Developing a believable world that all of these fantastic creatures and environments exist in, was extremely important to me when I first started developing Arakion. One of the most important things I have striven for when creating the world is to make feel as alive as possible. In this update I'm going to go over a little bit about how the world was created, what makes it feel alive and some characters you'll meet along the way.

The World

Arakion exists in an extremely prodigious and engulfing world. From the moment you first step foot in it, till the final battle, I'm striving hard to make everything feel like it has a place and reason for being.

In the same fashion the world is also highly interactive. You'll be able to interact with almost everything around you, a lot of time has been spent developing something that doesn't feel stale and static but is engrossing. In most games you will go from point A to point B, in Arakion you'll journey through the world being presented with multiple paths to get to your destination. If you're the explorer type, you will be able to go to massive open areas that have nothing to do with your main quest, finding dungeons and secrets and spending hours exploring the vast land that Arakion has to offer.

On the other hand if you prefer a more linear story, you'll be able to focus on the main quest and choose a more point A to point B approach. The world of Arakion presents you with a lot of options that don't bottleneck you, and that's the way it should be.

On the subject of characters, one of the most important people that you'll meet in the game is called The GroundsKeeper. 

When first arriving at your town, you'll be greeted by the disgruntled groundskeeper and his massive machinery. Throughout the game you'll be interacting and working with him to rebuild the town in the vision you see fit. 

Creating it

This has been asked, a lot. While I will be releasing the video version of the making of soon, I just wanted to quickly go through what goes into making Arakion.

The engine: The choice of engine was an easy one for me, I chose Unity because it allows myself as a small and essentially single man team to develop a massive amount of content in a short amount of time. 

In the span of 5 months unity allowed me working part time to:

• Finish the base code
• Create the world building tools
• Develop multiple dungeons
• Get a good chunk of the town finished.
• Test out a lot of what did and didn't work

With all this finished part time and in a short amount of time, you can see why I'm so excited for Kickstarter to succeed and find out what I can build with a full year and multiple people working on the project!

The Art: Developing the art for Arakion has been a wonderful experience for me. It allowed me the freedom to experiment until I was able to create a world and artstyle that I loved and that felt unique. Since I get questions about the process of the asset art a lot I'll quickly break down my process

• Quick ZBrush concept (See the groundskeeper above)
• Retopo in 3dCoat
• Unwrap in UVLayout
• Final sculpt in ZBrush
• Texture in Photoshop
• Import into Unity and it's good to go

Pledge Aesthetics

As a final note, I'm reaching out to you guys to let me know what you would like added to the pledges. In order to give you another special thank you I'm going be putting some aesthetic head gear into the game at different tiers. These will effect your characters portrait during the game (they have no stat benefits, purely aesthetic). What I need from you are ideas, what would you like some of the helmets or trinkets to be. Currently for sure is a Fez, but beyond that I'm open to ideas!

Before I get going I want to once again say thank you to everyone for your continued support it really means a lot to me. If you have any questions about the game be sure to hit me up in a private message and remember to keep reaching out to people and let them know that Arakion is here and ready for their support!