Snacko News

Meowllo everyone! Happy spooky season! As the end of the year draws closer, the more we - the devs - are freaking out. We did something this month we haven’t for years…we took a break!

We haven’t had a weekend or time to ourselves to de-stress in a very long time, and we really needed it. So, we took a week off in October to unscramble our brains. What prompted this break? I tried looking for our rice cooker in the trash can.

[h2]🔑 I’m a-shrined I can’t pass these puzzles! [/h2]
We started playing around with some puzzle mechanics and making some sample puzzle rooms. We had a rough idea of what we wanted the shrines and obelisks to look like, but the assets never really reached our expectations.

Well, this month, we finally buckled down and settled on a look and vibe that we feel like suits the lore behind them.



One of the first mechanics we started testing are logic gates and buttons. They function like gates in a circuit! Each gate has a symbol that changes depending on what’s required to activate them. We aren’t quite ready to show it off yet, but…soon 👀

[h2]🏡 A mew house [/h2]
House upgrades! What’s better than having more room to decorate? One issue we ran into while implementing house upgrades is that the original (very old) house design wasn’t upgrade friendly. It’s cute, but it didn’t give a lot of room to expand on. We still like the style, so we’ll keep the idea in mind for a house style variation in the future!



Now we have this little starter home…complete with a balcony. It still retains the charm of the old house with some more room to grow! Oh, and of course, it still has a dyeable roof.

Did you notice the colors looking a little brighter? You’re right! We tweaked the overall look a little bit to really make those colors pop! 🎆

[h2]✨ Refining what’s there [/h2]
We decided to change our old menu-based cooking system to something a little fresher. Instead of choosing what to cook in a boring ol’ menu, cooking is just like the restaurant mini-game.



You grab your ingredients from your rucksack and pop ‘em into any cooking station. Once you’re ready to start cooking, all the ingredients will come together into a dish.

We’d like to add cookbooks in the near future that you can buy so you can refer to them when you forget a recipe.

We also needed to revisit our starting cutscene a couple of times. It’s any player’s first interaction with Snacko, so we want to take extra time to make it super-duper great.



Striking a good balance between showing players the game and the mechanics without keeping them from playing the game is hard to do! We’re trying our best!!

[h3]That’s all for this month! Thank you for your support and taking the time to read our updates! We hope you have an a-meowzing November 🐾[/h3]

Fall is officially here! Although it sure doesn’t feel like it, as we’re still clocking in temperatures at about 26C. But that’s OK! This month, we started doing something egg-citing: tying everything together.

Before we start this month's devlog, we just wanted to say meowllo to all the new faces from TGS! Thank you for wishlisting us and checking us out! If you like to see more mini-updates, we're very active on our Twitter and in our Discord...come and say hi!

[h2]🎀 Knot Your Average Problem [/h2]

What does tying everything together mean? So far, Snacko has a staggering amount of stuff. Furniture you can place, objects you can dye, NPCs you can talk to, seeds you can plant…all of it is working, but they all work in sort of a sandbox type way.



This is our debug menu - you can use this to give yourself items, add cows to your barn, or fast-forward your farm tiles to test crop growing. Up until now, we’ve tested and played all of these parts and pieces of Snacko like this.

We’re now hitting that point where we need to start trying to knead everything together to see how it all fits into one another and test the overall game feel instead of just tinkering with it in isolated instances. This proves to be very…time consuming. The simple act of giving you the ability to harvest a turnip is quite long…



To avoid spoiling too much dialogue or story, we’re going to keep all of this stuff hush-hush! So…you won’t be seeing too much in regards to cutscenes and dialogue.



We showed some of the tutorials last month, with some screenshots of the opening cutscene including Nobu’s big lecture on placing buildables and planting crops. This month, we expanded on that by adding some quests that would reward players after teaching them something about the game.



If you’ve seen our old quest board screenshots before you’ll notice the quest card is slightly different! It has been slightly modified to fit in with the rest of the dialogue box changes - more contrast, bigger text, and inline images. Fancy!


[h2]🏡 Home Sweet Home [/h2]

We had to get some interiors of shops and houses put in. Each interior would be dependent on the type and style of building it is, not by the inhabitant. Here’s a look at the first floor of the Suburban Grocer!



We also realized that for Nobu Jr. to come to the island and sell ranching goods and livestock, Nobu’s house will have to expand to accommodate the little furball. We’ve set up an event to trigger the house exterior and interior to change when Junior is set to move in. He even gets his special (extra short) counter for you to shop from!



The upstairs also features Junior’s favorite spot - his little mat with all of his sketchbooks and crayons.



[h2]📍 Finding Your Way [/h2]

Before we added in waypoints, we had our NPCs follow a schedule that was dictated by coordinates. It was sort of like, "at 1PM, walk from X123 Y123 Z123 to…” and so on. It was very hard to work with, as these numbers don’t really mean anything to humans.



To fix this, we’ve changed the number and coordinate system to waypoints. Little dots, shown below, each have an ID attached to them. Now, we can easily create schedules by typing in the waypoint IDs. “NobuKitchen” is much more understandable to humans than a string of numbers making up a specific location in 3D space.



This has made the process so much easier and quicker! This also allows us to use our schedule system to swap out certain waypoints and actions for different sets based on different conditions - like the day of the week or events.



For example, Mikan has a different schedule depending on whether or not you had anything in your shipping container that morning. If there’s nothing to sell, Mikan will stick around town instead of going to Capital City. You can see her walking to your shipping container every morning!



Here’s what the waypoints for that particular route look like in the engine:



[h2]🛒 What Can I Get You? [/h2]

Shops! Every town needs their own shops! We added in updated backgrounds and character art. Shopkeepers will have little dialogue lines when you’re poking around their store. Nobu Jr. will try to guilt-trip you if you decide you don’t want to buy something anymore…



The way we have the shop system set up allows us to change the stock based on different conditions - like the day of the week and how much of the item is in-stock.


[h2]💅 Just a Touch of Polish[/h2]

Something new and small we added this month is little interactable volumes we can place in various spots that will give flavor text. This is something we enjoyed in games we’ve played, so we wanted to incorporate that feeling of discovering a different world’s mundane into Snacko.



Another bit we’ve added that’s a quality-of-life change is the building area material. Instead of showing…absolutely nothing but the borders, a light grid will show up. This way, it’s more clear where you can place objects and where you can’t. Once you take out your objects to place, the area surrounding it, like before, will be a more opaque orange grid.



We also added more functionality to our dialogues! Now we have more control over things like events that can happen through dialogue, or conditions that have to be met to trigger certain dialogue lines. Below is an example of Nobu Jr.’s dialogue when he’s working:



[h3]And…that’s all for September! We have a lot of work ahead of us but it’s slowly coming together. Thank you for reading and for your support 🐾 See you next month![/h3]

We often post work-in-progress shots of Snacko on our Twitter, and it was one fateful night of 1AM Twitter scrolling with my phone on night mode that I realized - “oh, it’s hard to read the dialogue text”. Not that you’d be playing the game on a phone in bed with the lowest brightness setting but, hey.

That, combined with our continued work on story cutscenes and quests that had us spending more time than ever with our dialogue and UI, caused me to take a step back and re-evaluate just how readable our UI was. Some of it was good. Some of it was, um, not good.

[h2]🔎 Very Lorge Text[/h2]
The first issue was the textbox itself. It had a lot of padding around the text, resulting in a large percent of the screen being used for…nothing. Not only did this obscure a lot of the world, it also made the text small, as to make the whole dialogue UI take up less than 99% of the screen, we had to scale it down.



All the red area is unused! Well, there’s the name tag, but we still couldn’t do anything with the top half.



Ta-da! 🎉 Now, the textbox takes up less room on the screen, while holding larger text! The background color was also lightened to give the contrast a little boost, as the low contrast was making it difficult to read on screens with lower brightness.

[h2]📖 Learning Curve[/h2]
Speaking of low contrast, one part of our story cutscene work is the player onboarding. To make the process easier on veteran farmers, we’ve left all the tutorials in tutorial pop-ups, instead of lengthy dialogue. That way, if tilling the soil to grow turnips is second nature to you, it won’t take up too much of your time. We had this already, but it looked a little, uh, rough.



It had the same issue with the dialogue box - it was quite large but the part that was the most important - the text with the explanation - was very small. It also had an extremely low contrast, as you can see below with the white and black side-by-sides.



We also added a feature that minimizes certain tutorials to the bottom right while you’re working on a task! That way, if you accidentally spam your way through the tutorial pop-up, you can still double check which key brings up the menu and whatnot. How handy!



[h2]🎬 Cutscenes[/h2]
While working on cutscenes, we identified some features we needed that our cutscene system lacked. My personal favorite is the “follow player” function. It’s cute watching Mikan keeping up with you while you collect materials. We even have animation triggers for cute events like Mikan tripping!



Our cutscene system also works with our quest system to trigger certain cutscenes once you complete a quest task. In this instance, Nobu will continue his farming lecture once you’ve successfully planted and watered 9 turnips.



[h2]🌟 Some UI Sparkle[/h2]
Do you spot some new UI in the above screenshot? The clock wasn’t working for us in other languages - most notably Japanese. To make it easier on us in the future when the game text is localized, we decided to simplify the clock UI down to give us the least amount of potential headache in the future. Now, it even comes with an auto night mode!



The season was something we figured was pretty easy to tell, and didn’t need to take up a giant portion of the clock UI. The color strip at the bottom will change colors depending on the season! No worries, the music and surroundings change, too.



PS: We got to listen to the seasonal tracks for the town and farm by Dale North! They’re absolutely ameowzing and we know you’re going to love farming to them! You can listen to a sneak peek of it in this Tweet.

We’ve put off the UI implementation for so long we redesigned it before we finally got to put it in the game…👁👄👁 Here’s a comparison to how we were planning to have it look at the beginning of the year versus how it looks in-game now!



The stamina can be toggled to show a visual representation of your stamina level or a number for those who like to know exactly how many more tiles they can till. Regardless, both formats will have a circular bar displaying your remaining stamina.



And for the last bit of UI polish we have…embedded images! Useful for quests to identify by icon to see what items you’re looking for.

[h2]🥧 The Island Cultural Center[/h2]
If you watched Wholesome Game’s latest video update - the Wholesome Snack - you’ll know that we have finally revealed our Island Cultural Center!



The Cultural Center is home to the Snacko Natural Artifacts Collection…or SNAC. At the SNAC, you’ll be able to donate all sorts of items you’ve crafted, found, and fished up in your adventures.



The three we showed off were the art gallery…


The furniture exhibit…


And the food exhibit! (My personal favorite, has nothing to do with my infinite love of eating.)


We also revealed Miss Curator, who will be taking care of the SNAC. The Cultural Center will be eventually home to other handy services, like the post office and other island administrative stuff.



When Miss Curator is off work, expect to see the Donation Box pop up in her place to take your donations. Don’t worry, it doesn’t bite. I think?




[h2]🐯 Kickstarter Villagers[/h2]
We’ve been working on Kickstarter rewards, too! Here’s a look at some early design iterations of backer villagers! In fact, we extended the pre-purchase period for the custom creator tiers, so if you’d like a tourist, they’re still a few left up for grabs at our shop.



[h2]🌎 Welcome New Team Members![/h2]
We’re also excited to introduce everyone to Adam Cohen and Joseph Jobst! Adam will be helping us with the four biome’s level design! Joe will be working his magic creating special visual effects for the game.


The matching pixel VFX will be a great touch to the pixel world!

[h3]Phew, we’re finally at the end here. That’s all for the month of August! Thanks for reading, and we’ll see you next month 🐾[/h3]

Not really, but the paths in Snacko can be on slopes.

Wait, there’s a lot to unpack in that sentence. Before that…

Meowllo everyone! It’s time for the monthly devlog! Does it feel like August? This year is weird, isn’t it? It’s simultaneously long and short at the same time. We’re over halfway done 2020, and we’ve been working harder than ever on Snacko.

[h2]🐾 Paths[/h2]
Yes, that’s right. You read our first sentence correctly - we now have two new features: paths and building on uneven surfaces.


To start off, we added Softwood, Hardwood, and two variations of Cobblestone paths. These can be snapped to the grid, or moved and rotated freely like the other buildable items.


We also added the ability to place buildables on slopes and such. You can’t place buildings on uneven terrain, but it still opens up a lot of new decorating possibilities, like a menacing wall of Scarecrows all dyed different colors.


[h2]🌳 Organic is Good[/h2]
To help facilitate this new “wow, I can have slopes!” thing, we gave the map a little bit of a makeover. You might’ve noticed some new landmarks, like the different waterfalls or arches, and the new way cliffs are done. All of these changes are so we can make our maps more organically shaped.


Now with more cliffs and more lookouts, it became more apparent that the horizon was a little…sudden. We added a slight depth of field to the distance to soften up the transition between sea and sky.


One of my favorite additions to the farm map is the new lake south of your farm. We’ve also expanded the building areas so you could decorate that as well. Lots of space for your creativity! Or your Scarecrow disasters, either works.


Having the extra bit of terrain and cliffs really help the island feel more alive!

[h2]🪑 Decorate Everything!![/h2]

In addition to expanded building areas, we also connected the farm (tiles) and the farm (map) building areas. Now you can easily place your fences, paths, and more!


The starter furniture set also became the Softwood furniture set, and we started working on their cousin, Hardwood furniture. The Softwood set has more of a cozy, suburban feel to it while the Hardwood set takes a lot of inspiration from traditional Japanese furniture. Some changes were made to make the sets more cohesive, like swapping out the low table in the Softwood for a more standard, rectangular tall dining table with chairs (and optional mats!)


We’ve had this feature for a while, but all the surfaces can have items placed on them as long as they fit. That means we purposefully left some cubbies in the Hardwood Bookshelf empty so you can decorate them to your taste!



[h2]📌 What Else?[/h2]
Here’s the part where we list off a bunch of other things that we worked on that doesn’t really fit into one category or the other.



We’ve started working on more story and quest content. We don’t want to spoil everything, so we’ll be showing just the bare minimum of that! We hope you can enjoy all the dialogue for the first time when you play the game in it’s final form 😊



The first thing that needed some touch-up was the dialogue selection choice. We never really had…one. So it was just floating text. But no worries! Now the box creates itself so it better fits the contents.


The second thing we noticed that needed a bit of polish was the quest tracker. The old one was quite small, and the checkbox looked stiff and not very fun.



Now it’s extremely fun, featuring a cute lil’ paw stamp that goes bonk when you complete a subtask! Don’t you feel more productive already?



The little opacity shift as you complete the subtask was suggested by one of our Kickstarter backers and Discord members, Foxling! If you haven’t yet, you should join our little community!

The last little bit of UI Juice™ is the pickup notification. It used to just kinda…pop up in the lower right corner. It didn’t even really have a quantity counter. It just told you “You got Item!”. So we made it better!



The new item pickup notification sits in the lower left where your inventory bar is, and updates in the same stack if you pick up additional items that are the same. Very handy! Also, it goes pop just a little bit.

That’s all for this month! Thanks for reading, we'll see you in another four weeks 🐾

Meowllo everyone! It’s already June but it doesn’t feel like it, huh? This month was quite hefty, including a fully funded Kickstarter! Wow!! Thank you for all your support - we really appreciate it. The campaign took a bit of time out of our regular schedule, but we were still able to make good progress! This devlog is going to be a long one…

[h2]🍔 New foods![/h2]
We started adding the 3D assets to some existing recipes - the Carrot Cake and Catfish Sandwich are our newest ones!



All of these can be placed on surfaces (or on the floor…if you don’t mind putting your food on the floor) as decorations, or eaten. Thanks to some Snacko magic, food never goes bad, so feel free to display all your cakes in your room.

[h2]🐱 Introducing Nobu Jr.[/h2]
You’ve probably seen Nobu Jr. on our Twitter or through a Kickstarter update, but we’d like to formally introduce this tiny boy.



Nobu Jr. will arrive on your island to live with his gramps, Nobu, when the island has been developed a bit. Nobu Jr. aspires to be a rancher, and growing up in Capital City that just wasn’t an easy task. Nobu took this opportunity to invite his grandson to live with him and experience the life of a cow-wrangler. You can buy cows and chickens from Nobu Jr., along with supplies.



Nobu Jr. is based on one of our cats, Nobu. It’s confusing, because we made Nobu (the character) first, and got Nobu (the cat) later. We didn’t plan to name Nobu (the cat) Nobu, but it seemed to fit him, so we named him Nobu. Now we have too many Nobus.



Nobu Jr. has a very cute walk cycle, so we hope you’ll like him! He’s very small - around the size of a chicken sprite - but full of purrsonality.



[h2]🪑 New coat of paint[/h2]
We had a couple of leftover objects here and there that needed that polish to match our current art style. Below, you can see the comparison of the front and back of the new (left) and old (right) Small Workbench.



We also have a new bowl of fruit - five times less the polygons, now with bananas! You can also dye to change the color of the bowl now. The storage container also went on a polygon diet. We think everyone looks much brighter and happier now!



We can’t just fix the 3D assets without fixing the icons - the older icons were also given a makeover.



[h2]⛅ Brighter skies[/h2]
We felt like the old colors were a little dull, and washed out the environment overall. We also changed the lighting a bit, as we realized darkening the game too much at night or in places like the caves made it hard to see unless your monitor was extremely bright in a dark room (because that’s how we work). Once we tried looking at the game on a different monitor in daylight, we realized you couldn’t see anything! So we had to brighten it up.



[h2]🍃 It’s windy out there[/h2]
We added wind! Well, there was always wind in the farm grass, but nothing else. So it was a little weird. Now there’s wind on the crops as well, to make it feel more alive. We also moved the data controlling the wind into a little collection so we can control it globally at runtime. This means we can do cool stuff like make it windy on rainy days.



[h2]✨ New stuff[/h2]
Well, all the other stuff was new, too. But these are things I couldn’t lump in with the other categories, so here’s just a list of “other stuff we did this month”.



You can now cut down the grass, flowers, branches, stumps, trees, and break the rocks around the world! It’s no longer limited to your farm. Grass and flowers can grow back, and rocks will reappear given time, but you have to replant trees. Don’t take more than you need! We also changed the way the debris and foliage in the world is handled - recursive did some ameowzing code wizardry, and now it’s much more optimized. This means we can have fun things happen to the objects - like the ability to cut them - without destroying the performance.



Maru has new portraits to match the new style! Poor Maru, he really got spooked by whatever he saw, huh? Now all the old villagers are updated with new portraits.



Since we updated the way some buildings look, the icons had to match, too. We finally went in and fixed them all!

Whew, that was a long devlog, huh? But we’re finally at the end! Thanks for reading, and we hope you enjoy seeing our progress every month! 🐾