June Update: Sorry for the wait! Let's talk trailers!
almost 3 years ago – Wed, Jun 30, 2021 at 11:54:29 AM

Hey hey! Hope you're all having a pleasant Monday! We're running a little late on the update for this month, huh? Thanks for your patience, we've been grinding hard this month and there just wasn't ever a really good time for the update until today. I don't know if this is going to be a short update or a long one because I only have one topic to talk about, but I have a lot to say on that topic so I guess we'll see how it goes! 

Before we dive in, I want to thank everyone who gave feedback on our last update. That tutorial was a lot more work to make than I expected but I loved the response we got from it. Some of you were apparently even shocked that we were being so open about how our game works under the hood, but I really enjoy doing show-and-tell like that. If you have a request for a future update, let me know in the comments! It doesn't even need to be programming-related, necessarily. We can talk about world-building, characters, art, music, Unity tips, whatever you folks want really. News is going to become scarcer until we get much closer to launch, but I still want to talk to you every month so let me know what topics I should cover! 

The one topic for today is of course our release trailer, which we are deep in right now. I think when I wrote our last update I mentioned we were just about to start on the trailer, so you might be a bit surprised we're still working on it. Well, a lot of the content in the trailer is being created the same day it's being recorded, which is what's really slowing us down. That's because, due to our development process, much of the game has sat in an unfinished/unpolished state for long amounts of time. Basically we get something working, then we move on. But you obviously don't want unpolished art or animations in your trailer, so everything that is in the trailer needed to be done. This unfortunately means that this trailer is taking much, much longer than the first trailer we did, but it also means that those things are done for the final game as well, so it's not all bad. 

Going back and updating all of this old art en masse can be pretty tiring but it's also honestly very exciting. It's been a great opportunity to really see how I've grown as a pixel artist, and there's a lot of satisfaction in that. A few characters have gotten big makeovers, including our starlight princess Ari who got some new hair because wow was it bad before...

I had absolutely zero pixel art experience when we began production, and sometimes it really shows in the old stuff.  Honestly I look back at our first trailer and wonder why any of you even pledged, so thank you again for believing in us. 

Alright let's see... I guess you probably would like to actually see some trailer footage, right? We do have about 25 seconds of it done. Unfortunately we don't work on it in a linear manner, so it's not 25 seconds consecutive seconds. Here's a clip I really love though:

 I hope you all enjoy that more than our twitter followers did! I think most of them just saw the logo at the beginning and didn't realize it was a video >.<

Here's another scene, although this one doesn't have audio at the moment:

I used to dabble in video production in my prior occupation so while I'm mostly self-trained, I'm no stranger to making stuff like this. Rob and I like to work a little backwards on these. We started off by recording all of the dialogue for each of the three characters appearing in the trailer.

Here's a little sample

From there I sent the dialogue over to Rob who composed a song around it.

 I know those links look broken, but the play button should still work. It's because they're audio-only, which kickstarter apparently dislikes. Also Rob wanted me to make sure you knew that the song isn't finished, and there will be some subtle but important changes to the final version. 

After Rob sent me the song back, I began storyboarding out the video based on the flow of the song, which leaves us about where we are right now! 

We're really going all-out on this trailer since this will be the face of Arkanya for perhaps years to come, so we're looking to hopefully have it ready by late July. Around that same time we'll be launching our Steam page, and we hope you'll all go wishlist us! I know you've all already bought the game, but wishlisting is free and it really helps us out, so we'd greatly appreciate it! We'll let you know more in July if we can. 

Well this was not supposed to be a long update and I really need to get back to video editing so I'm going to cut this short. I'll tell you everything you ever wanted to know and more about making a trailer once it's actually done. For now, here's a cute sketch of Marisa waking up and getting dressed for some treasure hunting: 

Aaaaaand I did promise I'd talk about our friend Konitama who is just blowing up Kickstarter right now with his new project, Cloudscape!

Now I didn't get to play this one yet, which is an absolute shame because I want it bad. But I've watched the video like six times, and boy am I hyped. 

So my first impression is top-down Starbound which is awesome because I was all about Starbound but side-scrollers aren't really my cup of tea. Now why do I draw that comparison? Well, we've got multiple explorable "worlds" with a strong visual diversity:

There's an emphasis on exploring and resource gathering:

And you can reshape the landscape around you to your heart's desire:

It's a procedurally generated survival game, and what does every good survival game need? That's right, agriculture! 

aaaaaaaaand...

Dogs.

Look at that good boy! 

I understand there's also a dating element similar to Stardew Valley, but I don't have a lot of details on that. Like I said, haven't yet had the privilege of playing this one. But you should absolutely go check out the kickstarter page for yourself  at the very least because as far as Kickstarter pages go, this one is beautifully crafted. This is a shining example of how a KS page should look, do yourself a favor and just scroll through it for a minute. 

Alright, well that's what I got today! It's back to the ol' pixel mines for me, so I hope you all have a wonderful day and I will see you next time!

-BeanBandit, lead Arkanya dev

How the lighting in Arkanya is made, plus new music!
almost 3 years ago – Sat, May 29, 2021 at 06:35:34 PM

Hello again, Harrison a.k.a. BeanBandit here and as I think I mentioned last time, this is going to be our longest update yet, due to the nature of what it's about. Speaking of last time, I want to thank you all for showing tremendous support to our friend Ivan with Elementallis, who is sitting at around 300% funding as of the time I'm writing this. 

The developer of Elementallis actually helped me a great deal in creating what I'm going to be talking about today in my first ever Unity tutorial, covering how the Arkanya lighting system works. For now though I have to let Rob talk about his music because he was going to get mad if I stuck him at the end of a six page tutorial. Go figure. 

New music w/ Rob commentary

Hey guys!  Rob checking in for just the music part of this update!  We've got some new tracks for you!  The first is called "Containment Breach" and is our 4th or 5th dungeon's theme! (order is dependent on which one the player finds/does first)  Harrison wanted an alarm to be playing for most of this dungeon, as its one of our more secretive tech-themed dungeons.  I told him that I didn't want to have just a random alarm playing, lets integrate the alarm into the theme!  I'm pretty critical of my own work, but Harrison was pretty stoked on this one so I hope you guys share that sentiment.  How is there a digital alarm in the mid-1100s?  Well, you'll have to play the game to find out!  

(Bean note: Or you can just come to our discord and ask me, I'm bad at secrets)

The second song is the theme of one of our elemental shamans, Indira "The Stormwitch."  With a name like that I'm sure you can figure out which element she presides over.  She's a bit of an oddity when compared to the other Marajoaran Shamans, and while we don't want to say a whole lot about the area you'll find her in, we think she's going to be a fan favorite!  As you can tell, these two songs share a synth part.  I'm a huge fan of throwing motifs (callbacks to other songs) wherever they make sense. 

I've given you guys a bit of a high level tour on composition process before, but I haven't really talked much about my work flow.  A big challenge in being in any creative position is keeping writers block away.  One way to do this is to have a process you go through every single time you start work.  My personal process is to spend 20 to 30 minutes listening to several different genres of music, typically starting with a classical suite, and ending with some metal or electronica.  While I'm listening, I listen very intently for specific things I like about the songs, and keep a note of where those things are.  After that I'll go back and listen to those specific parts, and try to play them on my keyboard.  Very few ideas in music are truly 100% original, so doing things like this will typically keep me inspired, especially if I keep my playlist fresh with music I've never heard before.  After I mess around figuring out those riffs on my keyboard, I'll typically start trying to come up with my own melodies or riffs.  Sometimes purely by pressing keys as I feel for the sound I'm looking for, sometimes by starting with one of the riffs from the songs I listened to earlier, and transforming it into something completely new.  For every great idea I have, I have about 100 bad ones so its important to not be discouraged if you have several misses in a row, you just have to keep trying!

I'm not sure if that information helps any aspiring composers out there, but the important take away is that in order to keep the creative juices flowing, you should make a ritual that you ALWAYS follow prior to working.  There have been days that I didn't follow through with this procedure to save time, and ended up with only sub-par ideas, or worse no usable ideas at all!  

Thanks for listening to my short ramble, and now back to Harrison with some cool in game lighting magic!

-Robby Siva

Well first of all, it's certainly not magic and I'm going to ensure there's no mystery left by the time we're done here.

Lighting tutorial/showcase starts here ---------

So a multi-year journey recently came to an end when I finally managed to create the lighting system I've always dreamed of in Unity, and just in time for us to begin recording our launch trailer! How wonderful!  

I have always been really into the idea of changing the color of darkness in Arkanya. If that doesn't make sense, here's a demonstration: 

The black in our color palette is more of an eggplant shade, really. But Unity don't roll that way.

Total darkness in Unity will always be black, no matter what. Or so I thought. 

In waltzes fellow Unity Zelda-like dev Ivan from Elementallis, with his totally not black darkness: 

So I contacted him and said "Wow that's incredible, how are you doing that?" Well, Ivan is pulling a little trick here. See, what he's doing is essentially drawing a colored rectangle over the screen, and cutting out circles wherever a light should be. Very clever. His system went a lot deeper than just that, but this is a tutorial for Arkanya's lighting system specifically, so we'll just leave that there. 

After a very enlightening (pun intended) conversation, I was able to recreate the Elementallis lighting system exactly within Arkanya. But I wasn't quite happy with it. You see, drawing a dark box on top of the camera and cutting holes in it had some pretty major limitations. It did an amazing job in cave-like settings, but if I tried to do something like outdoor moonlight, it just looked like the air was filled with smoke. There were also performance concerns as figuring out the position of the lights required rendering the screen twice every frame. Not ideal. And of course, I wanted to be able to use Unity's built-in lights, if possible. 

So I got a hold of my pal on the Below the Stone team, who happens to be quite knowledgeable about Unity's rendering system, and he turned me on to a little property which isn't documented anywhere you'd ever find: _ShapeLightTexture0 

_ShapeLightTexture0 refers to a built-in texture Unity generates which, interestingly enough, does almost exactly what Ivan was doing with his system, except it's being handled at the engine level. It's a texture that tracks how much light is effecting each pixel on the screen before rendering it. Turns out, you can access it inside of shader code. Which means we can make a custom material that reacts to light differently than normal. 

 This is the part where you want to start following along

This is my first time ever writing a Unity tutorial, so please forgive me if it's not great! I mean, definitely let me know what you didn't like about it so I can do better in the future, but forgive me still! 

First,  make an Unlit Shader Graph. I prefer visual scripting for shaders because shaders are visual things, so you want to see what they're doing in real-time, right? 

This must be an UNLIT shader graph. If you do a lit shader graph, it'll apply the lighting data before the shader. We want to apply it during the shader. Name this whatever you like. 

Inside the shader graph, create 3 Texture 2Ds, called MainTex, ShapeLight, and EmissiveText. 

MainTex accesses the texture of whatever you apply this material to. ShapeLight, as mentioned above, is the data for the light hitting that texture. So what's EmissiveTex then? We'll have to come back to that one in a minute, but its a fun one! 

Now select MainTex and look over to your right at the Graph Inspector. If it's not open, hit the "Graph Inspector" button. 

It's very important that your reference box say "_MainTex". By default, it's just going to be a random blob of letters and numbers. Also check "Exposed" if its not checked already. Then, to make this easier on yourself, pick a good sample texture, one that's easy for you to see changes to. I chose Ari because she's the first texture in the browser alphabetically. Also she's super cute, so that's nice.  Here she is if you want to use her to follow along!

Next select the ShapeLight texture and hop back over to the graph inspector. For this, the reference needs to say "_ShapeLightTexture0". 

If Unity starts spitting out errors here, it means you didn't use an Unlit Shader Graph.

Leave the Default texture empty, or else it's going to get weird.

Now save this and let's make a material out of it. 

Apply this material to... well, basically everything. Your character, your background, your objects, all of it. Anything you want to do fancy lighting with. 

If you're familiar with shaders and skipped ahead a bit, at this point everything might turn blue or pink, but most likely it'll just look normal. I call this neutral lighting. 

See the dark area beyond the cave wall? That's our ideal darkness color, and we want everything to match that when there's no light. This is of course specific to Arkanya, you can set it to whatever you like. 

Back in our material, pull in the ShapeLight node, and attach that to a Sample Texture 2D node. Then, for the UV, you want a Screen Position node. This is going to let our material know where lights are on the screen. 

 Next, take the RGBA pin from your Sample Texture 2D, and run that to a Multiply node.

You want to multiply your lighting data by a Sample Texture 2D of your MainTex, as shown here. This is essentially recreating what the SpriteLit shader does, applying scene lighting data to your texture. Now let's plug these in and see what happens. 

Take the result of your multiply node to the Base Color, and the Alpha (A) of your MainTex to the Alpha.

Aaaaaand...

Cool! We now essentially have created our own SpriteLit shader! But that's of course not what you came here for, so we still have some work ahead of us. By the way, if you're wondering how I got these pixel-y lights, I'm using a pixelated circle with a Sprite Light 2D. If you're not sure what that is, I recommend checking out this Brackeys video: https://youtu.be/nkgGyO9VG54 If I tried to cover 2D lights in this tutorial, this would get ridiculously long. 

So first let's tackle the dark area being the wrong color. Add a Clamp node, and run your Multiply result to the In slot. For our Min, let's make a Color node and set the color to your desired darkness color. Leave the Max at 1. Now let's save and check the result. 

Marvelous! But if you overlap your lights like mine, you'll notice we're still getting some blow-out in the middle, which isn't ideal. So that's our next bit to tackle. 

Make a little room and add a Clamp node before you multiply the light data, and leave the Min and Max at 0 and 1. Now save and check your results!

Nice! But that still looks a little weird, right? So here's my big issue with Unity's 2D lighting system. 

Let's say we have two lights, one with a value of 1, and one with a value of 3, and we overlap them. Unity has two things it can do with these: 

Add: 1+3 = 4

Average: 1+3 = 2

But that's not what I want. I want Unity to use whichever light it brighter, and ignore the other one. So

Max: 1+3 = 3

Unity has no way of doing this normally, so we're going to do something a little scary: We're going to make our own render pipeline.

This sounds nuts but please follow me here, it's actually way easier than you think. We're mostly just modifying the Universal Render Pipeline, but Unity doesn't allow that by default, so we need to make a copy first. 

Go in to your Packages folder and find Universal RP. 

Right-click that, and hit "Show in Explorer". Now close Unity. This will not work with Unity open.

You should see something similar to this, a folder named com.unity.render-pipelines.universal and then @ and a number. Cut this folder out (Ctrl+X)  

Now navigate a few folders up to your project's main folder, and you should see something like this

Go inside of "Packages" and paste the folder your copied (Ctrl+V). Now remove the @ and the number, so it just looks like this: 

If this seems a little sketchy, fear not: What we've just done is converted a centralized package into a local one, meaning we can modify it without worrying about Unity undoing our changes. This is maybe a little advanced but it's a fairly common practice.

Now comes the easy part! So let's re-open our Unity project and let Unity register our new package. 

Find the folder you just moved/renamed, and take the following path: Universal RP > Shaders > 2D 

We're looking at these two shaders, Light2D-Point and Light2D-Shape. Open both of those up in your code editor. 

In both shaders, we're looking for this chunk of code right here:

Now pay close attention, because this is the easiest change in the world and if you blink you'll miss it.

There we go, that's it. In both shaders, add "BlendOp Max" right under Cull Off. Save, and close. And now you should see something like this:

2D lighting just the way it should be!

In case you're curious, BlendOp Max is a simple function which takes two or more numbers and picks the largest value. So 1+3 = 3, to use the prior example. Now we have lights that blend in a very satisfying way.  

It also has some really interesting effects when blending colors. This is part of the appeal if you ask me, but you'll want to be mindful of how different colors combo together when setting up your lights. 

 Now there's only one thing left to add before we've recreated the lighting system in The Girl from Arkanya! 

We gotta make stuff glow.

I've spent a lot of time being frustrated about how the Emissive property doesn't work for sprites in Unity, but I was determined to find a way around it, and very recently I did find that way. 

So here's a scene in Arkanya with the lights completely turned on: 

Now let's dim the lights: 

And turn them off entirely:

Isn't that the coolest? I love it. We even made Indira's eyes glow so you can tell she's staring at you in the dark. Just kind of a thing she does, don't worry too much about it. Speaking of Indira, she's going to volunteer to be our test-dummy for this. 

We start with our basic sprite in your pixel editor of choice

Now on a new layer, we're going to take white and color over everything we want to glow. Save this layer alone as a separate file. Save only the glowing white parts.

Now back in Unity, go into the sprite editor for your chosen sprite and in the top left, go to "Secondary Textures"

This will open a menu in the bottom right. Add a new texture, named _EmissiveTex, and load your file with just the white pixels. 

Save and close that. Now let's get back to our material. Remember that EmissiveTex property we made but never used? Time to use it! Select it and then give it the following settings:

The reference name must be _EmissiveTex, and the mode must be set to Black. This gets really weird if it's set to white. 

For the default texture, I used the Arkanya Guard portrait, because while he's not nearly as cute as Ari, he's the second file when I open my file browser. Here he is if you want to use him to follow along. 

Ari's had it too good for too long, so let's give her a funny head shape!

Take your MainTex again and make a new Sample Texture 2D node, then do the same with your EmissiveTex. Multiply the RGBA of the MainTex by the Alpha (A) of the EmissiveTex. This will remove all pixels from the MainTex, which do not have a color on the EmissiveTex.

Now here's the part that's really hard to explain verbally, so please pay close attention to the picture! Make a new Clamp, and for the In, use the clamp node where we set the darkness color earlier. 

For the Min, use the Multiply node we just created. And for the Max, use the RGBA of your MainTex. 

And then take the Out of the clamp and run it to your Base Color! What this is doing is taking your material which has been effected by light, and removing the shadows from any pixel found on the EmissiveTex, giving the illusion of glowing! 

When you're done, it should look roughly like this:

And that's it! That's Arkanya's lighting! Now, if you want to have the neat bloom effects like we do, that involves post-processing, but that would be an entire tutorial just as long as this one! 

If you like this sort of update, please let me know in the comments below! If you hate it... well, let me know that too! And of course if the tutorial doesn't work for you, definitely let me know that.

I cannot believe how long this got, but thank you for sticking with me. I would love to do more of these in the future, showing how Arkanya works under the hood so that fellow Zelda-like devs can have an easier time than we did, or just so curious fans can see how everything works! If you'd rather I didn't though, please say so! These updates are first and foremost for all of you, so I want to do the content that you'll enjoy. 

I think next month we're doing a character showcase, depending on what is or isn't ready by then. As I said earlier, we just started work on the launch trailer, so maybe we'll do something related to that. Guess we'll see! Oh, but now I'm making this even longer. See you next time! 

-BeanBandit, lead Arkanya dev

May Mini-Update
almost 3 years ago – Wed, May 05, 2021 at 02:24:02 AM

Hello again! Feels like I was just doing one of these, and for once it's not because time is flying by at an alarming speed! I actually did do one of these very recently!   

But after the overwhelmingly positive response we received after the last update, I have been absolutely dying to tell you all how very grateful we are to be making this game for such kind and encouraging people! I mean we were beyond blown away. I can't tell you how nervous I was putting out that update, I really thought at least somebody would get mad at us, right? But instead, we got a flood of positivity, and people encouraging us to keep going. And I'll tell you what, I think that big morale boost has helped our productivity this last couple weeks too! When the full May update comes here in another 2 weeks, it's going to be absolutely packed with content! 

Okay, now the second reason for today's mini-update. So the Arkanya team made a new friend awhile back, someone who we've been chatting back and forth with about developing Zelda-likes. He's an indie dev out of Barcelona, Spain, and he is making an absolutely killer game called Elementallis! 

And it just so happens that today he launched his Kickstarter campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ivanrl/elementallis/

Great key art, right? So I got to play Elementallis for awhile because, y'know, I'm super cool and have connections and stuff... No that's not remotely true, the demo is available for absolutely anyone to play, and you totally should! It's a great one! So, like how you might compare Arkanya to The Minish Cap, Elementallis feels a lot like the older Gameboy Zeldas, like Oracles or Link's Awakening, but with some really beautiful graphics. 

Look at that! That's like... science or something! So as the name would imply, Elementallis is all about controlling elements. If the weather dances were what drew you to The Girl from Arkanya (but let's be honest, it was Kapi) then I highly recommend you check out Elementallis, because it leans even more heavily in to that theme, with lots of interesting elemental interactions. The more elements you collect, the more cool combos you unlock! 

I'm not entirely sure I have the brain cells required for this game, but I've seen some of y'all testing Arkanya and I know you're all qualified!

Alright so we showed the snow and desert biomes, what else did he send me... Listen, I love elemental and seasonal themes, that's my jam. I know I told you all early on I am an absolute fiend for Oracle of Seasons, and this is definitely in that sort of vein. Okay! We also have volcanoes!

And trees! 

Which is really funny to me because you can see here that Elementallis uses "Plant" as an element

But we cannot judge in the slightest because it makes a lot more sense than Arkanya, where we decided "Plant" was a type of weather... I mean look, Captain Planet decided that "Heart" was on the elemental wheel so I think elements are just kinda whatever you want them to be at this point. 

Well that's all the biomes I was given to show off, but I know there's 8 total. I showed you 4, and I would assume each biome corresponds to an element, but the wheel there only has 7 elements, so what could possibly be the 8th... 

Dwarves. Dwarves are the 8th element. That's my official BeanBandit Theory™ and effective immediately, I am leaving game development to pursue a career as an Elementallis lore/theory youtuber.

That was a joke. I was informed by a team member over the weekend that I'm not as funny as I think I am, so I gotta make sure none of you take me too seriously.   

Alright! Thank you for once again listening to me fanboy about another project I love. I'm trying to do less "advertising" to you folks, but Ivan has quickly become a good friend to the Arkanya team, and I really do just adore Elementallis, so if you like what I showed here, please give him a click. 

For once I really can't wait for the next update, we're gonna have some phenomenal stuff to show you, thank you all once again and I'll see you next time! 

-BeanBandit, lead Arkanya dev

April Update: How the heck are we almost through April already!?
about 3 years ago – Wed, Apr 21, 2021 at 11:12:06 PM

Hello once again you marvelous people! As you might have guessed from the title, I am currently being bullied by the ceaseless forward march of time (aren't we all?) and I was not mentally prepared to be most of the way through April already. But y'all deserve to be in the loop, so it's time to pause Arkanya work and write about what we've been up to for the last month.  

First, let's get some embarrassing business out of the way. I'm not a fan of this part, so we might as well get it over with. I'm sure a lot of you recall that our estimated delivery date on the Kickstarter was May 2021. And as you might have noticed... that's next month. It sure felt a lot further away back then! Anyway, those of you who have been paying close attention probably already guessed this, but let's go ahead and get it in writing: We're obviously not going to be ready to ship in May. 

I know the delivery date is just a rough guess, but I still feel terrible. I want more than anything to get Arkanya in everyone's hands and share this story we've worked so hard to create with you, but it needs to be ready. An estimate from our very experienced publishers put us at 10+ months left. That was a hard pill for us to swallow, and probably not what you all wanted to hear. The support you have all shown us has been so incredible, and I want to be able to feel like we earned that support, so the idea of making you all wait until 2022 to see the finished product nearly made me sick.  

But Rob and I aren't content to leave it at that, so we got to talking, and we're going to make sure all of our backers have an opportunity to play Arkanya much sooner than that. We now have plans in the works for a demo version that won't just be exclusive to our beta tester tier, and a big demo at that. Like, we're thinking upwards of a third of the full game. I don't want to make any promises before I have exact details, but I will say that we've done extensive work this month on future-proofing our save system so that, fingers crossed, your save data can carry over to the full version. Plus, this will be good practice for making sure we don't break your saves in post-launch patches! 

I'm not going to rattle off excuses for why development has taken a lot longer than expected, but I do at least want to give you all some idea why, because Rob and I believe in being open with our community. The biggest thing is, we're new to this. We've never done a project anywhere near this big before. We've had to learn new things almost every step of the way, and we've stumbled many times. And each time we stumble, we go back and try to do better, because you don't deserve a mediocre game. You deserve a GREAT game. There's art in Arkanya that's been redrawn half a dozen times, and systems which have been recoded just as much. We're not falling victim to the trap of chasing perfection, I promise you, but neither will I rush this project. We will deliver the quality of game we promised, and one that earns the overwhelming support we've been given. 

Alright, that's enough groveling for now. If you have questions about any of the above, please don't hesitate to ask and we'll answer them to the best of our ability.  Anyway, here's some new music!  

Through the Crystal Mirror, the newest track by Robby Siva, tells the story of a young shaman girl who has never left the mountain on which she was born. She sees the all of the world below her, yet she knows little of it. The thought of leaving her isolated temple one day fills her with fear of the unknown, but some small part of her yearns for it. And though she doesn't know it yet, the young girl and capybara she sees coming up the mountain are about to turn her entire life upside-down! 

Next up, work is well underway on the title screen art, and Pinkedelink gave me the go-ahead to give you all a look at it! Not that I've ever let little things like "permission" stop me from sharing her art before... 

That's coming along nicely, don't you think? Though Pinke has a much greater background in art than myself, she has also taught herself pixel art specifically for Arkanya, and it's absolutely amazing how far she's come in such a short time. 

Oh, tiny little thing but we've moved Renzo de Rocco to an outdoor stall to be more like the Clozy art.

 Here's the art again:

The in-game version looks a lot less lively, doesn't it? It'll get there though! NPCs take a long time to draw and animate, and we of course prioritize story-relevant NPCs. 

Next, let's have a look at a new... well, not really a -new- item, but one which recently got a real animation! Kaegra's Feather!  

 That one dang off-time monkey...

And one last thing, Pinke asked me to include the concept sketch for Captain Rafael Fidalgo Diaz de Castilla's dialogue portrait because, well, look at this glorious mug 

Rob told her to make him pretty and this was how she interpreted that. I think you can see up above though, that a lot of this concept did make it over into the pixel version! 

Anyway, that's all I've got for you today! Hopefully I'll be back before too long with some more specific news, so I'll see you next time! 

-BeanBandit, lead Arkanya developer

March Update - Rob Edition!
about 3 years ago – Sun, Mar 21, 2021 at 09:10:52 PM

Hey everyone!  
 

Usually Harrison does this, but this month you’re stuck with me!   Rob here with the March update.  It’s a bit of a small one this time around as we are working around the clock to get our next beta build ready for all of our beta backers to play.  Once we have that out of the way we’ll have a lot of exciting new content to show you.  I can’t get you an exact date on it yet, but stay tuned as we will have more information on that very soon. 

Before I get into what I’m going to talk about today, I just wanted to remind anyone who backed at the Kapi Pillow tier or above, make sure you join our discord at (discord link) and message either myself (Robby Siva) or Harrison (Beanbandit) to get access to our channel to discuss your in-game designs.  It’s important that you contact us with this info soon if you want your capybara in the game!  If you don’t have discord we highly recommend you download it (its free) and join our community; however, if you absolutely don’t want to, be sure to send us a message on Kickstarter as soon as possible so we can get working with you!

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, I’m here to talk about music and sound!   Sound design is my major role on the team aside from dungeon design, and yelling at Harrison about things not working correctly.  Kidding on the latter part, but only sort of.  I wanted to clue you guys in on some of the things I’ve been working on.

My personal sound design philosophy is this: Keep it simple!  We’ve had many technological advancements that aid in the creation of video games since the 90s, and that has had no small effect on sound design.  I personally think this is great for a lot of projects, but I also think it's a real Spiderman situation (with great power comes great responsibility) because there is A LOT of damage you can do to the clarity and memorability of your games sound if you use too much.  To that end, our sound design has been kept mostly light and punchy.  It’s a continuous process of iteration that I’ll likely still be working on up until the games release, but I hope to have some very memorable sounds akin to those found in older games like LTTP,  Diablo, and many other classic favorites.

On the music front, I tend to try to keep things simple there too.  As I’m sure you’ll notice in the final product, I tend to like to keep the tracks to less than 8 simultaneous instruments, and lean heavily on a single melody line for each song.  All of my favorite old tracks in games do both of these things (mostly in part to the technological limitations at the time) but I personally think you can get a really cool effect by using modern tools under the loose restrictions that they were held to.  As such, you’ll hear a lot of layering of counter melodies, and repetition in the Arkanya soundtrack.

It’s a bit of a balancing act to not be TOO repetitive within a single song, so as to not annoy the listener, which is something I’m constantly thinking about.  But I think especially our main theme, which doubles as our field theme really hits that sweet spot.  I’m hoping to continue to be just as inspired to make more songs I think will help set the tone and mood of our game.

This last week I finalized a song for a recurring mini-boss in our game.  You’ll get to meet him in our second dungeon!   I’m a big fan of how the character has evolved over the course of our development, and I hope you guys will like him too.  During our workshopping for him, he went from a one off enemy, to a recurring annoyance, to Marisa’s rival.  Sort of the René Belloq to Indiana Jones if you will.  Anyways, here is the theme of Captain Rafael Fidalgo Diaz de Castilla, The Man from Castille!

Speaking of dungeons, I think I’ve finally made an iteration of dungeon number 3 that players can’t sequence break.  It’s gonna be a bit of a doozy with one way elevators, and a non-linear path to complete it.  With its design, I was really aiming to up the ante for the complexity of our dungeon design, as the first dungeon is a tutorial, and the second one is a bit story and combat heavy.  We are really hoping to strike a good balance so that each dungeon feels like a fresh experience, while still fitting into the lore we are trying to establish.  

Speaking of dungeons, you’re going to get lots of treasure in them!  Something we haven’t publicly talked much about in our game’s core loop is, just what are you going to do with all the money that you get for selling your treasure?  Well I’m here to reveal one answer, and that’s a key weapon in Marisa and some enemy characters' arsenal, the Storm Messer! Here's Captain Rafael Fidalgo Diaz de Castilla modeling it: (Warning: LOUD VIDEO!)

 It’s an advanced sword design that allows the user to fire shrapnel from a cylinder fixed above the hilt.  This will do quite a bit more damage than your normal sword slash, but it will consume a percussion charge every time you swing, so be mindful of that!  Percussion charges will be purchasable in town and will be a tad expensive.  Make sure you stock up before heading out to fight even more dangerous enemies!

Before I sign off, let’s take a look at a new piece from Clozy!  This is a reference sheet for Marisa that will be included in our Artbook, so for anyone wanting to do some fanart of everyone’s favorite treasure hunter, this is how you can do her justice!

We’ll be back soon with some more exciting news, so be on the lookout!

-Robby Siva,  Composer and Developer