December update: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Hope you're ready for a long update!
over 2 years ago – Fri, Dec 31, 2021 at 07:46:22 AM

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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!
over 2 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

October update: What's been happening the last two months (It's a lot!)
over 2 years ago – Thu, Oct 28, 2021 at 08:22:06 AM

Hello! It's that time once again! Or rather, it's been that time for quite awhile, hasn't it? We did not do a September update and I do apologize for that. So of course, when I logged in to Kickstarter tonight, this was the first thing I saw:  

AAAAHH! That's a lot! The red bar always scares me a little. I see it and my first thought is "Oh no, they're all mad at me!" but really I should see that as 10 people who are eager to hear more about Arkanya.  Also for some reason I no longer get notifications from Kickstarter. I'll be looking into that but if you left me a message and I didn't respond, please forgive me and try again! You can also DM us on discord at any time, for basically any reason. 

In case you haven't joined our Discord yet and would like to, click here!

So what the heck were we doing last month?

September was a bit awkward. I hope none of you were under the impression that the team and I were vacationing. Far from it! I've been glued to Arkanya 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week for many months now, and I give the team hell if they can't keep up! However, late September rolled up on us really fast. Rob was in the middle of struggling through a new song (which I now have for you today!). Kale we can't afford to keep full-time, and she's been swamped with her other responsibilities, so she didn't have much for me. Meanwhile, I had just finished a massive new video that I'd been working on for two and a half months, that I was crazy excited to finally show you all, which was going to be our biggest and best KS update ever! And then... I was told not to release it yet. Certainly a very frustrating thing, having content that we're all very proud of and excited about, yet we can't show anyone. But we trust Top Hat Studios, and if they tell us something is best for the success of Arkanya, then that's almost certainly what we're going to do. 

I probably could have scraped together some other things to show you all, but with all of my plans were in disarray and I decided instead to just keep working and give a big beefy update for October. By the way, I still can't show you that trailer in its entirety, but I have been cleared to share little bits of it, so make sure you check out the video I posted up above! 

Happy Halloween!

Well, Happy Halloween in like 6 days or so! Little bit early. But you know what? I saw kids in my neighborhood out trick-or-treating with their parents on like October 10th. Now that's just ridiculous. I guess the city scheduled it to be way earlier in the month, and at like 5pm, so they'd have sunlight and good weather. First of all, who put them in charge of Halloween? And secondly, Halloween should be cold, dark, and rainy, like it is right now while I'm writing this. That's the kind of Halloween I remember! I dressed up as a different ninja from Mortal Kombat every year until I was like 12. I thought those guys were so freakin' cool, particularly Sub-Zero. It was pretty lucky for my mom that I never really grew out of that, because she made the costumes for me, and after the first year all she had to do was copy the old one but bigger and a new color. Good ol' 90's character recolors! I was learning the art of game dev from an early age, I just didn't know it yet.

Anyway, I hope everyone is enjoying Fall. Or, I suppose it'd Spring for our southern-hemisphere followers, right? It's been absolutely gorgeous here in Indiana on the days where it isn't raining nonstop. I also wanted to say how incredible it is that Kale is willing to humor me with holiday art, which she has no obligation to do but happily does month after month. Be sure to check her out on twitter if you haven't yet! 

What's New: Preview of the Fire Dungeon, Improving the Lantern, Reviewing Shrine's Legacy, and more!

The Fire Dungeon, Tia Iandara

This dungeon recently got a graphical update! We also got very poor reviews for the previous boss of this dungeon from our testers, so we decided to implement and entirely new boss! He's still in the works, but here's a little screenshot of him:

Just FYI, that's not the actual boss room. The construction crews found asbestos in the boss room so we're keeping him in here while they clear that out. 

No, but actually this boss is going to jump a lot and he needs a new arena where he can really stretch his legs out and terrorize new players. And while he's trying to smear you across the floor, here's a banger new track he'll be doing it to:

I hope we have showed by now that we are a team which highly values user feedback. And one big feedback we got from our discord community was that our fire dungeon was missing a key component: Lava. 

We have 5 other dungeons which still desperately need attention, so I didn't want to spend too much time reworking this one. However, one thing this dungeon had a lot of was holes, which were rather convenient to fill with lava. Additionally, we received feedback on users not enjoying certain puzzles, and some rooms simply not having enough to do. So knocking out two birds with one stone, we filled those rooms wall to wall with lava! Speaking of birds... 

Burn it all!

Another feedback which closely mirrored a concern I'd already had: What the heck is this lantern for, anyway? 

As you may have noticed, the lantern item is now visible on Marisa when she has it equipped. I recently played through Minish Cap again to get back into a Zelda-y mood, and when I saw Link holding his lantern in that, I decided I really wanted Marisa to hold hers too. I hope you find that as cool as I do! 

But just holding it isn't exactly a "use", huh? I mean sure, the little ring of light is nice, but as you can see here, it's not super necessary. But I really want you to use it. So here's what we did:

We can light things on fire! But what exactly does that do for you, other than add more light? Well...

Hopefully it makes sense how this could be integrated into lots of different puzzle designs. Additionally, this will allow the lantern to be used offensively, though the effect for enemies burning isn't ready yet. I will try to remember it for next time, though. 

Miscellaneous Updates:

As I'm currently writing this, I've taken way more time than I meant to and now its 1am the night before we're publishing this update. I had a lot more to show you than I realized, and I should have started writing this 3 days ago. So let's go ahead and really quickly move through a couple other things and cram in just a bit more before I call it a night. Also, keep an eye on our twitter and you'll see a lot of what doesn't make it into this update! https://twitter.com/ArkanyaGame

Next, let's jump over to dungeon 2 and give a little glimpse at that boss:

No sound though. The sound is a spoiler, believe it or not. So this bad boy is Aete, and he's got some pretty heavy armor, meaning you're not going to do much damage to him unless he exposes himself to be attacked. Fortunately, this dungeon gives you the Wave Ribbon, allowing you to dash in for quick damage, then dash back out before he slams his claws down! Aete heavily telegraphs all of his attacks, so you can use your speed to beat his strength!

I can't remember if I've shown you all this before, but Ari is going to demonstrate a relatively new mechanic we've introduced. It's like if you crossed the Lens of Truth from Zelda with Zelda's Lullaby. The Lunar Dance is used to reveal hidden secrets within Arkanya, like you'll see here:

It also changes the time to night, which might be more handy than you'd think! 

Here's the entrance to a forest area which is just about to be finished up. Look out for more footage of that on twitter in the next week!

It might be a little hard to tell with the lighting in this pic, but the way shadows appear under these "tree blobs" (big groups of trees smushed together) has been updated to be a lot more consistent and generally look better.

And then lastly, I wanted to mention that we're currently tuning knockback to be snappier and less floaty-feeling based on user feedback. Indira here is helping me test that, and letting me whack her with my sword while we turn the knobs and try to get it just right. We'll also be trying to improve the feeling of hitting an enemy, tuning things like camera shake and impact audio until the combat feels crisp and punchy. 

As you might have guessed from the clip, Marisa and Indira are using two different settings for knockback right now. When Marisa knocks Indira back, Indira moves at the same speed until she stops. When Indira knocks Marisa back, however, Marisa does more of a "bounce", with her speed starting at zero and rapidly increasing to max, then gradually tapering back down to 0. This is tricky to get exactly perfect, but I believe the bouncy knockback feels much better than the flat knockback. 

Oh, and don't worry about Indira's safety too much. Unspeakable acts of violence is her middle name. It's a pretty long name. 

Check out Shrine's Legacy, live now on Kickstarter!

Well, it happened again! Our friends at Positive Concept Games sent us a playable game build, and their Kickstarter lined up with our newsletter, so I get to do another review! 

Shrine's Legacy is a retro-style action RPG reminiscent of Secret of Mana. Which honestly is a game I never played, but I know a lot of you really love it! And much like Arkanya, after the intro you will meet a companion which can be played in co-op mode! 

Rob and I played through quite a bit of the game together, and I highly recommend you bring a friend for this. Shrine's Legacy is a good solo experience, but it's an amazing multiplayer one! 

There's also a pretty interesting magic system which allows you to wield different elements you unlock along the way. Each element serves a different purpose in both combat and puzzle-solving, meaning your utility skills are also your damage skills! 

Shrine's Legacy is also a game that does a stellar job of hiding little secret events around the world, and making sure you get that big dopamine hit every time you find one. I don't want to spoil too much, but after I talked to ol' green shirt here, I then had to poke around every single corner and talk to every NPC to make sure I didn't miss a single thing!

This is actually far from the first time I've gone hands-on with Shrine's Legacy, and it's been really incredible to see just how fast the game has grown. I'm actually pretty jealous. Every time I check in on it, there's tons of new bits and pieces that have been added.

I'm pretty sure the first time I ever talked to the devs, I told them that they were being way too ambitious for their first project. Because they asked for my honest opinion. I promise I don't go around just telling random game devs that. Anyway, since then they seem to be determined to prove me wrong, and the results definitely speak for themselves! 

It's hard for me to really express this with just pictures, but the game is big. The free demo alone takes about 2 hours to clear. Not bad, huh? 

For reference, the demo felt like it explored about 1/8th of this map. And Rob and I didn't even see everything there was to see in that! You really have to dig if you want to squeeze every last drop of content out of Shrine's Legacy. 

The story is a little goofy, but certainly not in a bad way. The devs clearly have a strong love for the good ol' campy 90s RPGs, and Shrine's Legacy feels like it came straight out of that era. 

We're big fans, so please give their Kickstarter page a look, and tell them we said hi while you're there! 

Thank you for continuing to follow us on this journey.

Before I go, I want to share a few more thoughts with you all. Development for The Girl from Arkanya has certainly been a massive challenge, but it would have been downright impossible without the tremendous support you've all given us over the last year, and in some cases even before that. I think we probably don't say often enough how truly grateful we are that you've given us the chance to work on this project we love. There's certainly a lot for me to worry about these days, but the only worry that has ever kept me up at night is thinking that you might become frustrated or disappointed with us. 

I do have to wonder if we maybe damaged the trust we've been given a little bit by not releasing our usual update last month. Since then I've thought about it a lot, and I've realized that part of what our backers paid for was to get a window into the development of a game which they'll be able to play some day. Really, to be able to experience that development alongside us. So I will try to do better when it comes to keeping you all in the loop, even if I can't make it flashy and exciting, as was the case last month. 

And it's not going to always be the most exciting thing ever, to be quite honest. For example, last month a huge amount of my time went into completing Arkanya's saving/loading system. How the heck do I show that in a kickstarter update? But maybe you'd all still like to hear about it, and if not, you can always keep scrolling. That's what our discord users do, and we have a great time in there. 

Well then, thank you all once again, both for your continued support of Arkanya, and for making it all the way to the end of this update! I will be back again next month, hopefully with some very exciting new things to show you (a brand-new dungeon, perhaps?) But either way, I also have a back-up plan I think some of you will find very interesting, especially those of you who use or would like to use Unity. I can't promise which one it'll be yet. 

So please have a wonderful Halloween, and I will see you next time! 

-BeanBandit, Arkanya dev

August Update: Trailer teasers and a new merch preview!
over 2 years ago – Wed, Aug 25, 2021 at 04:18:19 AM

Hello again my friends! I have a lot of cool stuff to show off today but no real plan for how I'm going to do this, so let's just wing it! 

Woah! A new-ish song! This one is actually months old but due to a miscommunication between Rob and I, it never hit Youtube. I think some of you heard this one before, but here it is again! 

To go with it, here's a tiny little preview of the battle with Captain Rafael Fidalgo Diaz de Castilla:

Now listen, real talk for a minute. I still can't show you the trailer. That's a direct order from the suits upstairs. Upstairs in this case is actually in New York. 

"But boss!" I pleaded, "These people are our biggest fans! They've already bought the game! They deserve more!"  

And because I did my most annoying whining voice for long enough, eventually they caved. I have been cleared to share a few more clips from the trailer! 

 I included the sound on these first two, but please keep in mind that we're still fine-tuning the audio! Some of these sounds and voices will be tweaked and adjusted before the full release. 

Unfortunately I'm supposed to keep the coolest clips a closely guarded secret. Something about maximizing the marketing impact, I guess. I would literally show all of you every single thing in the game right this moment if I was allowed to, but the rest of the team knows where I live. 

I think I'm going to end this update by going through the game files and getting some screenshots of some newer but non-spoilery assets we've introduced lately. Seems like fun. But first, I need to show you some new art from our highly talented artist, Kale! 

A huge number of you backed at tiers that included the sticker pack, and we've finally completed the design for one of the stickers. And I can give some info about them too! We are currently looking at 4in x 6in sheets of water-resistant vinyl stickers. You can put these on windows, computer cases, laptops, etc. The website even recommends car bumpers, though I can tell you from personal experience that they fade in the sun after a couple years. 

Kale and I are still discussing the details of the remaining designs, but let me know in the comments what you would rather have: 3-4 big stickers, or 6-8 small ones. 

So with that out of the way, here's a few screenshots of what we've been up to in the land of Arkanya:

Here's a part of the overworld map we just wrapped up. Its funny because I can show you this place, but I can't say it's name without spoiling a big part of the story...

Next we have the err... infamous Puruguard. These warrior capybara stand watch over the realm of Puru Puru, and are fiercely loyal to King Oli. Their actual combat abilities are rather dubious, however. 

Speaking of King Oli, he's gotten a little upgrade. He now sports a crown made of melon, and his prized melon treasury behind him. 

Watch out for Bushkins! 

Decorations for the Arkanya Volksfest are coming together nicely

And lastly for now, Renzo's brother Enzo now has his own shop in the Treasure Hunter's Guild!

 Thanks for sticking with me all the way to the end! I cannot make any solid promises on when the full trailer will release or when the Steam page will be available, but we're looking at mid-September right now. There will be a kickstarter update to go with it, so we'll definitely make sure you know! 

Thank you all so much and I'll see you next time! 

~BeanBandit, Arkanya dev

July Update: It's a short one!
almost 3 years ago – Fri, Jul 30, 2021 at 05:27:07 PM

Hey folks! Sorry for the wait. Things have been chaotic over here and time is relentless. Could we all collectively pretend its still January? That would be great. 

Anyway, guess what happened on July 3rd? That's right, a hard drive failed with no backup! 

I wish I could say that was the worst thing that happened to me that particular day, but honestly it probably ranks 2nd or 3rd worst. It seems like all of my bad luck likes to save up for a long time and then unload all at once. Life is funny like that. 

Anyway, you're probably wondering what was on the hard drive, right? Well, the main thing was the footage I'd recorded for the trailer. Oops! That's a bit of a setback. The rest was mostly personal stuff, aside from some templates I'd made for faster youtube/twitter uploads. 

Ultimately it took about a week and a half to get back to where we were, including a two-day break Rob and Kale forced me to take because they worry too much about me. 

The good news is that though we're a little behind our intended schedule on the trailer, we are pretty darn close to completion. The big bummer though is that we missed our publisher's original timetable for their big marketing push, and now they're asking us to keep the trailer under wraps until our turn comes around again. 

Imagine having this thing you're so proud of, you want to show the whole world RIGHT NOW, but you'll ruin everything if you do. But they're the experts, and I'm in no position to argue. 

For those unfamiliar with video game publishing, publishers usually juggle multiple, sometimes several projects at once, and ours likes to focus all their marketing energy on one project at a time for best results. Because we missed our slot, now we have to wait for a new slot. We'll be discussing the new time for that with them soon. It will most likely coincide with the creation of our Steam page so we can drive traffic there. 

However, I did not come here empty-handed. Today I have some screenshots to share! And next time (I'll try to make it earlier in the month) I'll bring some clips of the trailer, plus another song! Maybe two if Rob will let me.  

That's all for today! See you soon! 

~BeanBandit, Arkanya dev