The Girl from Arkanya | A pixel art treasure hunting RPG
Created by Arkanya Games
A top-down, 2D action RPG following the journey of an ambitious young treasure hunter and her capybara companion.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
April Update Part III: Return of the Update
almost 4 years ago
– Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 04:41:59 PM
Hello again! BeanBandit once more, did you notice the last update wasn't from me? Anyway I have something very wonderful to share with you today! Please stick around to the end!
But first, you know how I love fan art and fan artists? Well I do, so let's all take a moment to praise and appreciate Lemonie from the Arkanya discord server who painted this incredible portrait of our favorite treasure hunter:
Art by Lemonie
And I'm just now realizing she didn't sign it. You guys should sign your fan art! I like seeing the artist's signature, plus you should take credit for things you worked hard on!
Next up, as promised we have footage from HourADayGamer's stream of our new demo!
This stream had a -lot- of technical issues and Hour's internet provider was just not playing nice with us, but he did an incredible job given the circumstances! And I've prepared a sort of "highlights reel" that cuts out all of the internet issues and tries to focus on the most interesting parts of the broadcast. I believe the original stream ran almost 3 hours but I've condensed it into an action-packed 1-hour video, so please enjoy if you have the time!
HourADayGamer (follow him here on twitter!) has been a huuuuuuge supporter of Arkanya over the years and he came back from his streaming hiatus early just for us! So please go show him some love.
I remembered to package it in a zip folder this time because, as I found out the hard way last time, not everyone has Winrar! At one point we actually used an auto-installer but that apparently was alarming to some people so we were asked to just use a zip folder.
Please be aware that this is simply the preview version, and the final release of the demo will have the following improvements:
Better consistency on the sword hitbox
Additional NPCs
Reduced treasure spawn rates (They're crazy high right now)
Additional sound effects
Power upgrades from boss loot
Better stability on the quest log
UI Improvements including an area map
Along with various bug fixes. However, please do not let this discourage you from playing and enjoying this preview version of the demo. It should be completely stable and nearly (or completely) bug-free in normal gameplay. However, if you do find any issues with the demo and would like to get involved in our testing community, please join our Discord! https://discord.gg/GadHNKYBcu
That's all for now! See you soon!
-BeanBandit, Arkanya dev
Emergency follow-up update: "I sent you a broken build" edition
almost 4 years ago
– Tue, Apr 26, 2022 at 12:44:32 PM
Hi guys! Bean again! I messed up. Bad. But I also have the solution!
So I sent you all a very broken build, and I am incredibly sorry for that. Long story short, I messed up a few settings trying to fix one bug, and caused another much worse bug. One where the game could not save any quest data, resulting in the first quest just repeating forever.
To those of you who tried to play the game yesterday and could not, I sincerely apologize and I hope that you will give it another try now that we've resolved the issue. It was almost midnight when we were first told about the bug, but I moved as quickly as I could and got it patched up within the hour.
Please delete the existing file and download the new one here, by clicking the image:
Fixed an issue preventing quest progress from being saved, resulting in an endless loop on the first quest.
Fixed an issue preventing skipping on the opening cutscene from working as intended
Fixed an issue where the dungeon victory music would continue playing after the player had left the dungeon
I thank you all for your patience and hope this hasn't ruined your impression of our new demo. Please do not hesitate to DM me on discord or email me at [email protected] any time if there are further issues.
~BeanBandit, Arkanya Dev
Arkanya's page is up on Steam, mates! Go check it out!
almost 4 years ago
– Fri, Apr 22, 2022 at 05:29:17 PM
A special update today as we bring word of something well-anticipated and longed for... it's Arkanya's Steam page! With some cool snazzy new screenshots and a full-on description to help give you a lay of the land about the game (although you probably know it already, considering), consider giving us a hand by throwing us a good ol' wishlist on Steam. Just click here!
Each wishlist tells Steam that Arkanya's not only a game that people are after, it also tells Steam that Arkanya is indeed, a real game, and not a piece of shovelware! It's kind of tragic that even has to be said, but the platform is inundated with such a volume of... not very good things that there's certain activity metrics that need to be met before Valve now considers a game "real". A bit annoying, bit it is what it is! We appreciate all of you for backing the game and also giving us a good ol' helping hand here too.
And a final word on a shoutout...
And finally, a quick shoutout for another Zelda-like currently running a Kickstarter campaign, 'cos we know we all love Zelda here! Toasty: Ashes of Dusk is a Zelda-Earthbound mashup RPG, following the story of Marshall the Marshmallow Knight as he travels across the world to fight great evils, make weird friends while travelling parallel dimensions and... discover why he's a talking marshmallow.
Announcement! Demo live stream on April 23, demo backer preview available April 25
almost 4 years ago
– Mon, Apr 18, 2022 at 04:05:56 AM
Oops! Spoiled the reveal in the title. Yes, our friend HourADayGamer is going to be streaming the official demo for The Girl from Arkanya on Twitch.tv this coming Saturday, April 23rd at 1pm Eastern Time!
At least one dev will be there answering questions and providing commentary (probably me but Rob too if I can get him tied to the chair in time), so please stop in and say hi if you can!
For those who aren't familiar, my man Hour is a legend in the indie game community, and he works hard to bring attention to underappreciated indie games. Hour was one of the first people to really see potential in Arkanya and publicly support it, and so once again we are giving him first dibs on our new content!
But you can play it too!
The current plan is to put the demo in our itch.io page, and send you all a link and password via our next update. This isn't just for the beta tester tier, but for all of our backers. The Steam version, which will be open to the public, is also on the way, and our Steam page is currently under review.
That part I can't give an exact date on because it's largely up to our publisher, and they've gotta run all their 9000 IQ marketing strats. I just make the game. They said I could give you all the hook-up though since you've been patiently waiting.
Anyway I gotta get back to bug testing so this demo can be super smooth for you guys, but first check out this art Kale is working on for the intro cutscene!
Bean that's not pixel art! Yeah I know, we're experimenting a bit with the style. The intro cutscene tells the origin story of Marajo, and sets up a lot of the premise of the Arkanya story. This, along with a handful of other images, will play at the start of a new game and give the player a little info about the land they're stepping in to. As you may have noticed, we took a lot of inspiration from the opening of Wind Waker, and game Rob and I have always greatly loved and I'm sure many of you love as well.
Kale does pretty much all of the non-pixel art and a lot of the pixel art as well for Arkanya, and you should totally give her a follow on her twitter: https://twitter.com/Pinkedalink
That's all for now! I'll catch you again in a few days!
~BeanBandit, Arkanya dev
March update!
almost 4 years ago
– Mon, Mar 28, 2022 at 04:44:34 PM
Hello again! This is going to be more of a check-in than an actual update. Truth be told, I almost forgot to even do it this month. We've been absolutely buried in finishing our upcoming Steam demo and I honestly wouldn't have realized what day it was if I hadn't gotten an email notification from kickstarter.
Demo Info
I have a somewhat involuntary vacation coming up in May so the demo needs to be finalized before then. I can't say exactly when it will be up on Steam because we still need to coordinate with our publisher on that, and our steam page still needs to be made, but the demo itself should be done in 3-4 weeks and we should have a test version up in our discord this week.
Demo Stream
We've arranged to have an awesome indie game streamer play the Arkanya demo live on Twitch.tv late next month. I'll be sending out another short update once we have the date and time set on that, and we'd love to see you all drop in! It will also be announced several times on our twitter page. We also plan to get a recording of the stream and use that for a future update, so you'll get to see it eventually either way.
There's unfortunately just not a whole lot to show off this month aside from some progress on the updated UI art. March was largely about game sequencing, which more or less means that I was setting up instructions telling the game what events should happen in what order, and what effect those events have on the game world.
So in Arkanya, we have something akin to a quest system. If you've ever played an RPG where you talk to an NPC and they say "Go kill 5 squirrels and I'll give you 30 gold", that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. For Arkanya though, that's all done behind the scenes. It's presented just like a traditional Zelda game would be, but inside the program we have a list of "quests" the player can be on at any time. These quests can be set to Unassigned, Assigned, ReturnToNPC, or Complete.
On many, MANY objects throughout the game world, we have "Quest Listeners" which get notified every time the quest list updates. These quest listeners have instructions to react in certain ways depending on which quest changed, and how. So for example, here we have a merchant and his cart blocking Marisa's path outside the city of Arkanya. This is because she has not yet completed the first quest.
This gate is next to Marisa's house, so there was a high chance of new players just wandering off into the wilderness before they could understand the game or their goal, so we needed a way to keep everyone focused for at least a short while. You are, however, still free to roam about the majority of the city at this time.
But when we complete that first quest and return to the gate, we can see the merchant has finally left.
This is because the merchant had a quest listener on him, telling him to delete his character model (as well as his cart) once the first quest is complete.
There are hundreds of examples of this, with many being changes you won't even see, such as cutscene activators disappearing after the cutscene completes, stuff like that. And they take a little while to set up. Its a massive improvement over our original system though, where things like this had to be manually programmed and it was a really messy web of code that didn't always work. These days, it's all drag-and-drop for the most part, and it's 100% reliable (so far) which means it took about a week and a half to sequence one chapter worth of gameplay, as opposed to our original Kickstarter demo which had a fraction as much content yet took months to sequence.
Aside from that, the rest of the month was spent finishing cutscenes and bug-hunting. Arkanya is in a fairly stable state now but there's still a lot of polishing left to do before we launch this new demo, and we've still got 2 required music tracks before that goes out. Here's some updates on the UI elements I was teasing last month:
For those of you with the tester role in our discord, you should be able to go hands-on with the demo toward the end of this week. Bug me about it if you don't see it posted. It's basically ready to play right this minute, but I want to get more of the building interiors fleshed out first so you can explore and test more maps. However, sometimes I get so deep in my work that I forget about our testers, and next thing I know another month has passed. So don't be afraid to let me know you're waiting for it.
For everyone else who backed the game, I believe I can give you the PC version of the demo as soon as it's done, so you won't have to wait for the official release. Obviously things have not always gone according to plan for us, so please understand that this is what we are trying to do, not what's set in stone. However, the demo stream in late April is pretty much a sure thing at this point, and I see no reason why we can't give our backers the same version the streamer is getting.
I'm kind of just rambling now so I guess I'll get this wrapped up! Thank you all once again for your patience. I know you've all been waiting a very long time for this, so we feel truly blessed that this community has been so overwhelmingly supportive of us, still to this day.
You should be hearing from me again soon. Have a wonderful day!
