames.itch.io/arkanya-pocket
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.
But of course, this has not been easy, and so we're finding ways to reduce our budgeting stress a bit. Hopefully, this new tileset will be one of those ways!
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.
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.
More fan art!
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
