August Update: Trailer teasers and a new merch preview!
over 4 years ago – Wed, Aug 25, 2021 at 04:18:19 AM

Hello again my friends! I have a lot of cool stuff to show off today but no real plan for how I'm going to do this, so let's just wing it! 

Woah! A new-ish song! This one is actually months old but due to a miscommunication between Rob and I, it never hit Youtube. I think some of you heard this one before, but here it is again! 

To go with it, here's a tiny little preview of the battle with Captain Rafael Fidalgo Diaz de Castilla:

Now listen, real talk for a minute. I still can't show you the trailer. That's a direct order from the suits upstairs. Upstairs in this case is actually in New York. 

"But boss!" I pleaded, "These people are our biggest fans! They've already bought the game! They deserve more!"  

And because I did my most annoying whining voice for long enough, eventually they caved. I have been cleared to share a few more clips from the trailer! 

 I included the sound on these first two, but please keep in mind that we're still fine-tuning the audio! Some of these sounds and voices will be tweaked and adjusted before the full release. 

Unfortunately I'm supposed to keep the coolest clips a closely guarded secret. Something about maximizing the marketing impact, I guess. I would literally show all of you every single thing in the game right this moment if I was allowed to, but the rest of the team knows where I live. 

I think I'm going to end this update by going through the game files and getting some screenshots of some newer but non-spoilery assets we've introduced lately. Seems like fun. But first, I need to show you some new art from our highly talented artist, Kale! 

A huge number of you backed at tiers that included the sticker pack, and we've finally completed the design for one of the stickers. And I can give some info about them too! We are currently looking at 4in x 6in sheets of water-resistant vinyl stickers. You can put these on windows, computer cases, laptops, etc. The website even recommends car bumpers, though I can tell you from personal experience that they fade in the sun after a couple years. 

Kale and I are still discussing the details of the remaining designs, but let me know in the comments what you would rather have: 3-4 big stickers, or 6-8 small ones. 

So with that out of the way, here's a few screenshots of what we've been up to in the land of Arkanya:

Here's a part of the overworld map we just wrapped up. Its funny because I can show you this place, but I can't say it's name without spoiling a big part of the story...

Next we have the err... infamous Puruguard. These warrior capybara stand watch over the realm of Puru Puru, and are fiercely loyal to King Oli. Their actual combat abilities are rather dubious, however. 

Speaking of King Oli, he's gotten a little upgrade. He now sports a crown made of melon, and his prized melon treasury behind him. 

Watch out for Bushkins! 

Decorations for the Arkanya Volksfest are coming together nicely

And lastly for now, Renzo's brother Enzo now has his own shop in the Treasure Hunter's Guild!

 Thanks for sticking with me all the way to the end! I cannot make any solid promises on when the full trailer will release or when the Steam page will be available, but we're looking at mid-September right now. There will be a kickstarter update to go with it, so we'll definitely make sure you know! 

Thank you all so much and I'll see you next time! 

~BeanBandit, Arkanya dev

July Update: It's a short one!
over 4 years ago – Fri, Jul 30, 2021 at 05:27:07 PM

Hey folks! Sorry for the wait. Things have been chaotic over here and time is relentless. Could we all collectively pretend its still January? That would be great. 

Anyway, guess what happened on July 3rd? That's right, a hard drive failed with no backup! 

I wish I could say that was the worst thing that happened to me that particular day, but honestly it probably ranks 2nd or 3rd worst. It seems like all of my bad luck likes to save up for a long time and then unload all at once. Life is funny like that. 

Anyway, you're probably wondering what was on the hard drive, right? Well, the main thing was the footage I'd recorded for the trailer. Oops! That's a bit of a setback. The rest was mostly personal stuff, aside from some templates I'd made for faster youtube/twitter uploads. 

Ultimately it took about a week and a half to get back to where we were, including a two-day break Rob and Kale forced me to take because they worry too much about me. 

The good news is that though we're a little behind our intended schedule on the trailer, we are pretty darn close to completion. The big bummer though is that we missed our publisher's original timetable for their big marketing push, and now they're asking us to keep the trailer under wraps until our turn comes around again. 

Imagine having this thing you're so proud of, you want to show the whole world RIGHT NOW, but you'll ruin everything if you do. But they're the experts, and I'm in no position to argue. 

For those unfamiliar with video game publishing, publishers usually juggle multiple, sometimes several projects at once, and ours likes to focus all their marketing energy on one project at a time for best results. Because we missed our slot, now we have to wait for a new slot. We'll be discussing the new time for that with them soon. It will most likely coincide with the creation of our Steam page so we can drive traffic there. 

However, I did not come here empty-handed. Today I have some screenshots to share! And next time (I'll try to make it earlier in the month) I'll bring some clips of the trailer, plus another song! Maybe two if Rob will let me.  

That's all for today! See you soon! 

~BeanBandit, Arkanya dev

June Update: Sorry for the wait! Let's talk trailers!
over 4 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!
over 4 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 5 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