Snacko News

Good evening folks. I am, finally, out of scripting hell and dove head first into asset hell! At the very least this is what I want to do: art. Damn, what a concept. An artist making art.

Also thank you for all the kind comments on #53, I read all of them. I'm glad they're fun to read! 🥺

Alright well I’m sort of on a time crunch because the game has too much stuff so I’m just gonna quickly show what we’ve been working on so I can go back to working like dog.


I suffered doing the food for Snacko because it just made me hungry the entire time. I have no idea how many excess calories I’ve consumed during this period simply because it made me wanna eat despite being full.



Lookit all these entrees! Managed to fit everything in a 64x64 texture, too. Ended up having to nerf the grilled fish a wee bit. He was taking up way too much room.



But, he’s still got the spirit! So yeah. Some of these were hard for me to do simply because some of these things you have to take some creative liberties to make sure it looks good. You know, like why is your sandwich falling apart? Cuz you can see the contents that way. Sorry your sandwich is falling apart.



And um, here are the desserts… Yup. Nothing to say about that. I guess I don’t want to spoil everything so that’s all you’re gonna get :3

Also had to do the icons for all of these, too. Look at this carrot juice glow up✨



Who decided to make all the food items in the game also buildables resulting in having to make 3D assets so you can decorate with them? Oh right, me. I’m the clown.


Moving on, I also made the fish. I included a blahaj I mean, shark



I also used up all my brain cells and willpower to give the squid a new rig with it’s own animations. Why is there a giant squid in Snacko? I don’t know to be honest, I don’t remember making that decision.



Yeah… Anyways. I don’t wanna like, literally asset dump all the assets here (buy the game thank you) so I’ll stop here for the fish.

Ah but where will the fish live?! In the aquarium. In the Cultural Center. We had a lot of worries going into this involving the mechanism behind donating fish with different sizes and how it’ll look, but I think it turned out great.



Quite proud of the journey she went on to get to where she is today. I finished this in a day and a half in a caffeine fueled haze. All in all, a pretty good ratio of what got done and the collateral damage to my mental state.

Here’s a fun early block out to end product comparison!




I just started on this yesterday so it’s technically March stuff, but here’s a preview of the “simple set”, from my fiddling in the Sims to the 3D asset for Snacko. I’ve said this in the past, but it’s easier to play with colour combinations and proportions in the Sims versus drawing it out. So yeah.



Like the furniture set, it’s heavily inspired by Scandinavian furniture and houses, aka my bias. Sorry if it shows through the game a lot. The dark grey in the above assets are dye slots, so I hope you have fun coming up with terrible colour combinations.

Anyways yeah that’s February. Who made February short? That’s not really fair, is it? Like, “ah, I have to get these things done for this month” but jokes on you this month is missing a couple of days. Rude.

OK! Thank you very very very much for reading my rambling till the very end. See you on the other side! I’m still aliveeeeee

Before I start this devlog, I just want everyone to know I read all the comments here! Forum thread? Replies?? I tried to give rewards to all the replies to the devlogs but I ran out of points so lol.

Anyways! Onto the devlog!

January felt really long but also really short. Have I been saying that a lot recently? Sorry. Currently, there feels like there’s an insurmountable pile of work in front of us, but at the same time, we’re getting close to being able to concentrate on asset creation and game balance/tweaking.

A lot of the work done in January fits that trend of trying to tie up loose ends and complete content. The first of which are…



So, with the NPC dialogue written and converted to spaghetti trees, what else is left? In Snacko, we have dialogue resolvers for each NPC to determine what they talk about. If they’re working, if you’re giving them a gift, etc.



So, we’ve had some leftover dialogues to implement: quests, events, and gifting special items for confession and proposal. We’re not 100% done yet, but we’re extremely close!



Above, this would be the general dialogue tree you’d see for a villager. When you hold an item and speak to a villager, they ask if this is a gift for them. Assuming you haven’t already gifted them something that day, it’ll get judged for a reaction: Love, Like, Neutral, or Hate. The only outlier is on their birthdays, even hated gifts will not lose you friendship points. After all, you did make an effort to get them…something. However, getting your favorite villager a loved gift on their special day will give you extra brownie points!



Another thing we’ve decided to do is to give each villager a “story” quest which usually tells you something about them. Accept these quests when they pop up on the quest board to get to know the villagers better! Luckily, the Snacko quest system written by recursive is flexible and easy to use, so it was only about 3 days worth of work to implement them for all 26 NPCs.



There are also reoccurring quests, both villagers and generic, that will randomly propagate. It’s an easy way to make an extra Cocoa Bean or two.



We also spent some time this month combing through what’s left in Snacko’s core to implement so we have a better idea of what we need to do. Currently, we’re just cramming tons of stuff into the game without regard to bug fixing, so wish us luck 🪦



In doing so, I realized we were missing some item data so I had to go back and write up those item descriptions. I hope you’ll enjoy my jokes.



Last bit was combing through all the villager’s houses and maps to add little bits of flavor text. These are usually just one liners that I’ve added to give the world a little more coziness. I’ve enjoyed these little lines “without purpose” in games since I was a kid, so I wanted to make sure Snacko had the same thing.



…And that’s pretty much it? These days, we’re just going to have a lot of this kinda stuff. The “there’s nothing new to see but there’s actually a ton of stuff being added but it’s invisible”. We’ll just keep our heads up and keep working!
[h3]AHH, THERE’S STUFF TO DOOOOOOOOOOOoo[/h3]

Happy new years everyone! I’m welcoming 2023 with…tiredness.

Before I talk about what we did in December and a brief recap of 2022, I’d like to say a big thank you to, well, you. Snacko has been in development for a long time, and we’ve been recording our progress since the early days back in 2018.


The project has evolve and grown from “a project” to a “real ass game”. Isn’t that wild?

Never once did we once think when we first started Snacko (at the time, snekocatgame.project) that it would grow to the size and bulk that it is today.

Last month marked a big milestone for us as we finally released the first playable alpha build for our Kickstarter backers and early day patrons that were grandfathered into early access. It’s been a long time coming since Snacko was in a playable state. For two years, the game was in spaghetti hell. A lot of the mechanics existed, but none of it worked together or were connected. Sure, you can farm and grow turnips, but where are you gonna get Turnip seeds from? Sure, you can sell your goods by plopping the shipping bin but Mikan didn’t have a schedule to physically come by and nab the things you wanted to sell.

That was sort of where Snacko stood for a long time while we worked on the skellybones of the project.

Dialogue system, shop system, UI, minimap, quest system, donating to the Cultural Center, fishing, getting NPCs to move to your island…

The list goes on!

So, thank you for celebrating with us as we are finally crawling out of the deep dark tunnels known as game development.

That long winded speech aside, this is a perfect lead-in to what we’ve been up to in December:



Remember how I just said we spent many years laying down the foundations of the game? Yup! Now with the alpha out, many of the core systems are now connected and ready to go. Bugs aside, we’ve been heavily focused on pulling any remaining loose strands together and implementing new content.

What does that mean?

For example, in the past, you have always been able to donate items such as furniture, food, or fish to the Cultural Center for Miss Curator to display. However, the fish went…nowhere.



Yup. This is the aquarium. This was the aquarium for years. Seems like some space you’d be brought to and wake up with some missing limbs, right? It’s OK! I’ve been working on fixing that. Here’s a sneak peek at the area blocked out:



I based the feel of it on my experience visiting the aquarium in Okinawa a couple of years ago. When I was a wee lassie, my mom took me to Okinawa because I really wanted to see whale sharks. I was very obsessed with whale sharks. It was a great time, with a giant tank in the middle, and I want to recreate that feeling. While there will not be a whale shark in Snacko (….yet? ((hopeful))), I’m still excited to see the displays I’ve dreamt up for the fishies in Snacko to come to life.



Listen. You just gotta trust the process, okay??

Aquarium liminal space aesthetic aside, recursive has been working on some polish for the CC. Previously, you were able to donate furniture for the CC’s furniture exhibit. Each exhibit has a set list of items you can donate. For example, Softwood Exhibit allows for a chair, table, counter, and so on placed in a cute little room. However, you had to donate everything in the set before you could see the fruits of your labor. That’s terrible, right? I want instant gratification!! So, he has changed it that every item donated will show up immediately in the exhibit.



Um…because of some of the pivot fixes I have made over the last time we made these exhibits, it’s looking a little sus (where is the sink looking??). So yeah. I’ll fix that, don’t worry…



Since our plan involves “Bugs I Do Not Perceive”, I’ve been able to focus on implementing and creating content. In the past few weeks, I’ve implemented 4 additional NPCs including making their portraits!

Here’s a Kickstarter backer and long-time supporter (see: angel) Blossom’s villager: Fiona.


She is very sweet, so I hope you can be good friends with her! Look at those angery teefies. ANGERY



Wow, I’ve blabbered a lot today. I will try to make this short n sweet. 2022 was a HUGE year so I’ll uh try my best.

We started the year by starting our implementation of the main story. Through the first couple of weeks, along with Ken’s help, we were able to script, design, implement, and test the entirety of Snacko’s main story.



Next, we finally gave the mines the makeover they deserved. While there’s still some wrinkles to work out, at least the wrinkles are ✨pretty✨.



Then, we added a mini-map and map feature. Map feature is still…undercooked. But the flat images for the areas have been all done and a pin system put in place to help you find your way around.



To go with the maps, we also finished modelling, texturing, and set dressing the biomes that you will be able to explore. From the Grassy Plains all the way to the heights of the Frozen Tundra, we’re very proud of this achievement!



To really top off our ambition this year, we also reworked the build mode. Whether or not we are masochists are still up for debate, but we’re happy with how it turned out. Better flow for dyeing, moving, adding, and removing items from the world. You can even cycle through placed objects or hover over them to get the pop-up with the name! I did get to play some Sims 4 with a controller for a couple of hours as research, so it wasn’t too bad (says the person who wasn’t in charge of actually coding it).



Oh right, and then we announced that we are coming to PlayStation 4 and 5! Wowee! Cries in UI icons and implementation.



We also added a ton of content outside of the main story: villagers, their schedules, dialogues, portraits, and their houses! I want to say in 2022, we implemented about a dozen. The first couple definitely took us a lot longer as we found holes in our system that we had to patch or add to make Snacko villagers really come to life.



In addition to simply static objects and villagers, we also onboarded Miguel who handled all of the villager’s friendship events, heart events, and now schedules! Let’s give Miguel a big round of applause for essentially saving my life.



To really end the year off with a great bang of despair, we spent the last quarter of 2022 fixing bugs to make the alpha’s release possible. From Lan duplicating and stalking you in your house if you don’t introduce yourself to her all the way to an item duplication cheat, we’ve fixed hundreds of bugs and errors. We still have many more yet to pop up as we continue working on the game, and I don’t look forward to it. Yeah.



Anyways.

That’s a brief summary of 2022. Very bulky, very…draining, but very rewarding. See you next month! 👋

[h2]
Thank you for supporting us!

Thank you for reading all the way until the end!

Thank you for making Snacko possible![/h2]

Meowllo! How was your November? We’re getting way too close to the holiday season. I can feel the Mariah Carey creeping into the speakers…

Anyways!

We’re still hard at work because Snacko doesn’t care if it’s time to sing about red-nosed quadrupeds. Luckily for us, a lot of the main breaking bugs (don’t jinx it don’t jinx it) so we’ve been able to take some internal feedback and polish the build for backers.



One thing we wanted to do was to make the town feel more alive. So, that meant two things.



The first was that the town was just too empty. I wanted to give players the freedom to decorate how they wanted, but that meant the empty lots were extremely green.

And then I realized, wait. Snacko Island was abandoned, so it should have some evidence that the place was lived in, you know? Not just...suspiciously empty.



And that’s what I did. There’s broken down versions of some buildables that you’ll need to clear out of the way before you place down objects. This fills out the town during the early days of your adventure without taking away buildable space.

The second…



Was that there was no life. Sure, you can get more villagers and shopkeepers to move to the island. But until then. It’s just you. And an old man. And Mikan, I guess.

We’ve always wanted to implement the tourist feature but kept having to put out fires with bugs. But it’s in!



All of these are Kickstarter backer characters. They’re different from villagers as they show up randomly, walk around the town, and have some little dialogue bits about themselves. Hope you enjoy meeting them!



By launch, I’d like to add some more in to really give you that RNG dice roll so you feel like your town is always bustling with visitors.



One other internal feedback point was how easy it was to get lost. Even with the map, I totally understand this, because I will get lost unless I stare at a map. To try and alleviate this, I’ve put in some landmarks in the maps to hopefully give you a hint as to which direction will lead where.



For example, the lighthouse (which lights up at night!) will always take you to the town. You can see the bamboo and birch trees leading to the Grassy Plains, etc.

Hopefully this will help in addition to the signs and mini-map!

We still have a wee bit of polish to go with the UI and making sure the build is as stable as we can make it before it enters the paws of our backers, but this is the main bulk of what we worked on in November.

[h2]We’ll see you after the main holidays in our next devlog. Thank you for reading till the end! 👋[/h2]

Meowllo! It started snowing here! It’s officially winter! How was your Halloween? This is our 50th devlog, and we’re gonna spend it talking about bugs!

Yay!

Cries into desk


Since we last chatted, we’ve fixed 67 bugs and there are currently 19 fixes waiting to be tested and confirmed. That’s…a lot of bugs. Some of them were small, like Nobu Jr. saying “Nobu Jr.” instead of barn…



Some were major, like ways you can lock yourself in the game or NPCs not spawning at all.

Or spawning twice.



We’ve been super buried in bugs, but we’ve got our fingers and toes crossed we can get the game stable enough to move into some light testing outside of QA.

Speaking of QA, QA are the real angels here.

Snacko has a lot of content to test, and one of the most annoying to debug and fix (in my personal opinion) are NPC schedule issues.



Why aren’t they walking? Wait, where did they go? Huh?? It’s terrible. I just want Riku to show up for work! Stop being lazy!!


We had some dyes that have been in the game since the beginning. We’ve always wanted to come back and make tweaks or add any shades…and we finally did!



Here’s just some of them, modelled by the wonderful Scarecrow.


Sometimes, to lift my spirits from the depths of bug hell. For example, each house now has a little placard or interactable area that has the resident’s name. Depending on their personality, they might’ve included other information there.



Some other things also include signs in the world. This one was vandalized by a certain stinky small boy.



We also added quest markers, so it’s harder to get lost. I hope? It shows up as a lil exclamation mark. It’s even red, to show its aggression.



[h2]And…that’s about it for this month! Thank you for reading through a bug report. Your support and giggles of our bugs on Twitter has been keeping me sane 🐾[/h2]