Snacko News

Oh me oh my, it has come the time for us to be experience the beauties of QA.

Specifically, we’ve been hard at work wrapping up the Kickstarter backer beta build. For the past…I don’t even know how many weeks to be honest, we’ve been solving bugs, fixing soft locks, and tweaking things so it felt like a real game.

You know, sometimes, I still get shocked Snacko is a real game.

Anyways.



Quite literally. The first part of the game was one of the first parts we worked on (duh), so I’ve always felt a bit…sussed by it. It wasn’t terrible, but I didn’t like how it threw you into an endless journey of dialogue for the first 15 minutes.



Now, you start off with a relatively short bit of text and straight into the tutorial where you can walk around and get a feel for the gameplay. Although we kept almost 90% of the content originally made for the intro, I’ve shuffled things around a bit and edited some dialogue to set up the rest of the game (in my humble opinion) better.

As I go through the rest of the game’s text to get ready for localization, I’ve been re-re-re-checking to make sure all of the lore and story flows together properly.

‘Cause, you know, I can’t keep my own lore straight.



Speaking of lore, I’ve also made some small cosmetic changes and swaps to parts of the story. Snacko’s main story has undergone a couple of small changes while keeping pretty close to Mandy’s original plot outline for the game.



These are kind of small things, but they’re really important to me. I hope these small changes and improvements to the story makes the overall experience feel more polished!





Well, OK, now to the actual bulk of what we’ve been up to. Some of these aren’t even “bugs”, more like features that were never truly finished. One of the confusing bits of the minimap has been the player’s cursor’s direction being ambiguous. Well, now there’s an arrow! So I hope you won’t get lost!!



Real bugs aside, there’s small things from the bookshelf UI not being contained to the window properly, causing it to spill out the sides and become unreadable/unusable if your monitor or window wasn’t a perfect 16:9…



…to bigger bugs like…Nobu falling off the map continuously, banished forever to the Shadow Realm.



All in all, we probably squashed a little over 40 bugs of varying sizes and…intensity. Rest assured, Nobu is now safely in his house instead of falling until the end of time.
Sometimes, to make sure we can easily debug issues, we end up with screenshots like this:



The debug default cobblestone texture wall from the depths of game development hell. Lovely.

Looking back, though, the game is in a much better spot. I’m pretty proud of what we’ve accomplished since August! I think I’m starting to get less anxious about Snacko as a real video game that real people (wow) are going to play!

This is how I feel…



Well, that’s all for this month! Hopefully, we can squish the last of the ugly bugs in the upcoming weeks and run the beta. Ahh, I’m so nervous. Imagine that, people actually playing the video game.

[h2]Thanks for reading until the very end! 💌[/h2]

Meowllo everyone! We’re a little late on this month’s devlog due to a certain little stinker having a health scare. Turns out he’s perfectly healthy, just needs to grow more…

But now that all the vet appointments are over, I’m free to write my rambling devlogs! Yay!(?)



I touched on this topic vaguely in the past before, but I love using the Sims as a tool to help me play around with ideas for houses in Snacko. While the scale, materials, and colors don’t end up 1:1, it’s a good starting point that’s faster to iterate on than traditional concept art.



Plus, I get to play the Sims while working…

I wanted the houses to match the personality of their inhabitant, and this bold house with big windows and different style from the regular wooden cabins fits Date’s personality well.



I hope you enjoy getting to know Date and his eccentricities!



All in all, this month, we added 3 new houses for the additional NPCs that will be in the Kickstarter backer build. Everyone else already had houses, but Date, Hanna, and Riku were homeless…until now.

Now, they can enjoy paying property tax like everyone else (there is no property tax).



A little new touch I added to the houses to give them some character is interactable placards. View them to remind yourself of their opening hours, or just what the resident has scribbled on them.



I tried phrasing every one slightly differently to match their personality.



The bulk of last month’s work was on progression design. Remember how we put in all the assets and cutscenes for the main story? That’s cool and all, but…the game needed more meat on its bones.



The way story beats were triggered meant you could pretty much speed run a lot of it. It just felt a little empty and sad. To help pace the game better, we’ve changed from hard-triggers (X happens on day 5, Y happens on day 8), it’s now a cascading series of events and triggers that can cause something else to happen and unlock.



That way, people who want to speedrun the content can, and for those of us who like to chill a little and play at our own pace, you’re not getting cutscenes thrown at you randomly.

We’ve also added a bunch of different changes and quests to how you can obtain rewards like crafting recipes or items… (that I won’t get into but I spent a lot of brain power on)

But our hope is with these new quests and cutscenes, it’ll make your settlement into Snacko life a lot easier and filled with dopamine hits!



And…that’s the bulk of August! There’s somehow more work popping up the more work we do, because of things like the progression where we feel like an aspect of the game still needs some polish. But this is a good sign, right? That means there’s enough of a game there to criticize…right??

Ahh, games are hard. I’m going back to work.

[h2]See you next month, and thank you for reading until the end! 🐾[/h2]

Hello! I have emerged from the other side of July a new person, battered by the onslaught of NPC implementation that I started last month.

I don’t remember if I mentioned we’re working on our first pass for the Kickstarter backer beta yet, but if I didn’t. Yeah.

So, this month, we’re nearing the end of implementing some of the connective tissue to bind some Snacko features together.

[h2]🐐 Why does everyone talk so much?[/h2]

Oh right, I wrote the text, it’s my fault.

Anyways, the bulk of this month for me was continuing to put in NPCs. This entails a couple of things…

Sprites: Stefan did all the animations, but not all of them have been put in as Flipbooks (Unreal’s system for sprite animation)



Portraits: I had the PNGs, but they were just floating around in my PC



Schedules: the bane of my existence, responsible for my deteriorating husk of a person I became. There was more detail on this last month, but essentially, it’s just a lot of careful busywork that needed just enough brain power to wear you down



Dialogue: each NPC has a “dialogue resolver” that tries to determine what dialogue asset to use. For example, a shopkeeper will have a “come back later” set of dialogue when you bother them during store hours, or a specific set of lines about food when they’re eating. It’s essentially just a bunch of true or false checks.



Alongside the resolver are the actual dialogue assets (spaghetti monster). Within these, there are sometimes trees to determine which set of text to use depending on the time of day for hello’s, or the relationship level. As you befriend them, they’ll let you in on a bit more of what makes them tick. I hope you’ll spend some time getting to know everyone and their quirks!

…and that’s the bulk of what I’ve been doing! You can really watch me melt into my skin through my source control commit descriptions:



[h2]📬 Return of the Mailbox[/h2]

Ever since we remade the player house, the mailbox was replaced with a shell of its former self. It no longer had a little flag animation when you stepped outside and had new mail, it no longer had a little floating notification for your new letters…

Truly tragic.

But despair no more! I put it back in.



Also, recursive hooked up the rest of the letter system for inviting NPCs. In the past, we had the UI and framework, but only Mack ever replied. No matter what. You cannot escape Mack.



(Un?)Luckily for you, that system is now in, so you can escape from Mack. For the duration of the beta, we’ll be just giving you the house you need to invite NPCs for free, but in the final game, blueprints for building different kinds of houses and shops are unlocked as you progress for that sweet ✨dopamine✨.

[h2]🪑Don’t Be A Birch About It![/h2]

Also to give some more meat to the build, I added in a select few pieces of buildables from a set you can craft after razing the Grassy Plains of its natural foliage. Here’s a sneak peak at some of the pieces:



The vibe I was going for with the Birch set is a mix between some mid-century modern and Scandinavian vibes. All the white parts are dye-able, like the seat cushion and lamp shade. You can really change up the feel of the pieces by making them bright colors!

[h3]And…that’s all for this month! Thank you for reading until the end 🌼 We’ll see you next month![/h3]

Meowllo everyone! It’s already the end of June, which means the year is half over, which means I’m in despair.

That aside, a couple weeks ago, we announced through Wholesome Direct that we’re coming to PS4 + PS5! Ameowzing! Huey is handling a lot of the porting just like the Switch version, so we’re excited to try their implementation of the special PS5 controller haptic effects.

We’ve been mostly focused on other things, though…so let’s run through those!

[h2]📑 RIGHT ON SCHEDULE[/h2]
A long…long…..time ago, we mentioned our rehaul of the NPC schedule system. Up until now, we haven’t had a chance to implement any NPCs outside of making sure the system works. Now that the bare bones storyline is playable, I’ve been working on implementing getting a select few NPCs alive and running.



We’re aiming to complete a build for Kickstarter backers and old Patreon supporters who were grandfathered into the beta test. Having just an empty island with a bunch of story isn’t what we want people to experience, so the past month and the foreseeable future will be spent polishing that experience.

It’s kind of exciting that a few months ago, we were still trying to get the game to even go through the tutorial properly. Now we’re tying everything together and implementing content for it to be playable. It’s a nice feeling, but also kind of scary.



Above is what the overview of a schedule looks like. Depending on the NPC, they might have more than one. For example, Nobu has a different schedule when it’s raining, because he doesn’t have to water his crops. Shopkeepers might have a different routine on days their store is closed.



Inside each action contains the actual logic. This might be things like setting flags for dialogue, or adding in locations for where to walk next.

The actual system is quite simple and intuitive to use (thanks recursive), but it’s still a bit time consuming and dry…

[h2]🎨 NEW ART[/h2]
So, I’ve been dispersing some of my NPC work with art work! Do you remember Lan?



Her happy portrait debuted when we launched our Kickstarter in 2020 (oh no time flies). Now, she’s got the full gamut of emotions!

In the Switch trailer, there was also a portrait of Rejka looking bashful. I’ve revisited that portrait and improved it, since it’s always bothered me a bit. Now our beautiful eyelash boy gets the beautiful portrait he deserves.



Asides from some portraits I don’t want to show you just yet 🤫, I’ve also done some new asset work. There’s a lot of placeable furniture for one person to work through, so I’m going for a couple at a time to break it up.



What I’m trying to accomplish with the furniture sets in Snacko is having each set correlate loosely to a style. That way, if you’re not into the default rustic vibes the softwood set provides, there’s other things for you to get excited about.



[h2]Anyways, that’s all we have for June. Thank you for reading all the way until the end! We’ll see you next month 👋[/h2]

[h3]If you missed our new trailer debut during 2022’s Wholesome Direct…[/h3]
[h2]We’re also coming to Playstation 4 and 5![/h2]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

In addition to the Nintendo Switch and PC releases, we’ve been working quietly in the background to bring Snacko to PS4 and PS5.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us, read our devlogs, shared our Tweets, wishlisted us, and followed our journey so far.

This is all new to us…from juggling dev and other game-related work, to figuring out how to navigate the seas of tying up the loose ends of a big chunky game.

There’s been a lot of challenges so far, and probably more ahead (sorry QA…sorry programmers……), but we’ll get through them!

We’re getting to the end, and we can’t wait to see Snacko released into the world!