Snacko News

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]

[h3]As dubious as 2020 was, we have a lot to be thankful about this year. Every Tweet, every comment, every like, every message, and every share has been a driving force for us to continue doing our best developing the game.

2020 has been hard in many ways, but because of you, it has been one of our best.

From the bottom of our hearts, we’d like to thank you for believing in us.[/h3]



[h3]Here’s just few of the many things we are thankful for this year[/h3]


This year, we were able to enter a collaboration with Armor Games Studios as our publisher. From marketing, to QA, to business development, and of course, production management, Armor Games Studios has been helping us navigate the rocky terrain that is game development.

We’d like to thank everyone at Armor Games Studios for their hard work and dedication to Snacko. As well as the speed running jokes and stick item memes. And especially Dora, our producer, who puts up with me.




Patreon is the reason we were able to take the leap of faith and start working on Snacko full-time. Without all the support we have received since 2019, Snacko would not be where it is today.

We grew from a handful of dedicated supporters - many of which who are still patrons today - to enough income per month to help us hire additional help. This year, we were able to bring on Paige Marincak for additional programming funded through Patreon alone!




Despite everything, we ran a successful Kickstarter campaign. Launched at the peak of financial uncertainty during the midst of a pandemic, we are thankful for each and one of you for setting aside money to support Snacko.

1,250 people (!!!) decided to pledge Snacko and collectively raise $45, 700 to fund the project. This has allowed us to pay for development costs, like the soundtrack composed by the amazing Dale North.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]


This year, we’ve made huge changes to the game. The art received a complete makeover, and many aspects of the game were polished and changed from our first playable build. It was a lot of work to flip the game on its head, but it has been worth it. We’re happy where Snacko is right now, and we’re excited to see it grow in 2021.




You. Yes, you! We want to thank every community member for reading our blog posts, for wishlisting us, for viewing our tweets, for chatting in our Discord, for making fan content, for telling your friends about us…and most importantly, for being excited.

We love Snacko, and nothing makes us happier to know that other people are also charmed by our game. Thank you!

We’d like to give a special shout-out to our Discord mod team. They have all stepped up voluntarily to help keep our Discord a safe and cozy place for everyone. Thank your time and hard work!

Heyo! The holiday season has begun and time has warped to even weirder dimensions. 2020 sure is wild, we’re glad you’re still hanging in there!

[h2]📣 Is this thing even on?[/h2]
We spent the first couple of days in November finishing up a build for our publisher’s QA department to start breaking. They’ll be able to help us find all the different ways you can break Snacko. Since it’s so early on, we’re expecting tons of bugs. Fun.



To help make testing and working on Snacko features easier, we also made a testing map! We should’ve had one a long time ago, but we just never got around to it…



It’s like cheat codes! I guess that’s what cheat codes are, huh…Water all farm tiles, fast forward crops…very handy and time saving.

[h2]⛵ Land, ho![/h2]
We’ve resumed work on the town map. We’ve been taking it bit by bit and working on it between other parts of the game. We’ve added the port by the town square - that’s where all the boats will dock! While you can’t get on a boat and sail around, Mikan leaves by boat every morning to sell your shipping container contents. Be jealous.



The island should also be in a…not so good state. To communicate that, we started working on debris that will be scattered around the town. No worries! While they take a bit of elbow grease (do cats have elbows) to clean up, you’ll be rewarded with lots of resources.




[h2]🪑 Comfy interiors[/h2]
The town isn’t just the outside, Mikan also received her very own house upgrade! To match the exterior of her bright yellow and orange house, her interior has become equally…citrusy.



I wonder what she’s reading…?



You can also change your wallpaper and flooring style through your local carpenter now!



As long as you have a style unlocked and the Cocoa Beans to cover the renovation, you can select any room in your house and change the wallpaper, flooring, or both! Or neither. We’re not going to shame you.

[h2]🚀 Just stuff[/h2]
We also added saplings back into the drop pool for cutting down trees. Cut down a tree, plant a tree. Make sure Snacko Island stays green!



There’s also been a mini-game we’ve been working on lately…we’re excited to polish it up so we can show everyone 👉👈



The last bit is some dialogue polish! We’ve fixed a weird fading bug with the NPC emotes, and also made the dialogue choices more fun. They go bloop when you hover over them. That’s fun, right?



Well, that’s all for November. Stay cozy, and we’ll see you next month for…uh oh…the end of the year. Yikes. 💦

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]