Snacko News

[h3]Meowllo! Summer is here! The temperature is rising and so is the amount of assets! Cries quietly. In a few days, the Wholesome Direct will go live on June 12 at 10AM PT. We have something new to share with you, so make sure to tune in![/h3]

Direct aside, let’s take a peek at all the new assets this month, shall we?




Stefan has been hard at work finishing a bunch of animations for the characters in Snacko! I finally got around to putting all of them into the engine and setting them up. There were a lot. Here’s just a look at some of them:



It’s a mix of Kickstarter backer tourists and villagers and “regular” villagers. There’s still a lot of work to be done to implement dialogue, portraits, and so much more. It’s a little daunting, but I think it’ll be rewarding to see everything come together in the end!




Last month, we showed some new Grassy Plains assets, including birch trees and bamboo.



You can find saplings while out gathering wood and plant them back home on your farm or in the town.



This month, we finished up the assets by giving them a sapling mesh as well as some UI icons to match.



All of the item text have been written with a lot of love, so we hope you look forward to reading them! Please laugh at my jokes! 😳



Trees weren’t the only new assets - there’s also food! Here are three Kickstarter backer recipes: dubu (tofu) kimchi, white chili, and a dragon inspired sushi dish.



They all look delicious, right? I always get hungry making food icons or assets for Snacko. It’s very troublesome. The Temari Dragon was extremely fun to design and make! I’ve always wanted to see temari sushi in person, they always look so dazzling in photos…



But there can’t be food without ingredients! The majority of the existing crops were converted to Snacko’s current art style a while ago, but there were still some missing assets.



This month, we cleaned everything up and polished up the 3D models as well as the UI icons for them. They’ve been vertex painted like the previous crops so they’ll move around in the wind slightly. There’s something very calming just standing in the farm field…

https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/033/754/692/5603bc2ac007a2465aaa7ccb9ea44c14_original.gif?ixlib=rb-4.0.2&w=700&fit=max&v=1622686351&auto=format&gif-q=50&q=92&s=6fd312f771955f436ec9184ea0d6b686

During this process, we also added in new or polished up icons for other items, like mushrooms you can forage in the wild, or special woods from trees.



[h3]That’s all for this month! We hope you can catch the Wholesome Direct on Saturday! Thank you for reading through the devlog, and thank you for your support 💖[/h3]

Wholesome Direct will feature 75 ameowzing games from ameowzing people, chock full of exclusive announcements, updates, interviews, and more...so make sure to tune in!



[h3]You can learn more at wholesomegames.com
Or follow them on Twitter for the link when it goes live!

We'll also be updating live on our socials:
🐣 Twitter
💬 Discord[/h3]

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]