Snacko News

Meowllo everyone! April sure passed by quick…I thought it was still March. Time is scary.
This month, we’ve been working on a lot of cool things! Except we can’t show them to you just yet! Terrible! But it’s OK, there’s a lot of asset and art work done this month, we can show you some of those. This will be a pretty image heavy devlog!



Last month, we showed some assets for the Grassy Plains. This month, the family is all complete! Say hello 👋



Some tulips, a new fence, and flowers to help brighten up the colors. We wanted to keep the Grassy Plains primarily green. Lots of fresh warm greens! The terrain is quite large, here’s how it looks in the 3D modelling program:



…And here’s how the same chunk looks in-game!



It’s been a lot of fun working on the level. It’s changed quite a bit as it progressed, and it’s also become a lot more hilly. I swear, I do know what “plains” are. I took some, um, creative liberties.



The pond and the northern end with the bamboo are one of my favorite spots.



Also, owo what’s this…?



Adding another building to the “rustic homes” set, here’s an Alchemist’s shop.



Keeping in theme with the rest of the rustic homes, it features mainly Softwood and Stone. As always, you can dye the roof! To keep things consistent, I use the same set of pieces and textures for each style of housing. It also makes things easier!



Making a house is like building with blocks. Sometimes it can get a bit annoying to have to tweak things to work in the style I want them to, but I see it as a fun puzzle!



There’s also a few more things you can place as decorations. The fertilizer sacks are cute 😳
[h3]Well, that’s all for this month! Thank you for reading the devlog, your support means a lot to us 💖[/h3]

[h2]Before this month's update, we just want to say hi to everyone who is new! Thank you for all the love and support from around the world 🐾 You can always stay up-to-date through our Twitter, or join our Discord and say meowllo![/h2]

OK, now on to the devlog!

Meowllo! It’s starting to warm up here and all the flowers are starting to bloom. The same goes for Snacko! This month we’ve had some progress on the overall game, as well as some new assets for the first area that’s furever spring: the Grassy Plains 🌿


We finally got the first little bite size chunk of Snacko playable in its (almost) final form! That means an opening cutscene, introducing the island, and some tutorial bits! It feels great to finally see the pieces and parts come together into a video game. Sometimes, it can be easy to forget that this is a real videogame.



Obviously, we can’t show any of that here. That would ruin the fun! You’ll just have to wait until release. Nobu Jr. couldn’t have said it better.



This came with a bunch of things like bug fixes, quality of life improvements, and little tweaks to mechanics. Those took up the big majority of our time this month! At least we squashed a ton!



We also remade some older assets that suddenly popped up in the cutscenes. The old lantern was not chunky enough. It was also one of the first assets I’ve made for Snacko. Look how many polygons there are 🙀


Working on cutscenes in Unreal is kind of like having a little camera with you in the game world and setting places for it go to. In the intro cutscene, there’s a nice little fly-over of the farm, and the camera in that instance is controlled like this:



Er, don’t mind the flat cows and chicken. Of course, the actual stuff that happens in the cutscene takes a bit more work. Depending on how many things have to happen, and whether or not you’re just chatting or if someone has to give you items, it can range from being pretty simple to “ohh no”.



They’re still done over top of a code system that’s exposed to the engine’s native visual scripting, meaning it’s easy for anyone to poke their head in and look at the cutscene actions to figure out what’s going on. That’s super cool, right?


The furever spring of Grassy Plains…The Plains has undergone some changes. It’s a bit more hilly with some cliffs framing the sides, and it also has new trees and flowers!



We wanted the Plains to feel distinctly different from the town and farm, as we want every other biome to also feel special. So, instead of using the usual round trees and evergreens, we now have these cool birch trees and a fluffy cypress.



Sunflowers and little mushrooms will also dot the land and bring some extra color to it 🌻
That’s all for this month! We hope everyone has an ameowzing April filled with better weather 🐾

February went by fast. Only 28 days?? Terrifying.

Anyways, this month was a lot of smelly and boring (but necessary) work. There’s some improvements thrown in there, too!




Long story short, we have slight depth of field in Snacko to help blend the horizon line together. One of the issues with this was the ocean used to be one big pancake. So, when it blurred the horizon, it would also blur what was immediately in front of you.

To fix this, we split up the ocean into a smol pancake, and a large outer ring. The outer ring now also has a “simplified” ocean shader slapped on to help with the rendering cost. You can see the seam if you zoom in or bring out the camera very far, like this:



You can’t see it in the usual game camera, though. This also had us fixing the horizon shader. It used to use your camera’s position to kind of give the edge that glow to match the sky. The issue with that was if you were very low to sea level, that edge would be way too wide. If you were high up, it would be almost nonexistent.



The solution? Simple works best. Now that we have that outer ring that’s separated, all it is is two colors blended together with a gradient.



The horizon color is controlled by a curve we went over two months ago. Easy peasy!



We also have all the trims done for the town as well. Here’s a shot of the town:



The pier has little round foam discs!




The other chunk of work that took up some time was the collision. Interestingly, we were watching a speed run video about Mario Kart on the Wii when they showed a screenshot of the game’s collision, and it was very similar to how we handle it in Snacko. It was a relief to know our method wasn’t dumb.



If you’d like to watch the video by SummoningSalt, here’s a link!

Why is it an actual wall with depth instead of a single plane in Snacko? Because anyone who has watched enough speed running will know that thin enough walls will let you clip through by jiggling your character around enough…

Even though I know if you try hard enough, there’s probably some way of getting out of bounds, I still have to try, right? 😢



There’s…a lot of collision. Walking collision, boundary collision, building area collision…

Included in this collision work was also making sure all the building areas in the farm and town were proper. This was kind of difficult for ramps, or areas where there was a steep angle. These areas had to be separated out and use different kinds of collision calculation. The payoff is nice, now you can place slanted buildables on these ramps!



Oh? My decorating skills are very good? Why, thank you!

Before we move on from the town, there’s also an event square now. The town square has area for buildings, the quest board, and the cultural center. The event square is where events (hah) will be held. It’s got lots of space for everyone to gather!



Right in the middle is this bunny statue, which was a Kickstarter tier. Recursive’s parents backed it, and they chose to design it based on his first favorite stuffed animal and book.



Very cute, right? I hope they choose something embarrassing for the plaque text.



We have some more work by Stefan who just finished some idle animations for NPCs! Sometimes, it was kind of sad to just see them stand around doing nothing, so now we have personal animations for each character that will randomly play when they’re just hanging out. Cute, right?



We’ve also made progress with our story cutscene implementation…but no peeking! We’ll be keeping that a secret 😊

[h3]That’s all for this month, thank you so much for reading![/h3]

Meowllo everyone! How was your first month of 2021? This month, we started focusing more on the main story and the content behind it.

We are also excited to say that, with everyone’s generous support, we were able to bring on Stefan Åhlin (@quitefreshgames) to do the sprite animations! We’re hoping this means we’ll have more time to implement more NPCs to give the friends you can meet more variety.

[h2]🌼 Trims and polish[/h2]
The farm map is now considered done, so we’ve added the finishing touches: water trims and collision! You used to be able to just walk off the map, since we tend to change around map layouts quite often as we spend some time walking around them.

It’s nice to be able to finally walk up to cliffs and not fall off the map!
The town map was also put on a bit of a diet. There was too much unnecessary walking between the town and the connecting areas leading to the plains and the forest.

It’s been a bit of a challenge to create a town map that had some sort of structure to it, without being so locked in place that players would feel limited in where they felt like they could place buildings.


(The cobblestone isn’t done yet…don’t mind me 😳)

The new sky colors from last month for dawn match quite well with the snow, right?


[h2]🐶 New Friends[/h2]
Like we mentioned at the beginning, we have Stefan helping animate all the characters of Snacko now! Look at this super cute walk animation he did for Buffpup’s tourist!

To make sure Stefan has as many sprites to work with as possible, we finished all the directions for Kickstarter tourists and villagers. There’s such an amazing variety of awesome ideas and cute pets, here’s just some of them:

Generally, the “canonical” villagers take a bit longer to make, since I have to write their backstory and form their characters myself. But, this month, I was happy with a rework of an older NPC I had shelved away for the time being.

Meet Rejka (ray-ka). He’s a very good boy that is a little grumpy, but we hope you’ll look past his attitude and get to know him!

[h2]🚗 Beep-beep[/h2]
We’ve been working on another mode of transportation once the island gets too large to simply explore by foot.

It’s a car.

Ayup.


Anyways, that’s all for this month! Before we leave, we just wanted to say that we started using our Ko-fi page! You can check it out if you’re interested in the bite-sized mini devlogs we post on there as well as our sneak peek posts. All support goes towards paying for dev costs like software, hosting, and paying the lovely people who help us make Snacko possible!

We hope you enjoyed reading through the devlog. Thank you as always for your support 💖

[h3]New year, same game! Welcome to 2021 🥂[/h3]

We took a bit of time off at the end of the year to do non-game development things and celebrate the holidays together. From the two of us and the three studio executives Momo, Mikan, and Nobu, we hope you had a great holiday season!



[h2]🥞 Food for the eyes[/h2]
This month, we did two dev streams on our Twitch channel for two Kickstarter recipes: Pandacakes and a Breakfast Burger.


Backers will usually give me a list of items that they’d like to be in the food, and provide me either drawings or photo references for the asset. We’ll then adjust the ingredient list to suit Snacko’s cooking system and items.



In the Breakfast Burger’s case, while we don’t have bacon in the traditional sense of pork, we will have a Snacko-world equivalent. We had a bit of fun with the burger on the stream:



[h2]🌟 Let there be (less) light![/h2]
One issue we’ve always had with something in Snacko was how we set the light and sky colors. We used to use curves to control the brightness, colors, and all that in the game engine.

I can’t read this…and I picked these colors…I have no idea what they are…

We still do, but there are different kinds of curves in Unreal, and for whatever reason, we weren’t using a color curve. We did have to change some code to have it work with our day/night cycle, so maybe I was just too dumb last year to realize it could’ve worked.



Now, it’s actually human-readable. Plus! You get to use a color picker, which saves me a lot of time. Now, it’s super easy to go in and adjust everything.



The old “night time” was also way too bright. It was so bright I couldn’t tell where my night screenshot was because I assumed it was a regular daytime one. Now, it’s much more suitably dark. I don’t even have to label which one of these is the old one, it’s quite obvious, huh?

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Here’s a little time lapse. The sunset came out quite pretty! Set to one of Dale’s amazing tracks for the game.


[h2]💎 Refining[/h2]
There’s more than just the workbench when it comes to making things with your own two paws. You can recycle items in your inventory using chemistry sets to distill them into their original elements. These elements are useful for feeding your sprite and in crafting recipes.



I think in the future it’ll be cute to add other chemistry sets that are much smaller that can go indoors, like a work table with some equipment.



We’ve also polished some of the mini-game we showed off last month.



We originally showed off the game cabinet last month, but the game still needed some work. It’s come a long way since then!

[h3]That’s all for this month! See you next month…let’s see how 2021 plays out 🎉[/h3]