Quick update: Arkanya KS update postponed to October
over 3 years ago – Tue, Sep 27, 2022 at 08:30:23 AM

Good morning, everyone! Unfortunately I have to inform you that the new update will be next month. The workload this month has been quite a lot, both with Arkanya and my other job, and there just hasn't been time to put together an actual update letter. 

I will be setting aside time in October to ensure that we put together a very lengthy KS update, so please look forward to it!

 Until then, I hope you have a wonderful month.

~BeanBandit, Arkanya dev

August update!!!
over 3 years ago – Sat, Aug 27, 2022 at 02:01:26 AM

Holy cow this month flew by! I meant to get this to you much earlier in the month but, well... I wanted to show you guys some cool stuff and by the time it was ready, most of the month had gone by!

First off, thank you so much everyone for making our Backerkit closing almost entirely painless! I just about had a heart-attack when we initially closed it out and my goodness, hardly any of the money came in!

I thought to myself, oh no, they're going to cancel their orders. They've lost faith in us and now we're in a pickle... 

I worry over nothing! Obviously our backers are the best there's ever been, and you've supported us through everything. Within just two days, almost every single failed order had been corrected, and we got the money we need to produce everyone's Kickstarter rewards! Plus we got a bunch of new last-minute orders!

Speaking of which, Kale has been hard at work on completing the designs for those, when she's not working on in-game portraits. Go check out what she's been up to! >>>  https://twitter.com/Pinkedalink 

Here's some of her latest portraits:

 It's the Ocean Shaman, Amanayara!

Thank you to everyone who tried the Arkanya multiplayer!

55 of you downloaded the updated Arkanya demo with multiplayer over the last two months! That's honestly not bad! 

Not as stunning as our previous build which totaled almost 200, but I feel like a lot of you are tired of this demo and just want to get to the full game. I'm right with you on that! It's gettin' there.

Anyway! Little more fluff content, August 31st is Marisa's official birthday! 

Here's a very early sketch Kale did of Marisa, that feels practically ancient to me now...

Have I told you all before that Marisa predates the Arkanya setting? By like a lot? Her design has evolved a little bit but she's been my most-used OC for the better part of 10 years now. She starred in two previous game projects, both of which got scrapped pretty early on, but which created the foundation for Arkanya. We often joke that I came up with Arkanya purely to get people to make more art of Marisa, and there's honestly a little bit of truth to that!

So happy birthday, Marisa! I hope everyone looks forward to half the art book just being about you!

The Man from Castile

Please note that this fight is still incomplete and unbalanced, and some of the visuals are placeholders (such as the barrels locking the room). Additionally, the boss voices are placeholders, and we actually have a session scheduled with Rafael's new VA tomorrow! You'll be hearing his true, glorious voice very soon! 

With that out of the way, I present Captain Rafael Fidalgo Diaz de Castilla! 

Creating Rafael was quite the ordeal, and of course there are still improvements to be made. Unless the previous 3 bosses, Rafael is much less of an 'on-rails' experience. Other bosses have tightly-controlled movements and attack patterns, and will behave more or less the same every time you fight them. But Rafael, much like the Stormwitch, is given a kit of abilities, and a decision tree to decide which ability he wants to use. He is the first boss in the game which changes his behaviors depending on what the player is doing. Which is why, despite being pretty easy at the moment, I find him to be the most enjoyable boss yet.

And then we have the finished model for Amana, the Ocean Shaman (Which you may recognize from the portraits further up)

Alright, now that the fun stuff is out of the way, let's dive into something really technical and boring!

How to build a better monkey

So one of the things which has always plagued Arkanya's development has been the awkwardness of enemy navigation. Enemies have always had a really hard time moving around corners, handling walls between them and the player, and avoiding things like deep water or holes. Also, their patrol routes were all pre-determined, which took forever to configure on each enemy. 

While things weren't too bad with non-humanoid enemies, it always really bothered me how humanoids would bumble about like idiots, and I couldn't give them interesting patrol routes for fear they'd get stuck. Humans should be smarter than monkeys! We'd like to think, anyway. 

But I remembered this video I saw awhile back, and I decided to revisit it. 

BTW This is not a cross-promotion but I still encourage you to go follow GameEndeavor. He makes awesome dev logs and they're just fun to watch. Here's his twitter if you wanna see his game he's working on:  https://twitter.com/GameEndeavor 

Anyway, I'm not really a math guy, so this whole Dot Product thing was a foreign concept to me. I also just don't like working with raycasts, but I was so intrigued by how he was using them. 

Now, this isn't a tutorial for devs so much as a dev log targeted at his fans. So the info is pretty light on the technical side and is more geared toward entertainment value and showing off his game. But there was a surprising amount of info that could be learned just from watching his visuals (and I watched it probably 50 times) and dissecting what was happening. GameEndeavor is a Godot user, but the ideas transfer over to Unity just as well.

Before I dive into the code, here's a video of some monkeys chilling around some rocks, so you have some reference for what I'm talking about. 

Red lines represent "dangers". This doesn't mean they're dangerous, that's just what they were called in the literature linked by GameEndeavor in his video. A danger is any direction which leads the enemy into an obstacle, another enemy, or takes it further from it's goal. 

Yellow lines are undesirable paths. These are paths which could be taken, but much better paths exist so they're not considered as much.

Green lines are desirable paths. These are weighted more heavily because they are clear of obstacles, and they get our enemy closer to it's goal! 

So we have all our lines, now what?

Well, our enemy needs to make an informed choice based on all the info it's gathered. The 'Resolved Array' is the result of subtracting dangers from interests. This means that even if a direction takes our enemy toward it's goal, but there's a 'danger' in that same direction, that direction will score lower.

Once we get all of these values, we simply add up the values of every direction, average them out, and that gives us our chosen direction! In the monkey video, that's represented by the blue line. 

Now here's where I had to get really clever, because nobody else was talking about this. That's the Wall Problem. 

What a predicament! So here we have a monkey, a rock, and Marisa. The rock is directly between monkey and Marisa, so he can't go forward. He doesn't want to go backward, so his options are left, or right. But both left and right are equally desirable, so what happens when we average them together? Yup, the monkey runs straight into the rock. 

Maybe I could have done something fancy here. But why? Fancy is scary, I like simple.

All this is doing is looking in the direction the enemy has chosen, and seeing if there's a wall there. If there is one, the enemy will instead go in the direction of the first green line in the list. In the future, I'd like to randomize that a bit more, so that directions lower in the list aren't prioritized so much. 

But this was about making humanoids look better, so let's check out some pirates. Now for some reason I think humans look better if they prioritize cardinal directions instead of diagonals. Maybe I'm biased because of Link to the Past soldiers? 

Please appreciate how they DONT walk into corners and start spinning. They used to and it took SEVEN HOURS to fix! They're still a little jittery but worlds better than before! 

And last but not least, here's the system in action when the player gets involved

Also kinda jittery, but that will improve over time.

Alright, well that's all I've got for you today! Thank you and I'll see you next time! Have a wonderful weekend!

~BeanBandit, Arkanya dev

July Update: Treasure hunting with friends!
over 3 years ago – Tue, Jul 12, 2022 at 10:34:18 PM

HEY HEY!

So technically I (Bean) still have covid, but I've been feeling great for a few days now and we finally got the newest build ready! Actually, it's been ready for awhile now but I needed a partner to test it with, and wouldn't you know it, Rob also had covid! Except his case was a big rougher than mine so he didn't want to come play until last night.

And we recorded one of our test runs! Check it out!

I left my mouse in the middle of the screen for the first quarter of the video or so, please forgive me for that...

Despite having been tacked on as a KS stretch goal, after spending several hours playing multiplayer (and countless hours solo) I can definitively say that this is the best way to play The Girl from Arkanya. 

Anyway, same drill as last time! Click the image to go to itch.io, enter the password, and download the demo build! 

NOTE: You must first meet Kapi in-game to unlock multiplayer!

If for some reason the image doesn't work, you can find the download here:  https://arkanyagames.itch.io/the-girl-from-arkanya 

Last time a whopping 144 of you downloaded the demo! Wow! I hope even more of you were holding out to play it in multiplayer!

For Rob and I, the demo ran almost without a hitch, but we have a habit of playing the game exactly how it was meant to be played. So please let us know if you find any weirdness with multiplayer or... well, anything! 

Changes made in this update:

• Multiplayer has been enabled! Note: You must first meet Kapi to unlock multiplayer.
• UI adjustments have been made for both solo and multiplayer.
• Marisa and Kapi have both had their primary attack reworked. This should resolve all issues with the attack hitboxes bugging out.
• Stability adjustments have been made to the grappling hook.
• A small portion of the zone Upper Windberg has been added to the playable area. This is due to a change in the flow of the overworld map.
• An issue has been resolved where the context button for beer did not properly display in the Bierhaus.
• Adjustments have been made to the Pora Iandara map to accommodate the new entrance to Upper Windberg.
• A popup has been added to inform players when they have completed the demo.
• Various minor systems adjustments

Thank you everyone, and I apologize for the unusually short update this month. Hopefully the 18 minute video and demo download makes up for it! 

-BeanBandit, Arkanya Dev

Mini-Update: Bean got covid edition!
over 3 years ago – Fri, Jul 08, 2022 at 05:24:13 PM

Hi guys! Just wanted to let you all know that the release of the multiplayer demo might be a couple days late. As you might guess from the title, I got covid! Which has honestly not been a big deal so far. I've been pushing forward as planned as much as I can, but sometimes it gets a little rough and I either go to something easier like working on the overworld map, or enemy animations, or I'll just sleep.

Anyway, please don't worry about me because I have very mild symptoms and I'm pretty well chillin. But I don't want to promise that the multiplayer demo will be ready this week, and then I have a few unexpectedly bad days or something. 

The new build is looking pretty solid, we just need to fix some broken UI elements and tune the multiplayer camera for several differently-sized rooms within Dungeon 1. I've also received multiple complaints that the demo never explicitly tells you that you've completed it, so I would like to get something in for that as well. 

And so you at least get something fun out of this update, here's a WIP preview of Kale's next sticker for the Kickstarter sticker pack: 

And here's a baby version just because it's cute

Thanks everyone, and have a wonderful day!

-BeanBandit, Arkanya dev

June Update! Let's go!
almost 4 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