0.9.4 Town and Guild update is here! š
[h2]YESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS WEāRE FINALLYYYYYY DONEEEEEEE (asterisk kind of asterisk).[/h2]
This is the biggest patch weāve done since early access launch and it absolutely, irrevocably, mentally broke the two of us. We prefer to do smaller patches more frequently, but this patch just required so much tech debt to be fixed and systems to be remade there was no other way we couldāve done this.
Well, itās almost over now. Weāre still going to be working on some polish and adding some content that we couldnāt put in (like join quests), but for now, we both really, really need a day off after two and a half months of non-stop work.
Itās been so long Iām starting to make really dumb mistakes, so yeahā¦a day off would be niceā¦ā¦ā¦ā¦
Thereās a lot of ground to cover, so before I begin, Iām just going to list out the categories and highlight the major changes.
Okay, now that the main points are out of the way, itās time for enraliYapping! āļøš¤
Gone are the days of MIAO unlocking everything. From now on, MIAO will serve as a gentle nudge for players to discover features about the game, as well as progressing through Mikanās character arc. Iād like to add some more quests in the near future so you can get to know her own journey through Snacko Islandās revival.
To highlight how much has been changed, areas in yellow are quests that were retained from 0.9.3, everything outside of that I made for 0.9.3:
Yeahā¦it was a lotā¦ā¦.Thatās why it took us forever to test and fix :(
But! Iām really excited to see how you feel about the new progression. Instead of having 300 recipes unlocked right off the bat, anything from dyes, to cooking recipes, to crafting recipes can now be unlocked in a variety of ways, usually through Guild quests.
Guilds each have their own representative(s) that will communicate with you through quests or deliveries. Each Guild rep sort of has their own personality and way of writing, and some of them even have mini story arcs within them, so I hope you enjoy getting to know everyone!
You can also unlock things via villager quests. Not only will you learn a new recipe or unlock a new shop item, youāll also get to know them better! Itās a win-win!
We want to slowly move away from the whole ātalk to NPC, give them gift, rinse repeatā cycle, as well as the ārandomly trigger their friendship event when walking aroundā. With the quest system, weāre hoping to slowly port over those cutscenes, as well as giving players new ways to gain relationship points with the characters.
There are also changes to the quest tracker on your screen!
Now, the quest no longer disappears immediately after finishing, causing confusion. It will now stay on the HUD until you switch maps, or when you get a new quest, or when you track a different quest.
Completed quests with rewards will require you to claim these rewards. Thereās a new filter inside your journal to view unclaimed rewards, as well as an animation and icon in the quest tree.
You may also find quests that have rewards on accept. Those will be denoted with a little golden ticket icon.
The quest tree itself was built in our back end SnackoEd tool on the web, and the locations of each node are then ported over into the game. Cool, right? If we were still using the old quest system, there wouldāve been no way I couldāve made all these new quests for this update.
Along with the new quests also come new quest types. So, instead of just shipping something, or getting X number of items, there are also quests from villagers that will request you to place decorations or other buildables near their house.
It was a lot of work to rip out all the guts, from the way the game faded to the way the HUD renderedā¦but it was worth it! Snacko needed to get changed at one point so we could scale more easily, so weāre glad we bit the bullet.
Letās all give recursive a round of applause for sacrificing their sanity! Yippee!
In the next couple of days, outside of fixing any nasty bugs, weāll also be finishing up ājoinā type quests. These are quests that you can grab from the board and meet up with the villager and go on an adventure together! Theyāll follow you around until you bring them home, so itās a nice way to spend some time with your favourites.
For now, theyāre disabled until we push that update, so you may find some ācoming soonā cards in your tree or board.
You may have also noticed some quests being labelled as āstoryā. Thereās currently two side story quests after you finish the main story, but Iād love to add more. In preparation for these, Iāve moved off a lot of the front-loaded exposition in the game.
One thing Iāve noticed is that players actually continue to read the journals spread out through the biomes. I wasnāt expecting thatā¦ So, I wanted to do something like that without just littering books everywhere. Story quests will be a continuation of that concept, where the burden of world building and lore is no longer stuffed into the mandatory main story cutscenes.
The bookshelf/tutorial UI was also updated into SnackoUI, and Iāve left myself some room and space in the data for adding notes and books you can find in the future for more lore-dumps.
Now that Iāve talked about some of the things that we had to set up the gameās systems for in the near future, letās go back to whatās already in the gameā¦
You may have noticed some big changes in the UI! Now, with expanded dark mode, itās no longer just the dialogue box.
[h3]Original[/h3]
[h3]Darker[/h3]
Thereās some improvements as well, such as the action prompt image now paired with the item indicator, instead of needing the item name to disappear before you can see which key it is.
The dialogue boxes and choices themselves also got a face lift, along with new animations and functionality. When youāre speaking to a villager about a quest, it should show the quest name on the upper right corner.
The dialogue system was rewritten as a system so we can better add new lines in the future. The old system wasā¦prohibitive, to say the least, and it did not scale well. With these new system-level changes, we hope localization and adding more content in the future will be 100 times easier!
I mean, just look at thisā¦ I donāt want to touch thisā¦
Now, we can use a bunch of different ways to get text into the game. Either thatās through our custom back end SnackoEd, or through a good olā spreadsheet.
Hehe, thereās a lot, and honestly, Iāve forgotten a lot of the polish weāve done since itās been two months since we started. So I hope you guys will enjoy the little touches!
Additional quality of life features added include a crafting recipe tracker. Inside the workbench or your crafting tab in the journal, you can now pin a recipe at any quantity to pin it to your HUD like itās a quest.
You can also buy things from each shopkeeper when their store is closed. You wonāt be able to speak to them directly to expand your house, but you can buy the basic goods from their shop.
Yay, thereās new movement tech! Double jumping wasnāt enough, so now we have a charged sword dash and pickaxe bounce.
When you charge up your sword, you will dash the direction youāre facing. How far you go depends on how much youāve charged. You can also dash mid-air, and if you time it just right, you can keep dashing and āflyā. Iām not too good at this myself, but Iām sure thereās some of you that will find this a walk in the park.
The pickaxe bounce is when youāre mid-air, you can bounce off of anything by charging it any amount. The distance you bounce back depends on your initial velocity plus how much youāve charged.
It makes the cutest little ābinkā noise when you pull it off, so maybe you can have some fun just binking your way around town.
We also changed the charging: when youāre charging up any tool, it no longer locks you in place. Youāll move really slowly, but youāll still be able to move.
I hope it made sense why we had to take such a long chunk away from updates to work on this one! The way it was done and how many underlying systems needed to be completely gutted and redone was too many, so there was no way to āsplit it upā, so to speak. Weāre really excited to add the new things in that we can have now that the foundation for Snacko is much cleaner and easier to work with. Thatās something that will get more important as we add in more features and begin the work for multiplayer.
With all that said, I think the two of us need a day off to just lay down and do nothing.
As always, if you notice anything wrong with your save file or found a bug, please let us know! Weāre always happy to help you fix any issues or rectify any errors in your save file.
You can reach us through Discord (just ping us, donāt be shy!) or email.
[h3]Thank you for reading my long-winded patch notes, and we really hope you enjoy this one!
Good night!!!! š¾[/h3]
This is the biggest patch weāve done since early access launch and it absolutely, irrevocably, mentally broke the two of us. We prefer to do smaller patches more frequently, but this patch just required so much tech debt to be fixed and systems to be remade there was no other way we couldāve done this.
Well, itās almost over now. Weāre still going to be working on some polish and adding some content that we couldnāt put in (like join quests), but for now, we both really, really need a day off after two and a half months of non-stop work.
Itās been so long Iām starting to make really dumb mistakes, so yeahā¦a day off would be niceā¦ā¦ā¦ā¦
Thereās a lot of ground to cover, so before I begin, Iām just going to list out the categories and highlight the major changes.
- Restrictions on villagers lifted: you can now have everyone all at once!
- Blueprint shop and other recipes no longer all unlocked at the beginning. All new quests have been implemented to unlock content
- Villager quests have been completely redone and new ones have been added
- Villager dialogue pools have been reworked to give better chances of seeing all the lines; certain lines that donāt make sense to be repeated as you befriend them will no longer be in the pool (ex: Rejka being confused why youāre talking to him in the morning despite the two of you dating)
- While saves are compatible, we had to auto-complete some new quests to keep your progression state into 0.9.4; you will also have everything unlocked inside the blueprint shop already
- UI changes for expanded dark mode, including an all new quest system and UI to go along with it
- Crafting recipes can be tracked alongside a quest on your HUD via the crafting menu or a workbench
Okay, now that the main points are out of the way, itās time for enraliYapping! āļøš¤
š Quest Progression
Gone are the days of MIAO unlocking everything. From now on, MIAO will serve as a gentle nudge for players to discover features about the game, as well as progressing through Mikanās character arc. Iād like to add some more quests in the near future so you can get to know her own journey through Snacko Islandās revival.
To highlight how much has been changed, areas in yellow are quests that were retained from 0.9.3, everything outside of that I made for 0.9.3:
Yeahā¦it was a lotā¦ā¦.Thatās why it took us forever to test and fix :(
But! Iām really excited to see how you feel about the new progression. Instead of having 300 recipes unlocked right off the bat, anything from dyes, to cooking recipes, to crafting recipes can now be unlocked in a variety of ways, usually through Guild quests.
Guilds each have their own representative(s) that will communicate with you through quests or deliveries. Each Guild rep sort of has their own personality and way of writing, and some of them even have mini story arcs within them, so I hope you enjoy getting to know everyone!
You can also unlock things via villager quests. Not only will you learn a new recipe or unlock a new shop item, youāll also get to know them better! Itās a win-win!
We want to slowly move away from the whole ātalk to NPC, give them gift, rinse repeatā cycle, as well as the ārandomly trigger their friendship event when walking aroundā. With the quest system, weāre hoping to slowly port over those cutscenes, as well as giving players new ways to gain relationship points with the characters.
There are also changes to the quest tracker on your screen!
Now, the quest no longer disappears immediately after finishing, causing confusion. It will now stay on the HUD until you switch maps, or when you get a new quest, or when you track a different quest.
Completed quests with rewards will require you to claim these rewards. Thereās a new filter inside your journal to view unclaimed rewards, as well as an animation and icon in the quest tree.
You may also find quests that have rewards on accept. Those will be denoted with a little golden ticket icon.
The quest tree itself was built in our back end SnackoEd tool on the web, and the locations of each node are then ported over into the game. Cool, right? If we were still using the old quest system, there wouldāve been no way I couldāve made all these new quests for this update.
Along with the new quests also come new quest types. So, instead of just shipping something, or getting X number of items, there are also quests from villagers that will request you to place decorations or other buildables near their house.
It was a lot of work to rip out all the guts, from the way the game faded to the way the HUD renderedā¦but it was worth it! Snacko needed to get changed at one point so we could scale more easily, so weāre glad we bit the bullet.
Letās all give recursive a round of applause for sacrificing their sanity! Yippee!
š Coming Soon
In the next couple of days, outside of fixing any nasty bugs, weāll also be finishing up ājoinā type quests. These are quests that you can grab from the board and meet up with the villager and go on an adventure together! Theyāll follow you around until you bring them home, so itās a nice way to spend some time with your favourites.
For now, theyāre disabled until we push that update, so you may find some ācoming soonā cards in your tree or board.
You may have also noticed some quests being labelled as āstoryā. Thereās currently two side story quests after you finish the main story, but Iād love to add more. In preparation for these, Iāve moved off a lot of the front-loaded exposition in the game.
One thing Iāve noticed is that players actually continue to read the journals spread out through the biomes. I wasnāt expecting thatā¦ So, I wanted to do something like that without just littering books everywhere. Story quests will be a continuation of that concept, where the burden of world building and lore is no longer stuffed into the mandatory main story cutscenes.
The bookshelf/tutorial UI was also updated into SnackoUI, and Iāve left myself some room and space in the data for adding notes and books you can find in the future for more lore-dumps.
Now that Iāve talked about some of the things that we had to set up the gameās systems for in the near future, letās go back to whatās already in the gameā¦
š U and I
You may have noticed some big changes in the UI! Now, with expanded dark mode, itās no longer just the dialogue box.
[h3]Original[/h3]
[h3]Darker[/h3]
Thereās some improvements as well, such as the action prompt image now paired with the item indicator, instead of needing the item name to disappear before you can see which key it is.
The dialogue boxes and choices themselves also got a face lift, along with new animations and functionality. When youāre speaking to a villager about a quest, it should show the quest name on the upper right corner.
The dialogue system was rewritten as a system so we can better add new lines in the future. The old system wasā¦prohibitive, to say the least, and it did not scale well. With these new system-level changes, we hope localization and adding more content in the future will be 100 times easier!
I mean, just look at thisā¦ I donāt want to touch thisā¦
Now, we can use a bunch of different ways to get text into the game. Either thatās through our custom back end SnackoEd, or through a good olā spreadsheet.
Hehe, thereās a lot, and honestly, Iāve forgotten a lot of the polish weāve done since itās been two months since we started. So I hope you guys will enjoy the little touches!
Additional quality of life features added include a crafting recipe tracker. Inside the workbench or your crafting tab in the journal, you can now pin a recipe at any quantity to pin it to your HUD like itās a quest.
You can also buy things from each shopkeeper when their store is closed. You wonāt be able to speak to them directly to expand your house, but you can buy the basic goods from their shop.
š Fast Like the Wind
Yay, thereās new movement tech! Double jumping wasnāt enough, so now we have a charged sword dash and pickaxe bounce.
When you charge up your sword, you will dash the direction youāre facing. How far you go depends on how much youāve charged. You can also dash mid-air, and if you time it just right, you can keep dashing and āflyā. Iām not too good at this myself, but Iām sure thereās some of you that will find this a walk in the park.
The pickaxe bounce is when youāre mid-air, you can bounce off of anything by charging it any amount. The distance you bounce back depends on your initial velocity plus how much youāve charged.
It makes the cutest little ābinkā noise when you pull it off, so maybe you can have some fun just binking your way around town.
We also changed the charging: when youāre charging up any tool, it no longer locks you in place. Youāll move really slowly, but youāll still be able to move.
āØ Closing Notes
I hope it made sense why we had to take such a long chunk away from updates to work on this one! The way it was done and how many underlying systems needed to be completely gutted and redone was too many, so there was no way to āsplit it upā, so to speak. Weāre really excited to add the new things in that we can have now that the foundation for Snacko is much cleaner and easier to work with. Thatās something that will get more important as we add in more features and begin the work for multiplayer.
With all that said, I think the two of us need a day off to just lay down and do nothing.
As always, if you notice anything wrong with your save file or found a bug, please let us know! Weāre always happy to help you fix any issues or rectify any errors in your save file.
You can reach us through Discord (just ping us, donāt be shy!) or email.
[h3]Thank you for reading my long-winded patch notes, and we really hope you enjoy this one!
Good night!!!! š¾[/h3]