May Mini-Update
over 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!?
over 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!
over 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

February Update - Exploring the remade first dungeon!
almost 4 years ago – Fri, Feb 26, 2021 at 09:07:23 PM

Hey guys! We're back with another update, and this time I wanted to try something a little different. Since we recently... hey what the heck, did we just lose 8 days out of nowhere? Well, since we semi-recently did a limited test build with our discord community, I thought I'd make a video of myself running through the first dungeon of the game (freshly re-made!) and give some commentary on it. 

This isn't going to become a normal thing and if you all don't dig it, it'll probably be the last time I do it, because ultimately I want you folks to be able to read these at work, on the train, in the bathtub, wherever you please really, and 18 minute videos aren't the best for that. But let's see what happens. 

For our beta-tier backers: Yes, this is still available! If you want to try it out for yourself, just pop over to our discord and make sure you have the beta tester role (Any of the Blue or Green names can give that to you) and grab the build and the survey from the beta channels.   

We've already gathered a tremendous amount of feedback from our discord users, and we'll be using that to make this dungeon, and every dungeon, even better! 

Again, leave a comment here if you loved this or you hated it, I could do more videos or I could never do a video again, entirely up to the community. 

We're kind of in an art drought (Clozy's low-key kinda famous now and super busy) but hopefully he doesn't get too mad at me for sharing this work-in-progress piece, because you guys know I like to bring you new art every month! 

Marisa's so pretty, she's too good for this game 

Yup, it's another cross-promo: Kindom Gun!

This time we're covering Kingdom Gun, a roguelite shooter/platformer! This is combining a lot of genres I personally don't play all that much, so I'm afraid I don't have much to compare it to. However as you can see from the gif, the pixel art is absolutely gorgeous, and believe me when I say the soundtrack is absolutely stellar. Or instead of believing me,  check out their Kickstarter page HERE and give their trailer a watch! 

Kingdom Gun is a game with a lot of replay value, as you choose from six playable characters and each character provides a new experience. Plus, you can play online with your friends! Any indie game with online co-op is impressive in my book. It's seriously way harder than you probably think! And for all of you Rogue-lite fans, Kingdom Gun includes randomized items and permanent death, but also systems with permanent progression, such as collectable pets! 

 Check it out soon, because their Kickstarter campaign ends Sunday! 

Alright, that's all I have for you this month. I'm going to try to get the next update out earlier in March, and we've got a couple big things to share! I wanted very badly to spill the beans right here and now, but it's better if I wait until they're really ready to debut, so keep an eye out! 

Thank you all for your continued support, and have a great day! 

-BeanBandit 

January Update
almost 4 years ago – Wed, Jan 27, 2021 at 12:18:35 PM

Hello again, we are back! Did you miss us? Kickstarter claims a lot of you did, I keep getting bombarded with emails about it anyway! It's been a long, intense couple of months for us, and we certainly have a lot to talk about, so let's dive right in. 

Before I talk your ear off about what the gang and I have been up to since November, let's answer the question as to why we waited so late in the month to do our update: As of the time I published this, Ova Magica has gone live on Kickstarter!  

"What the heck Bean! Why are you starting with this?" I know, I know. Listen, first off, this is going to be a very long update and I didn't want to lose you before you saw this. Secondly,  ClaudiaTheDev is not only part of the Indie World Order family, but also a fellow dev signed with our publishing company, Top Hat Studios, and given our experiences with them we're more than happy to help out. But lastly and probably most importantly, if I suck up really hard, there's a slight chance that I can get Marisa featured in yet another game which is ultimately all I ever want in life. Maybe some sort of Kapi blob too? He's already kind of a blob.  Or I could guarantee it by backing Ova Magica, with the backer tier that lets you add your own blob trainer right into the game! 

But what the heck is a blob trainer?  

Well I'm glad you asked! Arkanya fans really are the smartest, most inquisitive people out there, after all. 

So, blobs are little critters kind of like Pokemon except they're spherical and jelly-like, which is really how all animals should be. So naturally, like you'd do with any spherical jelly animal, you do Rocky-style training montages and then have them fight other spherical jelly animals. But wait, there's more! Blobs have special abilities, so in Ova Magica, they've done what humans always do when an animal has a special ability: Use it for agriculture. 

Ova Magica combines elements of Pokemon, Harvest Moon, and Stardew Valley into a single experience that really is the chocolate and peanut butter of life sims. You're definitely going to ask yourself, "why was this not already a thing?" It just seems like such an obvious combo after the fact. 

Alright, you came here to hear about Arkanya, not listen to me fanboy over another game for an hour, but seriously do yourself a favor and check it out. If you're only going to back one game on Kickstarter that isn't Arkanya, I have to recommend this one. 

 https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/claudiathedev/ova-magica?ref=dti4cm 

Alright, now we can talk Arkanya. 

So we started working on implementing co-op and... oh boy. Don't worry, co-op is still coming and we're not too far from being able to share some co-op gameplay with you all! But when we started working on it, we unsettled a lot of ugly code that hadn't been an issue before, so January has largely been about cleaning up old messes I forgot I made. 

The first dungeon has also gotten a fresh coat of paint in anticipation of our upcoming limited backer test, including improved visuals, more intuitive puzzles, and a brand new boss fight! 

We've also finalized the game's lighting system/visuals, and uh... we actually kind of looped back around to our original lighting visuals. However, it's a lot more performant under the hood now, because we want this game to run flawlessly on the Nintendo Switch! (And also it just needed some cleaning up, badly)

"But wait" asked maybe one of you if I'm lucky, "Is that procedurally generated pixel fire and laser?"  

Why yes, it is! Neat, huh? Please don't touch them, Marisa's hair is extremely flammable.

UPCOMING LIMITED TEST

So, if you made it this far with me, then I have news for you! Remember that limited test I mentioned earlier? We're going to be taking volunteers to do a mechanics test of the updated version of the first dungeon, as well as the second and third dungeons shortly after! This is tentatively set to start February 15th. Anyone who backed at the Beta Tester tier can sign up, BUT!!! You will be testing the specific part of the game we want you to test, and you will be asked to fill out a short survey after you complete the dungeon, as well as writing down or recording any bugs/issues you may find. If you're interested in doing this, please join our discord! >>>https://discord.gg/HhSbRAf

If you haven't already, please message Rob or myself (BeanBandit) with a screenshot of your Kickstarter pledge to get your special Beta Tester role! If you're not a discord user and do not wish to be, that's okay too. We'll notify all of our Beta Testers when this test goes out via email, and you can participate via email if you prefer. 

This test will be a very stripped down version of the game and as you might imagine, many elements do not have nearly the level of polish they will in the final release, so we ask all volunteers to be understanding of that. 

If you are a Beta Tester who would rather wait until a more complete beta is available, then that's okay too! We simply ask for your continued patience, as we've had to re-do a lot of old work to bring it up to what we consider an acceptable level of quality, and progress on the overworld has lagged behind other areas of development. 

Speaking of other areas of development, progress on the Arkanya soundtrack is rocketing ahead! Before I close this up, please enjoy a selection of some of our newer in-game tracks: 

It's hard to get Rob to stick to a genre or style of music, which is just fine by me because we get this wide variety of outstanding tracks for Arkanya! I really hope I can share my favorite song in the game with you guys soon. Rob told me I can release it any time I want, but it's going to have a special piece of art that goes along with it and I want to share both of them together, so it'll be a little longer on that! 

Well, I think I'll cut it off there for now. Thank you all so much for your continued support! We are going to keep working our butts off to make sure that Arkanya is good enough to repay you all for the amazing opportunities you've given us. As always, feel free to contact us any time, and we'll see you next time! 

-BeanBandit, Lead Arkanya Developer