March update!
almost 3 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!
almost 3 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. 

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. 

I'm really bad at dodging the bullets. It's okay if you want to laugh at me.

So visually, there's nothing new here if you read last month's update. But if you turn your sound on... the robot talks! 

We based the voice on Alexa because as we all know, Alexa is an evil robot that would absolutely shoot lasers at us if she could. 

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?
almost 3 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 very much 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.

Also in case you didn't notice

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. 

Visual Updates:

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. 

Save System Updates:  

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! 

~Bean, Arkanya Dev

December update: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Hope you're ready for a long update!
about 3 years ago – Fri, Dec 31, 2021 at 07:46:22 AM

 EDIT: We've discovered an issue where some content in this update may not display on Firefox. Please consider using a different browser to view it. 

Hello again and I hope you all enjoyed your Christmas!  

 Before we get into the game stuff, Kale and I started on a little project together (by which I mean she did 90% of it) and I wanted to share that with you, especially since it's Christmas-relevant! 

Hopefully if the reference is lost on you, you'll at least find it cute! Kale and I have talked for a long while about trying to tell more of the Arkanya story via comic strips, so Christmas seemed like a good chance to test-run that idea. Of course this doesn't really reveal much about the game's story, but I like to think it adds a bit of personality to the characters at least. 

Anyway, this has been quite the month for us! We're still chipping away at getting our new public demo ready, and it's coming along quite nicely. Our beta tester tier backers have a chance to get your hands on that before anyone else, of course, and late January still seems like the time for that.  

So here's how that's going to work: 

In the coming weeks, we're planning to have a preview version of the demo specifically for our backers. It might be a little rough around the edges, maybe a few work-in-progress art bits here and there, but we'll be gathering feedback on that build which will then go toward polishing up our demo release. After discussing with our publisher, I believe the current plan is for that to include about 1/7th of the total game content. 

I need to check to be sure, but I think the test copies around going to be distributed via Backerkit. For those planning to play on console, I do apologize but our test versions are going to be PC-only at least for now. My understanding is that the actual demo should be available on a wider variety of platforms, but I don't want to tell you it's going to be on a specific console and then find out I heard wrong, so I'm going to hold off on promising anything until we make an official announcement.

With that said, make sure you do your Backerkit survey soon if you haven't already. Only about 50 backers have not filled theirs out yet, and I realize those probably aren't people who read our updates, but you never know.  

Speaking of unpolished content, I actually have several things I want to share with you today which are a little more "work in progress" than what I usually include here, but December was absolutely massive in terms of new game development, and I really want you all to see the scope of what we accomplished. 

So first lets start with the treasure system which you could almost say was rebuilt from the ground up this month. To be fair, the previous version was always very bare-bones, and most of the code from that version did get carried over in some way. However, in the interest of making a system that was robust, expandable, and easy to work with, it got some serious upgrades. 

By the way, UI design and UI programming are, in my opinion, two of the hardest parts of game dev. I'm pretty sure this is the 3rd or 4th version of the inventory/treasure menu that I've made, and it's the first one that actually works as intended all the time. It's difficult stuff. I actually just recently found a bug where this can happen to the player's health bar: 

I'll have that fixed before the next play test but wow, how does that even happen? I'll figure it out. UI is weird.

If you've played previous builds we've put out, you might remember that the treasure shop would just automatically take all of your treasure and give you money. That option still exists for convenience, but it's not very engaging, so I had always wanted to develop a full interface to allow you to individually examine and sell treasure items. Some of these items actually have multiple purposes, meaning you may not always want to sell all your treasure at once. 

So as you can see, the artistic side of the menu is still a little lacking, but the moving parts are all there. Poor Kale gets an endless string of art requests from me all the time, so it may be some weeks before either she or I get around to doing prettier versions of these menus. Hopefully her, she's the far better artist when it comes to this sort of thing. Worst case, I could probably ask her for a sketch which I could then pixel over, I can at least do that much. 

The HUD has also changed some as well. I felt it was getting too crowded previously, so a lot of elements are being made "temporary", in that they will fade in/fade out as needed. Things like the money counter will now only appear when they're updated. The energy bar will fade out when it's full. Controls which the player should memorize relatively quickly will no longer be displayed on-screen, but will instead be listed on the pause menu. 

Some other rather pointless things have been purged entirely. We used to have a display which would tell you if Kapi was currently idle or following you. But what purpose did that serve? You can just look at him to find that out. It was silly, so it's gone. 

And down in the bottom left here, you can see one new HUD element which has been added: The dance tracker. 

Some dances have effects which happen continuously until you dance again. I was asked not to put effects on the player model itself, so instead we have this little icon on the HUD which lets you know which dance is currently active. 

On a related note, you may remember that with the original dance system, you could make Marisa start dancing and as long as the dance window was open, she'd dance forever. Well, to bring the dance system more in-line with our overall design philosophy, we made several changes to how you interact with the dance system, and one of those changes made it so that the dance interface closes as soon as you release the button.  

However, I know based on some of our Youtube comments that folks really love our soundtrack and want to be able to vibe with Marisa and Kapi to the music. So to facilitate that, Marisa and Kapi will both start to dance if you leave them idle for a few moments while a dance effect is active! Kapi's dance isn't quite as fancy as Marisa's but please forgive him, he's got stubby little capybara legs. 

This video didn't go exactly as planned but I got tired of re-recording. Marisa basically rolls a dice to see which idle dance she's going to do and for how long, and she really seems to like landing on the number 3 for the max amount of time, with 3 meaning she does her "duck dance". She does eventually pick a different one though.

Next up, we made animations both for falling in water when you can't swim, and falling in lava. This was important because the demo is going to involve both swimming and lava (though not swimming IN lava) so we had to get these prepared.  

Quick note though, the splash sound here is actually for water. I haven't got the lava version back from Rob yet.

One change I would like to make there is getting her to appear further back from the edge but that's a low priority right now. 

And then of course we have our remade first dungeon boss here. This is the third iteration of this boss and in a way, he's actually a little more similar to the original design, at least mechanically. However, this boss should prove to be much more intuitive and most importantly, fun! Here's a little bit of phase 1:  

Try not to read too much into this. He still needs a lot more visual work, such as screen shake, more particles, and charge-up times indicating an attack is coming. Plus, this is only phase 1! If he seems a bit too easy, its because he is, but that's for my sake during testing. 

Phase 2 and 3 are substantially more difficult! Perhaps even too difficult, we shall see. They involve hand grenades and little laser robots that appear on those platforms you see to the right and left!. That's why I need all my beta tier backers to get in here and kill this guy as soon as you're able to, so that you can let us know if he needs any further adjustments. 

 By the way, this boss was actually designed for our highest tier backer! What I think is really interesting about him is that originally we never intended to have any sort of sci-fi elements in our game, but when the design was proposed, we didn't immediately reject it. The idea was interesting and we considered it for awhile. 

In the end, we actually rewrote a huge portion of the story because we really liked the idea of incorporating robots into the setting, and now most of the bosses are actually robots. All thanks to the suggestion of one very generous backer! Who I would love to credit by name, but I haven't spoken with him very recently and I'd rather respect his privacy until he gives me the go-ahead otherwise. 

Another thing updated this month: New camera system! Previously our method for keeping both characters/players on-screen was to use Unity's built-in Camera Target Group. However, this feature proved to be very frustrating to work with and not always behave how we wanted. I'm not here to rant about my beefs with Unity but, let's just say that it almost seems like they wanted to stop people from using this feature. So I remade my own version of it! It honestly wasn't all that hard, and while it still needs a little fine-tuning, the core functionality took about 2 hours to create. 

Anyone here ever play some Four Swords Adventures? That's the main reference I'm using for the camera feel. 

Anway, Kickstarter is beginning to do the thing where it gives me an error every time I try to upload something, which usually means I've gone on for too long, so I suppose we'll end it there for today. I did want to mention though that we actually do know pretty much when Arkanya is going to release now! I'm not allowed to tell you or else some people will be very very mad at me. Which is why I wasn't shouting this from the rooftops at the beginning. But as our backers, I hope it fills you with confidence that launch plans are coming together and are going to be put in motion soon. In fact, getting the next test build to you guys is stage 1 of that plan, so I better get back to work! 

Thank you all again and have a wonderful new year! 

~BeanBandit, Arkanya Dev (who had to upload this icon multiple times just now)

November update: Story time!
about 3 years ago – Thu, Nov 25, 2021 at 09:03:31 PM

Hello again ladies and gentlemen, and a happy Thanksgiving to all our American readers! 

I had originally hoped to get this out to you on Monday, but the team needed a little bit more time to get their respective projects into the update, so here we are today! 

To start off, I want to do a quick throwback to Halloween and show off some holiday art that Kale didn't quite get done in time for the previous update

It's practically become a tradition at this point to put Arkanya characters in Touhou outfits every Halloween. 

There won't be a whole lot of content from me this time, I'm afraid. However, I do want to give a bit of a heads up to our Beta-Tester tier backers: We're going to be needing you soon! 

This is a very loose plan at the moment, so please do not think anything is set in stone just yet. However, we are looking at getting a preview version of our new demo out to you for testing in January. Once this preview version is ready, we will begin 1-2 months of polish and adjustments. This may end up being done in 2 phases with some additional content being added in the second phase, but I'm not certain yet.  

We hope you will all provide lots of feedback during this time, because once we are have a high degree of confidence in the quality of the preview version, the plan is to release that content as a public demo on various platforms. I'm not personally responsible for that portion of the plan, so I won't go into any more details until I'm told to, but that's where we're at right now. 

I cannot say for certain, but I think you're going to start to see Arkanya hitting some major milestones in the early months of the coming year. 

More new music

Now then, let's see what Rob's had cookin' 

A result of our rather diverse dungeon theming is that it's very hard to make a song that fits all of them. Some of you may recall, but for those who aren't aware, this was the main dungeon theme previously: 

That has a sort of crypt-like feeling to it, I think. And that worked pretty well for the first dungeon, but we were in a very "zelda-y" mindset when we came up with that dungeon. Everything was going to be all ancient underground dungeons and lost ruins, that sort of thing. There was going to be a lot of darkness. 

Then we got to the second dungeon and said "hey, why not make it outdoors? Let's do a tropical island!" 

That almost had to have a new song though. So Rob went back into the mine and produced a brand new  track for dungeon 2!

I think this might have been one of the quickest production times on any song yet, from my perspective at least. Originally you should have been listening to the Bierhaus Theme right now, but midway through work on that, Rob messaged me in the middle of the night all excited about this song idea he'd just had. I think three days later I got the file for this track. 

I think the song is very interesting. It's quite different from anything Rob has produced before, and he mentioned to me that it was very outside of his wheelhouse. Still, I think he did a fantastic job of it. To me, this song conveys the difficulty and hardship of the daily life of a pirate. Given that these are disgraced former soldiers who saw piracy as their only way out of a hopeless situation, it feels like this is them lamenting the path that lead them here, which is why I named it Weary Sigh of the Wayward Sailor. 

Rob named it Captain Yo Ho Ho Jaegermanjensen's First Mate's Barmitzfah Brawl, so he might view it very differently. 

My initial suggestion had been to write a song which could have been described as "Marisa's happy fun island adventure", but I think Rob likes his music to be a little more serious, especially with dungeons. Even if he does give them silly names.

 I'm going to keep trying, though! One of these days you're going to walk into the darkest, scariest eldritch horror factory and the music is going to sound like it belongs on the Wii Shop Channel, and you'll know that it was because Rob finally gave in to my totally reasonable musical demands.

Story time

That is what the title said, after all. Seems like we've been planning this for months now, but something always came up. Not this time though! Today we're going to introduce some more Arkanya characters, along with concept art by Kale for all of them! Let's talk about the seven Shaman Priestesses of Marajo.

In the game, each of these shamans corresponds to a different dungeon, with the dungeons being the temples where each shaman lives and works. However, after recent events, the shamans are being held captive within their own homes! 

The shamans all have very different personalities and will interact with Marisa and Kapi in a variety of ways. There won't be a whole lot of "Thank you for rescuing me from the bad guy, here's a reward" (although each shaman will lend her power to yours when she is able!) but instead you will have a different experience with each shaman. In fact, some don't need to be rescued at all, and there are even some you might need to be rescued from! 

Let's take a look at each of them. The visual design for each character was created by Kale E. Rion, and the backstories were written by me!

There is additional planned content for each shaman which will allow you to get to know them better and see them interact with each other after you've completed each of their dungeons. If you recall from our original campaign, we talking about a system where you could get an upgradeable house, similar to how it works in Breath of Fire 2. We have always planned to allow you to move the shamans into your house for safekeeping while Amazonia remains in crisis. This is still the plan, and I'll revisit that in a future update once we've fleshed out that feature more. 

Dialogue is the easiest thing in the world to add, and my goal is to let you discover every last detail I've ever written about these characters within the game itself, if you choose to. I tend to get carried away with my writing, so all of this will be optional side-content. For those of you who don't like endlessly clicking through pages of text, you'll have the option to never speak to most of these ladies again! Except Ari, she's a special case...

Since I know some of you are already wondering: No, there are currently no plans for an Arkanya shaman dating simulator. That was the $45,000 stretch goal and you all just barely missed it. 

I'm only kidding, but I do hope that as everyone gets more familiar with the game, people will pick favorite shamans and that not everyone's will be the same. It always makes Kale and I very happy when anyone gets excited about the characters we've created. 

That's all for now. Thank you all for your amazing kindness and support for yet another month, and we'll see you next time! 

~BeanBandit, Arkanya Dev