Snacko News

Before I start, thank you for the comments! I'm dramatic but I'm hanging in there, so don't worry! We're doing this! WE'RE MAKING VIDEO GAME--

Ahem.

Hello, Snacko readers! Welcome to Season Two of “Bugs - Please Go Away!” I’m your host, enralis, and I’m here to tell you how it’s…

Yeah, we’re still fixing the video game.

I mean, I could just ramble about all the specifics about the things we’ve fixed but I’ll just cover the gist of it. This will be a short one and I apologize in advance for very little pretty pictures.



To make up for that, here’s a bug where some desert rocks are floating in the Grassy Plains. Why are they there???

[h2]🥰 Likes & Dislikes[/h2]

So, I lied, ‘cause this isn’t a bug. When we went into QA, one of the issues was trying to give Mikan an Egg on Toast would crash the game. The bug was actually…the NPCs never had their likes and dislikes entered into the database.

Yeah, my bad. So I had to go do that.

Also, I didn’t put in the proper recipe data for some dishes. So Mikan would teach you how to cook something, and if you followed her instructions, you got…this.



Luckily, 80 years ago, recursive already wrote the system for defining and setting this data, and it was super intuitive and easy to use!

Hardcore weirdo fans will remember (sorry you’re not weird I’m joking) that we have an internal tool: SnackoEd. It’s like a web interface to edit backend data.



Using SnackoEd, I could choose specific items (like Softwood) or items that have an attribute (like Fish, or Sweet Food). It’s pretty cool!

[h2]💀 Domino Effect[/h2]

But with foresight also comes the other end, finding bugs and trying to fix them, only to find out the downstream effects break something else, so a workaround or change had to be implemented.



In this particular case we had, it was an issue where you can softlock yourself by going back to your house in the middle of a story cutscene and sleeping, breaking the video game. To prevent this, we made it so that you can’t sleep or save during a cutscene. Easy? Right?? NO!



Because we have two cutscenes that require you to sleep. And for story/ease of managing the flow/localization team will cry/our producer will actually cry, we can’t change the way it plays out.



So recursive had to go in and add another checkbox that you can check to say, “okay, for this specific cutscene, you can save”.

Kinda frustrating that the closer we are to finishing the game, the better all our custom systems and tools get. It’s like, okay wow…sure would’ve been nice if we had this at the start!!

Such is life.

[h2]🎮 What’s That Button?![/h2]

I’m not a very honest person. Actually, my memory is just bad. ‘Cause this isn’t a bug, either. In fact, I barely talked about bugs this devlog.

Anyways, you know how every console and their pet hamster has a different gamepad button setup? Right, so, I forgot that the three main controllers that are used (Switch, XBox, PlayStation) are ALL different and NONE of them want to call the shoulder buttons the same thing. Or anything, for that matter.



125 items! Just for gamepad! Ahhhh!!!?????

For each controller button, I had to make a light and dark version (different UI screens will pick different ones to show up better) of every variation. Is this the L2 trigger? NO! You’re a clown! This is the Switch! It’s called ZL!!

[h2]🐛 Bug (Real)[/h2]

Well, to stay true to the title, I will show one bug.

One day, we got a worrying report: when villagers reply to a listing, they should also include the crafting blueprint for the house they’re requesting to live in.

Only fair, right? If you’re going to make me build you a specific house, you better tell me how to make it!!

Anyways. The bug was that you weren’t getting the crafting recipes. How could this be? The game is broken! Oh no!

So, I sit down, prepared for a long day of debugging when…



Oh.
I’m creating the blueprint for the house.
But I never put in the code to add it to the player’s inventory.



Anyways, yeah that’s all for this month. Thank you for reading until the end and sticking with us!

We’ll be working hard to squash these bugs!

Not all of them are caused by my incompetence, promise! Pinky swear!!

The weather is warming up, and that’s where all the bugs are coming from! Ahhh! I hate bugs! Of both variety. Sorry if you like bugs. I’m just scared of them.

This devlog is going to be a short one with not many pretty pictures, because we have not done anything pretty.

We’ve been fixing bugs. In fact, it’s been so solely bug fixing that I’m going to have one header for this month…



Yes, bugs.

One of the bigger ones that plagued my mind for days was how localization for Japanese came back with a sheet detailing concerns about repeating lines across different NPCs.

“How is that possible??” I thought. Upon further digging, it almost seemed like the keys (a unique ID assigned to any chunk of text that displays) are all jumbled.

That’s terrible!

I went into a mild panic because that means something went wrong in the export process of all the text, and with how many words the game has (over 100k!) it was a lot to…do.



Luckily, the issue seemed to be something related to the plugin we used for our dialogue trees. Outside of “Save”, “Save All”, and “Save As”, there was also a plugin specific action: “Save All Dialogue”.

Yup, you guessed it. We had to press that button for the engine to regenerate and apply keys to all the texts keys. Which we haven’t, because I pressed “Save All” in the regular menu and assumed it was the same.



Read the wiki and documentation people! People is me.

This sort of took up a whole week of scrambling and some 3AM emails, but now we’re on track! I think!



Bonus image: localization team confused by my terrible jokes.

That one solved, I also spent a day on one of the long-standing Snacko bugs: blue tint when you move between levels during day time.



You’re gonna love this one.

Essentially, we noticed two years ago that when you move between levels, like the town and Nobu’s house for example, the game would get ugly blue tinted.

After multiple attempts over the past 24 months, I have finally figured it out after an afternoon of piece-by-piece dismantling of Snacko’s lighting and weather system:

The fog I chose was too blue.

[h2]I repeat, the fog I chose was just simply too blue, causing the game to be blue.[/h2]

What was happening, was that the fog color that you can see in the world was changing properly, but the way the fog affects the sunlight etc. was not being updated until you swap levels. This is what I assume to either be an engine bug or a limitation of the half dynamic half stationary lighting system.



So in the above example, you can see the fog in the distance being green, but the world is not covered with a sickly green YET. When you switch levels, it updates the world to reflect how the lighting would be if there was green fog everywhere.

So yeah, I fixed the “too blue” bug by making the fog color “less blue”.

I love video games with all my heart.

The rest of the bugs we fixed are too boring to recount. If I told you about the bugs I fixed you would close this window and go do something better with your time, like eat dirt.

So I will spare you the details and end the devlog here.

[h3]Thank you for reading all the way to the end!

I still haven’t figured out if it’s “nosy” or “nosey”, apparently both are correct, but my spellcheck is telling me it’s “nosy”.

Anyways, hello! March went by really fast. We got a lot done, so let’s run through some of them:



The asset hell continued into the first two weeks of March. During the first half, I wrapped up all the 3D models and 2D icons for the remaining furniture items.

I themed sets after styles, so they were fun to make. For example, the Palm set is Florida grandma core:



…and I was quite proud of the Vintage Couch.



I don’t want to spoil everything, so that’s all you’re getting! WAHAHA! Oh, but here’s some icons I did.



Right after I finished all the furniture goodies, I had to work on…



Obelisks are a big part of the game in the sense of the vibes and story part it plays. So for that reason, I don’t really wanna show you anything! Cause I think it’ll be 10,000 times cooler if you get to experience for the first time in the game along with Dale’s music. The music adds a lot!



But I don’t want to show nothing, you know, just in case you think I’m a Big Fat Liar. So here’s some concept art I did for one of the interior designs, with zero context.



And here’s the same environment in Maya. I think what makes this place really special are the shaders I made for it and the whole atmosphere when you’re standing in there at scale with Dale’s music. So this much is allowed, as a treat.

After this, I spent about a week laying in bed and turning into mashed potatoes. I think since the end of January, I finished about 150+ buildable assets along with their icons, 30+ NPC portraits, 30+ food assets and their icons, and 17 buildings. So yeah, I really needed…to turn into mashed potatoes for a bit.



After I reconstructed myself back into a whole potato, I dressed up some NPC houses.
Prior to this, each NPC had like, a square with a bed as their house interior. Now that I had all of the furniture done, I was able to drag in some meshes and dress up their homes.



One of the things I’ve always loved about Pokemon Crystal and Fire Red (in particular!!) are the flavor text bits. You know, checking the fridge will say “Oh, a Cinnibar Burger. Mom’s special!” I’m probably mashing 3 different texts and butchered that one but don’t worry about it.



I spent a lot of time to think about which villagers would own which pieces of furniture, and what colors they would’ve dyed them. So I hope you enjoy learning more about everyone through the way they decorated their homes and the bits of text you can find!
…
…..and that’s all for this month! I would love to share everything with you, but I also think it’ll be nice to experience some of it for the first time in game.
Well, see you soon. We have…a lot of bugs and loose ends to tie up now. So many loose ends. So, so, so many loose ends…

Goodbye………..

[h3](Thank you for reading all the way to the end! I love you!!!)[/h3]

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]