Snacko News

Meowllo! We have a new hotfix patch that's on the NEXT branch. Please read carefully, as this isn't the default branch and your game won't automatically update unless you follow these steps:

• The Next branch will be patches we personally verified to work with current saves, but not yet passed through QA
  
• To opt in to the Next branch, go to the game in your Steam library, select the cog -> Betas -> and insert the code snack0snack0
• You can go back to the default game at any point by selecting "None" under beta participation's dropdown menu
  
• And obviously, you can always go back to the NEXT build by selecting it under Beta Participation
  
• We will be marking patch notes only live on this version as NEXT, and will notify when it's been clear to go default
  
• There may be times where multiple NEXT builds roll up into one big default build, but don't worry, patch notes will be written for each release
  

Now, patch notes for the current build...


[h2]Game[/h2]

• New players/players who haven't seen the end of Grassy Plain events yet: last cutscene now triggers right after Obelisk event to be more clear on progression
  
• Myst Pollen can now be properly found in the Mushroom Forest
  
• Gems can now be found in their respective biomes. Their drop rates are low, so good luck!
  
• Fixed freeze when you buy a barn from Nobu Jr.
  
• Discard extra equipment tools
  
• ALL wood items can now be used as furnace fuel, not just Softwood and Hardwood, including furniture. Different woods have different fuel rates. Wooden furniture burns very well ;)
  

[h2]Misc.[/h2]

• The boat is now sue-able. Fixed typo of an unusable boat being unsuable
  
• Fixed Nobu being off-screen during his first friendship event
  
• Frame rate limit set to 60 by default to prevent your GPU or fans from dying, esp on Steam Deck (options in Other tab to change it)
  

[h2]Known things we're working on still[/h2]

• Memory leaks and related crashes
  
• Cannot put equipment into containers
  
• Cannot affix gems on tools using the Furnace
  
• Mesecina's wrath still appearing (flashing particles in Grassy Plains and Goddess Pond)
  
• After spring ends, Goddess Pond trees have both the spring and summer trees, causing them to glitch between the two
  
• The Goddess does NOT like the game
  

[h2]Settings UI[/h2]

• Added a "text" tab, which is available both in the title screen and in game. This page contains a picker for the game's Language. You can only pick between "English", and "Japanese (Beta)"
  
• Adds "Gentle Visuals" to the "video" tab. This will be available in the title screen and allows players to disable the flashing in the intro cutscenes.
  
• Fixed an issue where selecting a video mode (Fullscreen/Windowed Fullscreen/Windowed) would sometimes not update the video mode.
  

[h2]Game[/h2]

• (Temporary) Player will now be warped back to their house when they fall out of bounds - this calls the same function that the "Go Home" button in the main menu uses.
  
• Fixed issue where Item Obtain notification popups would appear over the shop UI, making it impossible to leave.
  
• Fixed issue where you needed to hold items to be able to craft with them (you can just leave items in storage and still use them in crafting)
  
• Removed ability to walk off platform in the Obelisks, causing you to fall forever or get stuck
  

[h2]Known issues we're looking into right now[/h2]

• Myst Pollen currently not obtainable in the Mushroom Forest
  
• Stumps drop way too many Hardwood to stamina use ratio
  
• Sometimes, NPCs can get stuck in the middle of the town map underground. Leaving the town and coming back can sometimes unstuck them
  
• Resources from other maps (Grassy Plains, Desert) can regrow and appear on your farm when switching levels
  

You can always join our Discord to help expedite the back-and-forth process to help get your save file unborked! Or, you can fill out our bug form to pass along any files.

No longer blinds you when you walk into the plains during a rainy day!

If I had a nickel for every cozy farm sim I played this month with a Paper Mario visual design that begins with getting washed up after a shipwreck I'd have two nickels. One was Echoes of the Plum Grove, and this one is Snacko, the ridiculously cute cat-themed farm sim. Snacko turned up at the Wholesome Snack show today (how appropriate) and announced that it's launching into early access today. Surprise!..
Read more.

Meowllo! Spooky season is over, now it’s cake season. I mean, November is almost December, right? That’s how that works? It’s already snowing where I live, so it’s December for all I know.

Anyways! We have lots of big important things to cover this month, so I’ll leave the intro short~



We came to this decision after a lot of thought and discussion on where Snacko is, and where we want it to be for you, the player. This gives us time to do a final polish pass, expand on some of the existing content the way we want, localization, MORE QA, and implement community feedback!

[h2]A lot of things have factored into this, so lemme run them through you. Before that, I know it’s a lot of text, so the gist of it is:[/h2]

• The game’s story and core loop is complete and playable, but there is room for more content and polish
  
• Localization and porting takes time to both do, and do well for a game of this genre and scope
  
• We want to fine-tune the pacing and balance for everything: crafting progression, relationships, all that fun stuff
  
• We will be working with our QA team to try to maintain save file integrity, but the possibility exists that changing content or fixing a major bug update may impact your save files as updates are released.
  
• I’ll post a separate update that goes into more of the dry details of how EA will look like, our plans, and the rough update schedule during the time period, along with some other important things in the future.
  

Now, the long version:



Yes, you can play through the main story. Yes, all the dialogue is written and you can do everything else you’d expect in the game, like...farm, explore, build, craft, date...cow.

But, there’s a lot of polish and balancing we’d like to adjust. We’re about a month into our Kickstarter-only beta now, and it’s been very helpful to get feedback from players, so we’d like to continue that vibe for a little longer through early access!



Part of that is yeah, it’s mostly just the two of us working on the game full-time. (Including support from some of the talented contractors we’ve worked with, of course!) The game has (unsurprisingly) ballooned into quite a hefty game over the last couple of years since we started. It sure does feel great to say “the whole game is playable now!” but it’s been long enough that we feel like the additional time will really help Snacko go from “yay” to “WAHOO”. You know what I mean?

[h2]There’s lots of stuff that is already playable but we want to improve:[/h2]

• Better mines experience, more floors with more variation
  
• Player house expansion, wallpaper and flooring options
  
• Little world activities and events, more festivals
  
• Proposing and a more in-depth post-bonding life (don’t worry you can romance and date everyone eligible in early access!)
  
• UI/UX (including controllers!) polish
  
• Better tutorials and documentation in the game for those of us that need more help (me, that’s me. I need more help)
  
• More accessibility options and better settings
  
• Additional craftables
  
• ...and obviously, bug fixes
  

For weaker computers and consoles especially, we want to dedicate time to make sure it runs well and feels really good with a controller to play. These are things that will take us some time and a couple rounds of playtesting and fine-tuning to really get right, but we think having the game play well on both keyboard/mouse and controller with a stable framerate is very important!
In fact, the month of October was heavily focused on making UI/UX improvements. We’ve been working on a new system (we call it SnackoUI, very original) that has made it easier to make functional buttons and screens that will just work with controllers. It’s very exciting.



(Keep in mind at this point when this message was sent, I haven’t seen recursive in a whole week. We live in the same house. He is my husband.)

Poor recursive did...wilt a little bit creating the system, but it’ll make things go much faster (with less bugs) in the near future. In fact, we’re already reaping the rewards now! No more “1 business day spent on a single UI screen to get it to work with a controller”!!!

Zoro also spent time profiling where a lot of the performance bottlenecks were and remaking certain portions of features to improve it.



Now, with the worries of “oh no not another UI screen” out of the way, we’ve been able to spruce up some existing screens to make them feel and play better.


(Before!)


(Now!!!)

The poor arcade machine at the grocer’s just...Yeah, it was rough.



PC is relatively easy to test on, make fixes for, and update. But that kind of exponentially grows as you tack on more things, like other languages and console releases.



While working on finalizing the text earlier this year, it became pretty limiting to keep the text as-is and not make any more changes or additions. It became clear that we just had to add more text, especially with small tutorials and other flavor text to help the world come together.



But unfortunately, the process of writing, making sure I didn’t spell mackerel wrong again, sending it off to get localized, reimported, QA’d in the new language...

It’s just a lot of time and effort. With the two of us, it meant if we were working on localization implementation, we couldn’t work on bug fixing or polish. So, we decided to focus on making the base game better before worrying about controller support or additional language support.



So like, I guess I never thought about this in depth, but one of the downsides of having a more sand-boxy type of game where you have a lot to collect and craft and a lot of characters to talk to means that it’ll also take a long time to test.



Sure, we’ve got debug commands and systems to help us test if something works, but people have to actually play through it to see when the pacing feels off, or when an activity or goal is just too grindy.
Bubbafare, one of our long-time supporters, was a huge help as they played...a hundred hours during beta.



Not sure how, but thank you very much.

So, early access will give us more time to nudge numbers back and forth and play more of the game ourselves to see where we can improve the experience. One feature we’d like to implement that was a brainchild from beta and Discord suggestions was difficulty modes. An easier difficulty setting would make days longer, actions cost less stamina, etc.

Anyways, I’m starting to ramble (I started to ramble 8 paragraphs ago my bad).

[h2]At the end of the day, Snacko is our baby. Well, a 5 year old child at this point. Bro’s in kindergarten already. But it’s a game that we’ve put a lot into, and we want to really make sure that the full release alongside the console versions live up to the effort and love we’ve put into the game so far.[/h2]


(Snacko in 2019! Wait, look how different the inside of the player house looks, too!)


Optimization, polish, balancing tweaks, bug fixes...I’m just very, very happy we’re finally at the point in development where we can worry about things like this, versus implementing basic things, like cutscenes.

Thank you very, veryveryvery much for reading all of this, and reading all of my updates.





[h2]Thank you (again) for reading this month’s long update! Keep your eyes peeled for news coming soon![/h2]