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:
February Update - Exploring the remade first dungeon!
about 3 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!
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
over 3 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.
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.
Art also by Clozy. We got a lot of art recently. A LOT. Gotta save some of it for next time!
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
November Update
over 3 years ago
– Mon, Nov 23, 2020 at 11:47:53 AM
Hello again you beautiful people! Well, I blinked and suddenly November is almost over, so I suppose it's time for our update.
I don't have much "news" for you this time, but if you purchased the Kapi body pillow tier or higher, please get in touch with us soon so we can start on your capybara/npc/secret area/etc. I highly recommend you join our Discord server: discord.gg/xxx24Ge where you can get a special Contributor rank, and speak directly with the devs at any time! However, if that's not your style, then you may also message us directly here on Kickstarter, though we may be a bit slower to respond.
So, what's happening with this beta? Well, there's a bit of an internal battle going on over in the Arkanya Discord, and I AM LOSING. Inconceivable, yet it is true. I wanted to get beta testing rolling asap, which would mean our testers would be playing a very bare-bones and content-light version of the game. Rob, with the backing of many of our community members, is trying to bully me into holding off until we have a more feature-complete build with a much bigger playable area. Maybe we'll compromise? It does have a logic to it though. While some of you may be ready to become die-hard testers, digging in to every single build I throw your way, I do fear that most of you will play the heck out of it once and then not touch it again until release. I mean, it's what I would probably do. So its true that we will likely get better, more valuable data based on how much content we put in front of you in that first build. As of right now, the debate continues.
Anyway, let's explore some new Arkanya media! Starting off, we have the official concept art for High Priest Xolotl, the main villain of The Girl from Arkanya! This is the first time we've ever shown this off! We -were- saving it for IWOCon, but... yeah... we still have no idea when IWOCon is. And Clozy worked hard on this! It needs to be seen!
Truly a terrifying presence! Don't let his muscular physique fool you, Xolotl is the most powerful necromancer the world has ever known! He is a titan both in body and mind.
Let's see, what else do we have in the IWOcon folder... Oh, we've begun working on the different weather versions for the world map! If you didn't know, certain weathers actually can have dramatic changes on the layout of the world map! Weather changing will be critical for exploration as you progress through Amazonia.
Who leaves all of these treasure chests just laying around? Well I'm glad you asked! You see, 45 years before the events of The Girl from Arkanya, a Castilan colony once existed where Arkanya now stands. Castile sought to subjugate the Marajoarans, and extract the land's vast mineral wealth. To free their people, the Marajoaran shamans performed a ritual to summon a terrible calamity, wreaking havoc on the Castilan settlement and its surrounding areas. In their haste to escape, the Castilans left behind much of the treasure they had accumulated, usually dropping it where they stood before fleeing to their ships. So be sure to thoroughly explore every area when you're out treasure hunting! You never know what they might have left behind! And check back often, because the jungle has a way of producing things which weren't there before...
We've been reworking the game's tutorial a lot based on feedback from our KS demo. Here's a small peek at a scene from the new tutorial:
Bats!
Here's an area from later in the game called Tamandare. Our level designer refers to it as an "enchanted forest", but I can promise you that "enchanted" is not the right word! But I don't want to spoil one of our biggest plot points, so you'll just have to speculate why these trees are purple. And what's with those weird lizard guys?
And last, but also least (though I still wanted to show you!) we have... new beach sand! Moderately prettier than the old beach sand!
Please take some time to appreciate the fine, wavy details of the sand, as you visit the new Wildkat Kapanna!
The Wildkat looks awfully fun, doesn't it? You'll be spending a lot of time there, and its one of the first locations you'll visit in Costa Verde!
That's all I've got for Arkanya-related stuff. If I still have your attention though, I'd like to give a shout out to some of our friends really quickly though. First off, the legendary HourADayGamer will soon be making a triumphant return to streaming on December 15 after a long hiatus! If you don't know Hour, he's a terrific indie game streamer and a pillar of the Indie World Order community.
And finally, let's talk very briefly about Shrine's Legacy. We're not really doing cross-promos anymore, but this one is on the house because these devs are just great guys and people helped us, so we're gonna pay it forward! This is an excellent project styled after early 90s action RPGs, and it has co-op! I know like half of you are here because of our couch co-op mode, well Shrine's Legacy has that too! But even better, you can play their co-op mode right now! They have a pretty lengthy demo, and its quite fun. You can find that here: http://www.positiveconceptgames.com/shrineslegacy/getdemo/
But they would really appreciate it if you followed their Kickstarter page. It'll be launching early next year. Just click the picture below!
That's all for now! Follow us on Twitter or Discord to get more frequent updates, otherwise, see you in December!
-BeanBandit, Arkanya Lead Developer
October update: Backerkit, private testing, and more!
over 3 years ago
– Sat, Oct 17, 2020 at 03:05:18 PM
Hello once again you marvelous people! It feels like ages since I did one of these but in reality its been right around a month! The business side of things has fortunately been winding down since, and we're back to spending ~90% of our time on actual development. Very little progress was made during the Kickstarter campaign, so this feels wonderful.
Alright Rob is gonna yell at me if I don't put the Backerkit stuff first, so lets get that out of the way and then we can move on to the fun stuff!
We are launching the Arkanya Backerkit
The Arkanya Backerkit is up! So what is Backerkit exactly? Well, it's a reputable 3rd-party company that assists in fulfilling Kickstarter pledges. You should receive an email from Backerkit explaining what you need to do to claim your pledge rewards. Additionally, anyone who wishes to upgrade their pledge or add additional items will be able to do so once again!
For those of you who pledged extra money, there will be a small extra step for you. As I understand, anything extra you paid over your pledge tier will be credited to you, and you will be able to choose add-ons equaling that credit amount. Anyone else wishing to buy extra add-ons will also be given the chance to do so.
If you do not get your email from Backerkit within a few days, please message Rob or I on Kickstarter or Discord, and we will get you sorted out ASAP!
Private testing is starting soon! ...Probably.
I say probably because as is always the case with the Arkanya team, some things are moving faster than expected while others are going slower. Our goal is to have a playable build in the hands of our testers (which includes a huge number of you reading this!) by the end of October. We've recently rebuilt the controllers from the ground-up for both characters and enemies to improve game feel and better accommodate a co-op experience. This means we have a certain number of tasks to re-complete before the game is even playable again, so we can't really give you a build until every one of those tasks is complete. That said, progress has been excellent!
The upcoming build will focus almost entirely on testing the newly rebuilt systems, which will mostly be combat and movement-related. You will also get to explore a bit in the forest of Pora Iandara, which has also been rebuilt by our level designer James. In the previous playable build, Pora Iandara had been designed by myself, but it wasn't on-par quality-wise with James's work, so he's gone in and redone all of it. Please explore it thoroughly!
These early tests are going to be very strictly structured and limited, so if you're only looking forward to getting your hands on the dungeons or story, please be patient and wait a little longer. I promise those things are not super far away!
New promotional art by Clozy
I'm sure most of you are familiar with the amazing talent responsible for all of Arkanya's promotional art thus far, but if you're not, please go check him out on Twitter! https://twitter.com/ClozyOzy
The man is working like a machine, so I suspect we'll have even more of these to show in our next update! This scene depicts the encounter at Ibotirama, aka Ari's Glade. For those who played our most recent build, you may remember this scene from the tutorial! But wait, that scene didn't have glow-y blue flowers, right? Huh, weird!
Thanks to our level designer James for really sprucing this place up!
That's all I've got for you today! Please expect your Backer surveys very soon (like today) and have a great weekend! I'll be back with more once we're ready to open beta testing!
-BeanBandit, Arkanya Lead Developer
Announcing the winners of the costume design contest! And our little Kickstarter postmortem
over 3 years ago
– Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 01:04:06 PM
I love running contests, but boy do I hate ending them! It's actually seriously the worst thing. Why? Because we had dozens of incredible entries and only 3 can win. The devs and community team argued for HOURS, our community manager probably hates me now, and we never reached a consensus. However, we put it to a vote, and 3 clear winners emerged.
So congratulations to David Martin-Bennett, Kirstie Rutter, and ThePetitBullet! It was an incredibly hard decision, but you three are our contest winners!
David's entry:
Kirstie Rutter's Entry:
And ThePetitBullet's entry:
These three will be getting some neat prizes, as well as having their designs featured as unlockable outfits in The Girl from Arkanya! You can follow them on twitter at @DubniumGames, @KirstieRutter, and @BulletPetit.
Expect to see these as some of the very first outfits available when the outfit system is up and running. This is actually our second time running this contest, so here's a shout-out to the winners from back when this project had like 2 followers! These were made using our old and ugly character templates, but we'll be fixing that!
@OfTetris, aka PixelTheWise
Blueskadoo:
And Acero (sorry, I seriously cannot find your twitter handle right now!)
A huge thanks to everyone who participated in the contest! I'm always really hesitant to do anything like this because I think nobody's going to enter, and then we'll look like idiots and have to admit nobody wants our dumb prizes, that kind of thing. But clearly that's not the case! In fact, maybe we can do some more contests in the future, since this one went so well. So thank you once again!
How to win at Kickstarter
We learned a great many things doing our Kickstarter campaign and since many of you are indie creators or kickstarter enthusiasts (some of you had triple digits for projects backed! What the heck!) I'd like to share with you some insights we gained along the way. There will be pictures and graphs! If this isn't something you're interested, feel free to skip this whole section. Its long.
Your video is your most important asset
This was very counter-intuitive to everything we were told beforehand. All of the research I did said that having a really killer demo build is the most important thing you can do. Here's why that's wrong:
This is the daily downloads for our demo build every day since around the time we announced our Kickstarter. You can see it spiked up a lot the day we launched, and right at the end. And by spiked up, I mean it went to about 7. SEVEN DOWNLOADS! Our highest day was 12! Granted, we had about 90 downloads back in April when we released our first build, but during the Kickstarter we had less than 100 total downloads. And that's a good thing, because our demo build is rough and unpolished, if I'm being totally honest.
Now lets compare that to our video:
Almost 10,000 people saw our video, and 1 out of 5 people who watched our video gave us money! Now, you may notice here that roughly 21% of people who watched our video also finished it. I think its no coincidence that almost the the number of people who finished watching our video is nearly the same as the number of people who bought the game.
If I ever lead a Kickstarter campaign, we're not even going to do a demo build. I just don't think it had any significant impact on our funding, seriously. Instead I'm going to spend 3x as much time making an even more awesome video. If you can get people to finish your video, they give you money. If any of you have had different experiences, please reach out to me and let me know but with the data I have, this is the conclusion I reached. Keep an eye out, November 2021, you're gonna see a trailer for Arkanya 2 that we spent 4 months filming (this is a joke (maybe))
A good publisher goes a long way
We partnered with Top Hat Studios back in... February? It's been a minute. Anyway, if you think you might benefit from a publisher (and you probably would if you're new at this) start shopping for one long before you do Kickstarter. Once you announce you're heading to Kickstarter, the opportunists start coming out of the woodwork. And it may become hard to filter out the good ones from the vultures if you're not experienced.
Now this is an area where having a prototype, not a demo, is very useful. Publishers like to get hands-on with your project and make sure its not all just smoke and mirrors, which trailers often are.
Look at how front-loaded our funding was. We sold out of our 2 highest tiers within the first hour, I kid you not. Most Kickstarter campaigns start big and then taper off, but not like this. So why did we get that huge burst within minutes of starting? Because our publisher asked other developers under their label to promote us, and promote us they did! Our first wave of backers flooded in from Steamdolls, far outnumbering the pledges even from our own twitter followers. It helped as well that we were featured on the front page of Kickstarter and got the "Projects We Love" badge within the first hour or so, but I firmly believe that the promotions our publisher set up for us were what got us noticed.
What else did they do for us during our campaign? Well, for one, they did all the leg work for figuring out our shipping costs, which saved us a ton of time on our end. They also wrote and sent out a press release to dozens of games journalists, which got us a great amount of coverage early on. And they continued to promote our game multiple times per week for the remainder of the campaign. They also yelled at me multiple times for not including our Kickstarter link on posts, which you probably need if you're as forgetful as I am.
When looking for a publisher, one of the biggest things you should be seeking is a team that's going to try to lighten your workload as much as possible, I think. Also for what it's worth, our publisher did not ask for any cut of our Kickstarter funds, except what was required to manufacture the physical goods and ship them to backers. Definitely ask about that before selecting a publisher. We didn't but we sort of lucked out.
Don't stop! Don't ever stop!
Running a Kickstarter campaign is absolutely exhausting and sometimes the anxiety kept me from sleeping on top of it. But we never took a single day off. Very early on we spoke to a solo dev with an excellent game who hit his goal very early, and then stepped away from his campaign for a bit to focus on development. His campaign stalled out, and despite trying his best at the end, he could never revive it. Don't get me wrong, he still ended up fully funded, but he could have done so much better had he stuck with it, and he told us as much.
If your campaign looks like ours (and most do) your best days for funding are going to be the first 3 and the last 3. But look at these 24 days in between. Over 50% of our funding came from those middle 24 days, so while they aren't glamorous, they're important. Once that train stops, it might never start again, so keep promoting your product HARD during this middle section, and find ways to keep people interested. Cross-promoting with other campaigns seems to be the most reliable way to achieve this, though I have no idea what the best way is. Just get in the mindset that for 30 days, your only job is marketing your game. You're not a developer, you're a salesman. It's the worst thing but you just got to do it.
Don't find your hook, let your hook find you
Did you know that Kapi wasn't even a main character originally? Seriously, he just had a side quest. That's it. So how did he go from a lowly quest giver to the face of Arkanya? Well, people just liked him. And the more we showed him off, the more they liked him. So now we're the capybara game.
For those who don't know what a "hook" is in this context, it's the thing which grabs attention and makes people interested in your game. What instantly sets it apart from everything else?
Back in the olden days of 2019, Rob and I were foolish young lads. We couldn't come up with a hook, the thing that was going to define our game. "We don't need one!" we said, like a couple of idiots. "We'll just make a really solid game with no gimmicks and that will be good enough!"
And it can be hard. Not everyone is a walking idea factory and a truly good hook is hard to dream up. But when we saw the public reaction to Kapi, we knew we'd found something. People LOVE capybaras. They really loved the idea of having a capybara companion. And then they reallyreally loved the idea of being a capybara. So no kidding, we re-worked the entire game concept to revolve around Kapi. Now look where we are, being the 430% funded capybara game instead of the forgettable Zelda clone.
So here's my advice to you on this: If you can't find your hook, let the hook find you. Go head and make your prototype based on whatever genre you're trying to make. Then watch veryclosely what aspects of the game your fans respond to. What character do they like best? What do they spend the most time doing? Which of your posts get the most likes? When you find something, lean into it. If you wanted to make a medieval action RPG but your players spend all their time throwing rocks at NPCs, make the "Throw Rocks at NPCs" game. It may not be the game you dreamed of, but you want to be an indie dev, right? Focus on that first, and making your dream game later. When you have a huge following, then you can go off and make your version of Death Stranding that nobody will understand but it'll sell a million copies anyway because it was made by the same director as "Throw Rocks at NPCs".
For the record, Kapi will always be in my dream game because he's just so darn handsome.
Well, I think that's all I've got for now! There's definitely other stuff we picked up that just didn't really merit a whole section here, so if you have questions, please ask in the comments!
Have you heard of Haiku?
This is going to be the last one of these we do for probably quite awhile, but boy its a good one! I mean obviously, I wouldn't promote it if it wasn't.
My first impression of this game (it has a demo!) is that it makes me think of Nier Automata if you played as Pascal. If that means literally nothing to you, it's real easy: The world has ended, humans are all dead, you're a cute robot, vending machines are weirdly important.
Oh, and industrial equipment wants to murder you.
I think my favorite thing about Haiku is the color palette. It's just so pleasant to look at and perfectly merges the cutesy aesthetic with the feeling of an apocalyptic wasteland.
Just an fun, happy, adorable little game about a tiny robot named Haiku.
And they have... SOCKS?!
I'm so frustrated right now. We should have made capybara socks. That would have probably sold 10x better than the body pillow. I failed my team, I failed you, I failed capybara enthusiasts everywhere. But Haiku, the Robot didn't, so go check out their socks! And the game too, while you're there!
That's all I've got for today! From now on I'll be posting updates less frequently, but I'll be sure to do minimum one each month. Now my question for those of you who read these: Would you prefer we do small but frequent updates, or just do one big update letter every month? Let me know in the comments!
Thank you all and I hope you have a wonderful weekend.
