Snacko News

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]

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]