Snacko News

[h2]Meowllo everyone! Happy new year![/h2]

It’s amazing that after…39 devlogs and 2 years, we’ve finally hit this point. What point? The point in development where we’re focusing on content creation and implementation, and fixes and balancing!

It felt like we’ve been creating an endless stream of features, systems, and designs…but the end of the tunnel is near. We still have some small things to tie up, but we’re mainly into filling out the bones we’ve made with some juicy, meaty, content.



Honestly, it’s a little scary. For the months and months we’ve spent on creating the foundation for the game, and now we have to tie everything together. We have to make sure all of the things we decide to fill the game with result in a fun game.

It feels like a lot of responsibility.



This also means there’s going to be less and less to show in the new year. For the past 2 (wow) years, we’ve been able to chat a lot about what we’ve been doing with development. Putting in day-night cycles, dialogue choices, and so on. But now, with content becoming our new focus, there will be less to show. We don’t want to spoil the entire game before it even comes out!



So, now that we’re in the new year, we’ll be working extra hard to bring Snacko to the finish line. Thank you for all the support you’ve been giving us. We’re extremely humbled by everyone’s excitement for Snacko, and we want to do our best to live up to these expectations and succeed!

[h3]We’ve heard about you sharing us with your friends, we've noticed your wishlists on Steam, we’ve seen your pledges and donations on Patreon and Ko-fi, and we’ve felt your enthusiasm through your Twitter replies and YouTube comments. We’re not exaggerating or joking when we say this is the fuel that helps us keep going.

Sincerely, from the bottom of our hearts, and our four cats, thank you for an amazing 2021. We hope you can continue your love and support for us in 2022 🐾[/h3]





[h2]🌱 You can now walk around in all 4 biomes![/h2]


[h2]🏗️ Redesigned the building system to make it easier to use with controllers! Added more options like multi-slot dyes and more![/h2]


[h2]🎵 Dale North finished the OST! All the tracks are great, by the way…[/h2]


[h2]🎮 Announced we were coming to the Nintendo Switch on Wholesome Direct with a shiny new trailer![/h2]


[h2]🎬 Implemented a system for cutscenes and events![/h2]


[h2]📑 Finished the game’s script and started implementing content[/h2]


[h2]🐧 Stefan Ahlin has given us the joy of idle animations for all the NPCs[/h2]


[h2]💌 Brought the world to life with visual effects by Ken Visudharomn and Adam deGrandis, and sound effects by Fat Bard and José Ramón García[/h2]

Meowllo everyone! It’s finally the last month of the year. That’s a little scary, isn’t it? That’s extremely scary (for us). We’ll also be away for 10 days in December…taking our first extended break since we started working on Snacko full-time! Wow, it’s been two years, huh…

All of us have been diligently chipping away at the mountain of work that is Snacko. Here’s just some of the things we’ve been working on:


We have Bibiki working with us for the sound effects! The past month has seen a lot of sound effects being created by him and then implemented.
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

We had a lot of holes in our implementation, like tools not recognizing the differ ent surfaces, etc. It’s very satisfying to finally get it done and see it in action!

It’s done in a similar way to how we’re handling the different visual effects for player landing on grass vs dirt, etc. Now the visuals and the sounds match! It’s a great feeling 😌


We’re in the home stretch of sprites and their animations! Stefan has been hard at work creating the cutest walk animations for the villagers. Oh, but we don’t want to show all of them just yet 🤫

In the meantime, have the directional sprites for Kiryl! I had a bit of trouble fitting some of my designs into the compact Snacko sprites, but it was a lot of fun to figure out. Like a puzzle. Except if you misplace a pixel, the character goes from looking fine to super stupid.

Now that the sprites are almost completed, there’s still a lot of work left to do. Their daily dialogues, friendship events, schedules, portraits…

Ahh! The list goes on! We also spent some time this month organizing our tasks. There’s a lot of work spread across different categories, and sometimes it’s easy to lose track of them. Look at Nobu Jr., he’s so small.


The barn became a source of some…headaches lately. The issue was that the way we handled the barn door animation meant the doors were separate from the rest of the barn. Which was fine, until you tried to dye it.

Everything would get dyed except the door, which is an issue. We had the option of either having the building system support multiple meshes, or to make the barn one mesh and animating the doors more traditionally. The easiest option was to make the barn one mesh. Which was…fine. Until the building system didn’t support skeletal meshes, so we had to add in support for that.

A whole rodeo and a half later, we finally have the barn back to what it was, except now the doors get dyed. Yahoo?


Last but not least…a new mini area: the hub! We used to connect a lot of the maps together using the Grassy Plains, but Recursive brought up a valid point: it’s really weird going from the farm or town’s weather, to spring (Plains), to whatever the next biome’s weather is.

So…I made a hub. And moved the Goddess Pond from the farm to there. I hope this will make travelling to multiple places less tedious - this is a lot less walking!

It will also make transitioning between cutscenes and the story flow a bit better…I think. Well, that’s all for this month! We’ll see you in the new year 🥂

Meowllo! We’re going into full-fall territory now. But, the dev team is in winter…because of the final biome: welcome to the Frozen Tundra~



[h2]❄️ FROZEN IN TIME[/h2]
We had a lot to do that popped up between when we first started this biome and now, when it’s finally finished. Optimization, bugs, UI code rehaul…



All those trees in the distance are fake planes! They’re flat!! ALL FAKE!! We hope this makes the game run better 🥺👉👈

But, after two months(!!) it’s completed. It’s come a long way from the sketch. This was one of those places I had a very strong idea of what I wanted from the beginning, so I set out with the goal to recreate it as close as I could to what was in my imagination.



Some changes were made once I could walk around it in the game, but the gist of it stayed the same.



This was, by far, the most time-consuming environment to do. It was essentially two: the inner cave and the outside.



But! It’s done. So let’s say bye-bye to all the terrain modelling, and hello to…the rest of the game. Props, furniture, NPCs, the list goes on and on and on and on-




[h2]📈 PROGRESS ON OTHER THINGS[/h2]
There’s also a lot of other things we’ve been doing in the backend that we can’t talk about. Sorry! Just trust us, we’re doing lots of work. OK?

OK. Well, onto the things we can talk about: cutscenes.

We’ve brought on Ken, who you may remember also being our tech artist who made our great water shader and some VFX. He’s now on cutscene duty to wrangle the spaghetti that is cutscenes inside Snacko.



Let’s say thank you to Ken for wrangling this noodle monster. We hope you enjoy the cutscenes and interactive tutorials, because they take a lot of time (save me).

I’ve also made some progress with things like the different signs for each biome.



Now that I finished that, I was able to send out Kickstarter reward surveys for the signs and the other custom assets. For the other tiers, like just game keys, etc. we’ll be sending those out later. Thank you for your support!



I’m especially happy with the Frozen Tundra’s sign. Look at that little snow overhang. Very cute.

We’re also working on an in-game achievement system. These icons were very fun to do, we hope you enjoy collecting them!



[h3]Anyways, that's all for October. We'll see you next month 🐾[/h3]

Meowllo! It’s now pumpkin season. Which means you should go pick up a Trick or Trick Nobu Jr. sticker from the store. You can give this fat baby pumpkin boy a new home. Sparkly!



Anyways, that aside, we have been working on some detail-oriented things in September. Stuff that you won’t really notice in the game, but if we didn’t do it, you would definitely notice. My favorite kind of work to do 😥

[h2]🏃‍♂️ LOADING VERY FAST[/h2]
So, one of our pain points in the past has been the absolute chonker that the Grassy Plains (and to an extent, all the other maps) has been in terms of resources to load. Well, it’s the Plains, right? So there’s a lot of grass, and flowers. And you can collect petals from the flowers, so they need collision. And you can chop the trees, so they need-

You see where I’m going with this, right?



Anyways, this absolute chonker took about 28 seconds(!!!) to load on our computers, and it would just straight up crash the Nintendo Switch.

So we had to fix it. And fix it we did! With a combination of ✨magic✨ and 🥴headaches🥴 we have solved our conundrum.

[h3]Step One: reduce the number of foliage objects that had data in it[/h3]

A no brainer, right? Less data to load, the speedier it becomes! Except we didn’t want to make the Plains completely bald. Instead of just wiping all the flowers and grass off the face of Snacko Island, we swapped out the foliage in places you couldn’t reach with instanced static meshes. They’re like shadow clones of things, so they don’t take up a lot of resources.



This alone reduced the load time of the Grassy Plains from 28 seconds on PC to about 13. So much better, but still not good.

[h3]Step Two: bake down the data from the foliage objects when the game is being packaged[/h3]

The thing that was taking the longest was the first load of a level. Once the code generated the data for the foliage objects, it would go much quicker. So, why not do that process before the game turns into an executable? That’s what we did!



Recursive made this handy Resource Bakery (sounds delicious, but there’s no bread involved, sadly). Every time foliage would be changed in a level, you’d just have to bake in the information. The data tied to each tree and flower then gets rolled up along with the rest of the game. Essentially, it’s almost like we’re pre-loading the game before it gets installed on your system.

This has reduced the total load time of the Grassy Plains to a snappy 3 seconds on our computers, and 6-7 seconds on the Switch!! Congratulations 🎉

Now that we can vomit more foliage everywhere, I’ve taken the liberty to fill up the horizon with more trees and bushes in the farm, and added vistas to the town so you get a sneak peek of the Mushroom Forest and Grassy Plains.



I mean, since you’re walking there from the town, it makes sense to be able to see it, right?



All that optimizing aside, we’ve also been working on other things, like fixing our tutorials to include instructions for controllers, fixing inventory UI bugs because…of controllers. And adding controller support. We’re starting to hate controllers, just a bit. No one said it was going to be this hard?

[h2]🎨 DYE-ING TO TRY[/h2]
Before I bore you with more…stuff. Here’s something we’ve been working on recently: multiple dye slot support for objects! It gives us the ability to define dye slots and parts on an asset, and apply a separate color for that part. You can have a circus barn set up with clown colors.



With adding Switch to release, it has made our work to-do list very fat. But it’s OK! Just knowing it isn’t crashing every other minute on the console is giving me a lot of happiness. We can’t wait for you to play Snacko! But first, finish the game…

[h3]Alright, well back to work. See you next month![/h3]

Meowllo everyone! This month, we’re bidding goodbye to summer, and hello to autumn! The new season also brings in new biomes…and new family members! Nobu Jr IRL has a baby brother now…meet Maru (Jr)!



Yup. We named another cat after an existing Snacko NPC. Way to make it confusing, devs.

[h2]🍄 THE MUSHROOM FOREST GROWS[/h2]

Remember the sneak peek of the Mushroom Forest’s terrain last month? We’ve improved upon that and also finished the resource nodes and foliage for the biome. There was…a lot!



This isn’t even all of it! I was honestly not expecting to have to make so many different items for this biome, but I think one of a forest’s charms is having a wide variety of flowers, mushrooms, and trees.



I also made the shadows in the forest a lot darker, and the sun shining through the canopy a lot brighter. Really adds to the forest mood, huh?



[h2]🐾 NEW DEV FRIENDS![/h2]

Thanks to our publisher’s and your continued support, we’ve been able to seek help for Snacko dev goodness! Huey Games is partnering with us to bring Snacko to the Nintendo Switch! There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes to make sure the game runs as it should. We’re so grateful to have their expertise on board so we can focus on other parts of Snacko’s development. And just between you and me? Apparently, Snacko has been running OK so far in their preliminary tests…



There’s also new VFX to enjoy by Adam deGrandis! He’s been doing ameowzing work bringing Snacko to life with fluffy effects.

[h2]❄ A SNEAK PEEK[/h2]

We have one last biome to model the terrain and resources for! Here’s an early preview…🧐



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