November Update
almost 4 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. 

Go check my man out! 

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!
about 4 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
about 4 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 really really 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 very closely 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. 

Haiku!

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!

Here's that link one more time! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/haiku-the-robot/haiku-the-robot

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. 

-BeanBandit, Lead Arkanya Developer

Thank you all for an incredible campaign!
about 4 years ago – Tue, Sep 08, 2020 at 12:13:14 PM

It's over, its finally over! Apologies for the wait, we took a short break after the campaign ended but now we're back and ready to get to work! 

Word of advice for those who hope to run their own campaign some day, it's HARD! We had everyone telling us it was going to be hard and we still weren't fully prepared. Before you start, make sure you'd ready to dedicate your entire life to your Kickstarter campaign for a whole month.

So we really did it, we passed every single stretch goal! 

You continued support has made Kapi all the more powerful. 

Quite a few payments didn't go through (so check to make sure yours did if you want your rewards!) but even with that, we comfortably crossed the final goal. For those who aren't up to speed on it, we have a planned expansion for Arkanya which will include a new overworld map, two new dungeons, and many new quests! When this releases, everyone who backed the campaign will receive the update for free!  

We're going to be continuing to provide updates for Kickstarter backers right up to when the game releases and probably for awhile after. I'll be putting out a survey very soon to ask if you'd rather see small but frequent updates, or bigger updates once a month or so. 

We're currently figuring out how exactly we want to handle getting everyone their backer discord ranks. I'll be honest with you, we were not expecting there to be 1300 of you, but it's our #1 priority for next week! Many of you should have your rank as early as Monday, so look forward to it! 

For those who purchased the beta tester tier, our current schedule puts early testing in mid to late October. Testing will be organized via Discord, though we can make other accommodations if necessary. However, it certainly makes our lives easier if you're in the discord server. 

We also have exciting news! Lots of folks have requested it, so we will be doing a Backerkit!  We can't say which physical rewards will be available for purchase quite yet, but it should be the majority of those that were available during the campaign, and maybe a few surprise ones?  Physical reward fulfillment will be timed with the games release, and we will be updating on Kickstarter with previews of said products whenever we feel they are ready.   If you have any questions about this, please feel free to ask.  Otherwise, be on the look out for the Backerkit email to go out in the next few weeks!

Today we're featuring Vigour Games, who just recently started a Kickstarter for their game Growl!

Its a sort of psychological, social deduction card game about werewolves, where humans trade bites and wounds during the day, and the werewolves give bites anonymously at night. It's a fast-paced game that's perfect for parties! Check it out here:  https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/vigour/growl-madness-and-plagues?ref=73wy3q 

Their trailer is pretty funny, so at the very least go give that a watch! 

Rob and I are a bit pressed for time at the moment, so we're going to be back early next week with more info. Thank you all again so much for the amazing support you've given us, and please have a wonderful weekend! 

-BeanBandit, Lead Arkanya Developer

Just two days left!
about 4 years ago – Sun, Sep 06, 2020 at 05:28:10 AM

Hello again you outstanding people! I can't believe we're finally here. The final 2 days. We are fantastically close to our final stretch goal and getting all our wonderful backers their free expansion! That's a new overworld map, two new dungeons, and all sorts of new quests! So please, spread the word! 

I have some great news, Pinkedalink, otherwise known as Kale, will be joining the team as a dedicated artist! That frees me up to focus more on the technical side of development, and it's thanks to your overwhelming support that we are now able to do this! So thank you all for giving us this amazing opportunity! In case you are concerned, Clozy will still be producing all major promotional art for Arkanya, as well as the majority of the art book. Kale's main focus, aside from creating the game manual, will be in-game art such as the dialogue portraits mentioned in our stretch goals! 

Here's a portrait of Ari she sent me just this morning, in fact. One down, a whole bunch to go! 

Check this out!

Capstone from the Arkanya discord made this awesome bead picture of the Arkanya cover art with his girlfriend! They even framed it! How cool is that? 

I'd go as far to say it's the best-looking thing in the room! 

The costume contest is ending soon!

This coming Sunday is the last day to get your entries in! DM them to us or email them at [email protected]. Or better yet, join our discord and post them to the contest channel!

So one of our goals with Arkanya, especially now that we're working on couch co-op, is to have it be a game that parents play with their children. So it really made our day when one of our fans, Chris, reached out to us to tell us how excited his son Dominic was about the game! And better yet, Dominic had lots of entries for the costume contest! 

Thank you so much, Dominic and Chris! I really hope that one day you look back on Arkanya as one of the games you loved growing up! 

We also have an outstanding entry from Totostuck on twitter! This one is a combination traditional art/pixel art entry, which I always absolutely love to see! 

I think Marisa looks super cute as a brunette, and Kapi is wearing little mittens on his feet! How can you not love that! 

Did you know Sunday was Marisa's birthday? You do now!

Ari's birthday is 4/10, if you're curious. Kapi has transcended beyond the concept of time and therefore does not recognize birthdays. He does, however, love a good cake! 

LightBreak, and The Red Opera

We have TWO kickstarter campaigns to show you today! First up is LightBreak, a game that looks super cool but I'm not sure I fully understand! So I'll let the game's creators describe it instead! 

LightBreak is a narrative driven aural game that uses music as a core gameplay element and encourages players to listen while they play. LightBreak is inspired by Ludomusicology principles as well as games like Monument Valley and GRIS. The dev team is being mentored by the Producer of Harmonix's PS2 Hit; Frequency.

I have no idea what Ludomusicology is, but these folks are doing something very impressive here! The creators asked me to put in another gif here but you know I like to go off script, and this is a music game! It should be heard! So I tracked down their trailer on youtube, please give it a watch

LightBreak will be coming to PC but potential platforms are Nintendo Switch, Steam VR, and PS4. You can check out their kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/deev-interactive/lightbreak?ref=8isszc

Next up we have The Red Opera! Who are my Dungeons and Dragons fans here? What about metal lovers? Now I'm more of a power metal guy myself, but I do enjoy some good symphonic metal from time to time! Well The Red Opera is a D&D 5e campaign based on a stage show by the band DiAmorte, and each chapter of the campaign is set to a track performed by the Budapest Symphonic Scoring Orchestra! To top it all off, the project is sponsored by the Heavy Metal Hall of Fame! 

Check out the animated trailer

 The Red Opera has already passed its funding goal within 40 minutes, which is just absurd to me, but good on them! If tabletop RPGs are your thing, this is definitely one worth checking out. 

Check out their Kickstarter page here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/stonejamison/the-red-opera-rpg?ref=30nlhc 

They have some really neat art, thought you guys might find that cool. 

Well that's all I have for you today! I'll be back most likely Friday to do a bit of a postmortem on the KS campaign and give you a bit of info on how we'll be proceeding from here. Thank you all, and lets finish this out strong! 

-BeanBandit, Lead Arkanya Developer