Snacko News

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! 🐾

Meowllo everyone! We hope you’re taking care of yourselves. We’re excited to share that Snacko is over 120% funded on Kickstarter right meow! The campaign ends Thursday June 25th at 11:00AM ET, so if you want to back and nab exclusive rewards like beta access later on in development, the ability to name livestock or immortalize a pet as a fine piece of in-game art, and more, now is the time! Check Snacko out on Kickstarter here!



We’ll have a bigger update for you at the end of the month. On our end, we’ve been working on a lot of in-game optimization that will help out big time later on, and getting some NPCs up-and-running in the game. Take a peek below:



One of the biggest (well, smallest, but most important!) is Nobu Jr! This little fellow has big dreams; he wants to run a farm someday just like his grandpa. In the meantime, once you’ve built up your island enough, Jr will come along to start selling you livestock. He might be tiny, but he can wrangle cows and chickens - and take your money for them - with the best of them.



As we wrap this month up, we want to take some time to thank everyone who has wishlisted the game, shared the campaign, or just spared us some positive vibes. While the game still has a long way to go, your enthusiasm motivates us. We can’t wait to share what the future holds for Snacko. Stay tuned 🐾

Meowllo everyone! May was such a busy month. We got our Steam page up and running, we were showcased in a Tumblr spotlight, we participated in the Wholesome Direct, and we started a Kickstarter campaign to help fund the development! That’s a lot of stuff, huh? We’ve also been doing a lot of dev work, too!

[h2]🐣 On the Ranch[/h2]

We can finally talk about the ranching now that Wholesome Direct is over! So far, we’ve added chickens and cows that you can keep in your barn and get resources from. They can all stay in one barn!



The feeders will have a badge affixed to it once you have livestock, so you can see who has eaten and who hasn’t! Every barn is equipped with two egg incubators, a birthing pen, and four feeding pans. Each barn can have up to four animals, and you can freely move them between barns easily through your Journal.



Barns and livestock are randomly given a name, but you can always edit these later as many times as you’d like in your Journal. We’d like to add a “randomize” button in the near future so you can go through the different names if you’re not very good at naming things (like me). One of our Kickstarter tiers lets you submit a name to this database! You’ll be able to choose a name and what kind of animal it’ll be attributed to (or all). So if you haven’t checked out our campaign yet, there’s more fun rewards like that!



Our favorite part about the ranching system so far is the feeder – you can put in any edible goods and it’ll be magically turned into feed! So if you have any extra turnips or wild berries laying around, you can always put them to good use. Different foods will move that little arrow a little farther to full, though. Putting in a little berry will fill up the machine much less than say, putting in a bowl of ramen.

[h2]✨ A Little Bit of Polish[/h2]

We’ve also added some new little sparkles here and there to really make the game feel and look better. The main menu’s UI style has changed to match the rest of the game, including pixel icons that do a little jiggle and light up into color when hovered.



We also updated all our portraits to be more consistent and have a bit more contrast! This cleaner style is easier to see in-game, and it’s also easier to draw with consistent results. This also allows us to give the villagers a bit more variety in their poses for their different emotions, which is a big plus!




Our last little thing is the title screen! Dale North has been doing such an amazing job with Snacko’s music, including the title theme. We wanted to do it justice, so we put together a proper title screen that will go through the map while you relax and listen to the music. The best part? It reads data from your first save slot, so you’ll be able to see what you’ve grown on your farm, the villagers and their houses, and all the hard work you’ve put into your island!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[h2]🥗 Order Up![/h2]

And last, but definitely not least, is the restaurant mini-game! We wanted to add in little bits of gameplay to break up farming and exploring with something that makes you feel like you’re more apart of your island community. So…we put in this mini-game! It turns out it wasn’t very mini, as it was a lot of work to get it all working nicely together, but we’re proud of the result.



We’re looking into slight variations of these in the future – like a cafe and a family restaurant. But currently it’s a diner! Each day, the menu will change and the fridge will be stocked with the ingredients to make those dishes. Patrons will come through the door and request dishes, either by name, or by an attribute like “sweet” or “spicy”. You can choose to go by the menu, or if you’re a pro chef and know some recipes off the back of your paw, you can choose to cook up something with what’s available in the kitchen that also matches their request!




We changed cooking so it wasn’t just the crafting menu but with food – now you have to hold the ingredient and pop it into a cooking station. They’ll float and bubble around until you’re ready to cook. If you make a mistake, the kitchen has a convenient trash can to throw away your blunders or your accidental fridge pickings.



Doing good work in the kitchen and serving the guests will net you a nice Cocoa Bean payment for your time and maybe a reward to take home!

That’s all for this week, thank you for reading and supporting us! 🐾 Double special thanks to all our patrons that make our development possible 🎵 While we do have a Kickstarter campaign going, and while 100% of the funds are going to development, it’s to pay for outside help like the music to make Snacko the best it can be! So patrons are still an instrumental part of our development that allows us to pay for our own dev costs, like hosting this website. Thank you to all of these lovely patrons who have and continue to support us through this long Snacko journey 💕