Snacko News

Meowllo! Spooky season is over, now it’s cake season. I mean, November is almost December, right? That’s how that works? It’s already snowing where I live, so it’s December for all I know.

Anyways! We have lots of big important things to cover this month, so I’ll leave the intro short~



We came to this decision after a lot of thought and discussion on where Snacko is, and where we want it to be for you, the player. This gives us time to do a final polish pass, expand on some of the existing content the way we want, localization, MORE QA, and implement community feedback!

[h2]A lot of things have factored into this, so lemme run them through you. Before that, I know it’s a lot of text, so the gist of it is:[/h2]

• The game’s story and core loop is complete and playable, but there is room for more content and polish
  
• Localization and porting takes time to both do, and do well for a game of this genre and scope
  
• We want to fine-tune the pacing and balance for everything: crafting progression, relationships, all that fun stuff
  
• We will be working with our QA team to try to maintain save file integrity, but the possibility exists that changing content or fixing a major bug update may impact your save files as updates are released.
  
• I’ll post a separate update that goes into more of the dry details of how EA will look like, our plans, and the rough update schedule during the time period, along with some other important things in the future.
  

Now, the long version:



Yes, you can play through the main story. Yes, all the dialogue is written and you can do everything else you’d expect in the game, like...farm, explore, build, craft, date...cow.

But, there’s a lot of polish and balancing we’d like to adjust. We’re about a month into our Kickstarter-only beta now, and it’s been very helpful to get feedback from players, so we’d like to continue that vibe for a little longer through early access!



Part of that is yeah, it’s mostly just the two of us working on the game full-time. (Including support from some of the talented contractors we’ve worked with, of course!) The game has (unsurprisingly) ballooned into quite a hefty game over the last couple of years since we started. It sure does feel great to say “the whole game is playable now!” but it’s been long enough that we feel like the additional time will really help Snacko go from “yay” to “WAHOO”. You know what I mean?

[h2]There’s lots of stuff that is already playable but we want to improve:[/h2]

• Better mines experience, more floors with more variation
  
• Player house expansion, wallpaper and flooring options
  
• Little world activities and events, more festivals
  
• Proposing and a more in-depth post-bonding life (don’t worry you can romance and date everyone eligible in early access!)
  
• UI/UX (including controllers!) polish
  
• Better tutorials and documentation in the game for those of us that need more help (me, that’s me. I need more help)
  
• More accessibility options and better settings
  
• Additional craftables
  
• ...and obviously, bug fixes
  

For weaker computers and consoles especially, we want to dedicate time to make sure it runs well and feels really good with a controller to play. These are things that will take us some time and a couple rounds of playtesting and fine-tuning to really get right, but we think having the game play well on both keyboard/mouse and controller with a stable framerate is very important!
In fact, the month of October was heavily focused on making UI/UX improvements. We’ve been working on a new system (we call it SnackoUI, very original) that has made it easier to make functional buttons and screens that will just work with controllers. It’s very exciting.



(Keep in mind at this point when this message was sent, I haven’t seen recursive in a whole week. We live in the same house. He is my husband.)

Poor recursive did...wilt a little bit creating the system, but it’ll make things go much faster (with less bugs) in the near future. In fact, we’re already reaping the rewards now! No more “1 business day spent on a single UI screen to get it to work with a controller”!!!

Zoro also spent time profiling where a lot of the performance bottlenecks were and remaking certain portions of features to improve it.



Now, with the worries of “oh no not another UI screen” out of the way, we’ve been able to spruce up some existing screens to make them feel and play better.


(Before!)


(Now!!!)

The poor arcade machine at the grocer’s just...Yeah, it was rough.



PC is relatively easy to test on, make fixes for, and update. But that kind of exponentially grows as you tack on more things, like other languages and console releases.



While working on finalizing the text earlier this year, it became pretty limiting to keep the text as-is and not make any more changes or additions. It became clear that we just had to add more text, especially with small tutorials and other flavor text to help the world come together.



But unfortunately, the process of writing, making sure I didn’t spell mackerel wrong again, sending it off to get localized, reimported, QA’d in the new language...

It’s just a lot of time and effort. With the two of us, it meant if we were working on localization implementation, we couldn’t work on bug fixing or polish. So, we decided to focus on making the base game better before worrying about controller support or additional language support.



So like, I guess I never thought about this in depth, but one of the downsides of having a more sand-boxy type of game where you have a lot to collect and craft and a lot of characters to talk to means that it’ll also take a long time to test.



Sure, we’ve got debug commands and systems to help us test if something works, but people have to actually play through it to see when the pacing feels off, or when an activity or goal is just too grindy.
Bubbafare, one of our long-time supporters, was a huge help as they played...a hundred hours during beta.



Not sure how, but thank you very much.

So, early access will give us more time to nudge numbers back and forth and play more of the game ourselves to see where we can improve the experience. One feature we’d like to implement that was a brainchild from beta and Discord suggestions was difficulty modes. An easier difficulty setting would make days longer, actions cost less stamina, etc.

Anyways, I’m starting to ramble (I started to ramble 8 paragraphs ago my bad).

[h2]At the end of the day, Snacko is our baby. Well, a 5 year old child at this point. Bro’s in kindergarten already. But it’s a game that we’ve put a lot into, and we want to really make sure that the full release alongside the console versions live up to the effort and love we’ve put into the game so far.[/h2]


(Snacko in 2019! Wait, look how different the inside of the player house looks, too!)


Optimization, polish, balancing tweaks, bug fixes...I’m just very, very happy we’re finally at the point in development where we can worry about things like this, versus implementing basic things, like cutscenes.

Thank you very, veryveryvery much for reading all of this, and reading all of my updates.





[h2]Thank you (again) for reading this month’s long update! Keep your eyes peeled for news coming soon![/h2]

HELLO EVERYONE I’m like half a month late with this, but! There’s a good reason!

[h2]Snacko beta for Kickstarter backers has been released! Into the wild! Live!! Playable![/h2]

Actually, that was like, almost two weeks ago at this point. But because of the beta release, I have been a withered husk of a person. My Slack profile picture really encapsulates how I feel right now.

(If you haven’t, you should totally read the webtoon “The Greatest Estate Developer”!!)

I have re-alived myself to report what we’ve been up to!


Well, obviously, lots of bug fixes. We went through internal QA, but bugs always slip through the cracks. They are simply too small. We probably spent the first 4 days doing nonstop fixes for things like falling out of a collision hole, etc.

Luckily, there was nothing huge. So, we are alive and happy with how it went.

Right before the launch though, we had a lot of super special surprising (SSS) bugs pop out of nowhere. Like, literally, where did you guys come from?

My favourite, that dealt severe spiritual damage to my already weak psyche, was this one:

We were working in a voice call together. Motivated by the beta launch in the horizon, the three of us work quietly, excited to wrap up the build for the night for QA to test in the morning.
And then suddenly, Zoro asks,

“Hey, um…is your guys’ house…sideways?”

Silence.

Recursive, worried, responds, “what do you mean…sideways?”

Zoro pauses, unable to find the words. “I went in the house, and when I came back out, the world was upside down. And now the house is in the floor. When I jump up…I jump…sideways?”

Nobody makes a sound. The implications of this world-turning (literal) bug happening 24 hours before the beta is set to go live weighs heavily in the call.

After a moment of confusion, I sheepishly ask, “can you show us? Through screen share?”

Zoro turns on his screen share.



Mind you, at this point, I was already on the brink of tears for a whole week after the whole main scenario refused to work despite the story being tested and played through multiple times by QA at this point (it was easy bug to fix…happened because we added debug functionality). So, I did have a wee bit of a freak out but it ended up being an easy bug to fix.

Asides from doing hotfixes, we’ve also worked on other things! So don’t worry, the rest of the devlog will have many pictures for your enjoyment.


“Make Mesecina statue less ugly” has always been on my to-do list, I just never had the chance to work on it on top of the more pressing bugs. But last month, I did! Left is the old one, right is the new one!



Along with the visual rework, you can now obtain a quest while interacting with it. The statue, broken as you arrive, can be fixed up. Maybe if you pay a visit to it once a day often, something good might happen!



I totally did not want to implement that into the game because I recently got back into Neopets and found myself enjoying doing the dailies…

While we were working on an item duplicating bug with the seedmaker, I also realized the old seed maker was just a little…old.



We also felt like the interact prompt pop-up that often comes up also blocked a lot of the screen. With these two things in mind, we’ve…

• made the seed maker asset more aligned with the other assets
  
• made the pop-up indicator for how many seeds less…stretched
  
• instead of 3 sad seeds when the seed maker has something produced, there’s now different colored seed piles depending on which seeds it’s currently making!
  
• made the interact prompt a little smaller and reduced the opacity for the text portion so you’re not losing as much vision on your screen. The key portion is kept opaque since the readability of which button to press > what the prompt text is
  

The alembic also got a similar treatment, getting a cute little animation, some VFX, and an all new indicator for what elemental fragments it has distilled so far.



And lastly, for the longest time, you couldn’t place any of the crops as a buildable. It was marked as a buildable, but when you tried to actually place a turnip or something, the game would give you an error. So I fixed that! I put em in lil baskets.



All crops now can be placed as a decorative object. Nice!

That’s all we have for this…I mean, last month. I’ll see you in November 👋 Thank you for reading until the end! Getting to Kickstarter beta was a huge milestone for us, so thank you for being patient with us as we put out fires etc etc.

Meowllo everyone! It’s the 60th devlog! That feels like some kind of milestone. The big six zero! This month, there’s a lot of little things that all add to the game in a big way. We combined a list of feedback from our producer, à la angry Steam reviewer, and triaged them based on how much impact it would make versus how much time it would take us to implement.

So let’s get down to covering some of the things we’ve done!

[h2]🐦 IN THE WILD[/h2]

The world felt a little empty and quiet when you walked through it. Sure, half of that might be because I forgot to vertex paint the trees that are in the farm and town so there was no wind effect, but also because until you invite a couple of villagers, it’s just lonely.



One of the things we did to try alleviate this crushing loneliness is by adding wildlife. Now, there’s bugs, birds, and other Snacko fantasy creatures that inhabit the world.



The birds(?) fly from one tree to another and fly away when you get too close. The bees…don’t sting you, so don’t worry.



Bro’s chilling.

[h2]📑 LORE OF THE WORLD[/h2]

We also added more interactable spots, cutscenes, quests, and other bits like that with either stories, items, or letters that make the world feel more alive.



Our hope is now, there’s more to look at and learn about the world of Snacko outside of the main story cutscenes. In the past, we had a lot of lore locked behind befriending certain NPCs, but now there’s also bits of that lore spread across the world.



I don’t want to spoil anything, so you get the most uneventful text box as a preview.

[h2]📽️ CINEMATIC TREES[/h2]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

I’ve always had a little cinematic introduction when you first set paw into the plains, but I uh, never did it for the rest of the biomes you can explore.



So I fixed that. It was a lot of fiddling timing. A couple frames here, a couple frames there…before I knew it, it’s been 30 minutes! Scary.

[h2]📦 SMALL TWEAKS[/h2]

The bulk of things were also focused on smaller things, like finishing up UI screens and elements that were unfinished, binding keys that most players would expect (like M for map, or J for Journal).



I also realized there were a few things that didn’t have tutorials. I tried to make them as out of the way as possible. For example, it was never explained to you what the box beside your house was. You just sort of had to eventually guess that it was the overflow storage - where everything goes once your bag fills up.



Now, the first time you interact with it, a tutorial popup tells you about it. I also added a shipping container beside your house, so you don’t have to walk all the way to the other side of the planet to sell your turnips.

The reason why the shipping box is by the path to the town to begin with was so poor Mikan can easily get there in a set amount of time reardless of your farm’s set up. But it proved to be a pain. So now there’s just two of them.



Ehh, the rest of it was a combination of fixing VFX glitches, making so you could click to advance text with your mouse, and other small bits like that. When you hit the tree in the fall, it used to spawn green leaves instead of fall colored leaves. Things like that.
They’re small, but I bet if we didn’t fix them somebody would notice;;



We’ve also tried making small tweaks like adding an option to disable the flashing in the game’s story intro, and making it more obvious when you can’t place an item by making it REDDER.

And that’s all for August! I’m proud of all the work we’ve been able to finish this month. It definitely polished up the game a lot more.

[h3]Thank you for reading until the end! See you next month~[/h3]

Hello everyone! It’s August. Is that the middle of summer or the end of summer? Anyways…

This month, we have a mixture of bug fixes along with polish and implementation, so it’ll be a more interesting devlog than just “haha bugs”.



Cookbook now has a preview of the dish! It’s just a nice touch, I think. The cookbook is one of those UI screens that we made way back when cooking was a point and click experience - you pick a recipe, then you cook it.



Then later on, as the game matured a bit, we swapped it to dropping ingredients in a pot. So the cookbook UI didn’t match what it should’ve been: a reference point.



Now it correctly shows the dish’s taste attributes (handy if you’re going to work part-time at a restaurant!), recipe, icon, description, and 3D model.



Enjoy how the real-time preview is set up in the engine. ✨dramatic lighting✨



Sure, we made the assets for the different keys and mouse buttons, but unless you were playing a console build, there was no way of accurately determining which button set up your plugged-in gamepad was using on the computer.

Paige worked hard to set up all the framework for making it possible, and Zoro brought it to the finish line implementing the dynamic system in existing UI.



Now you can press A, or right face button, or X…whatever makes you happy.



Another aspect we’ve been working on is having the items you donate to the Cultural Center actually show up.

What a concept, eh? Furniture items are in set rooms.



Items not yet donated will appear as a shadow. As you populate them, I hope you feel satisfaction watching them fill up!



Food items also show up in their display cases.



We also did a bunch of odds and ends. NPC schedule testing was difficult in the past, but not anymore! recursive made a debug tool that shows each NPC’s next action, along with the option to teleport to where they are.



It’ll be easier to troubleshoot what’s going wrong when someone is spawning off in the depths of hell.



The round circle shadow on the ground of dropped items was not graphical enough so it felt a bit uncanny. We fixed this up by giving it a bit of a look overhaul.



Dye icons were something that were never color matched. In fact, I also didn’t update our internal visual guide on which colors are which name. So we took some time this month to clean that database up. Finally, Blush Pink is no longer bright green.

[h2]…And that’s all for what we’ve been up to in July! Enjoy the rest of your summer! Or winter…

Thank you for reading until the end! We're very energized by your support!! See you next month!!!![/h2]

Good morning! Evening! This month, we’ve got a couple things to cover: the bugs we’ve been fixing, NPC stores, and events. Generally, this time of year for us should be pretty dry and hot. This year, though, it’s been raining and storming a lot. Wow! Lovely!!

Small talk aside, something before we start is an addition to the Snacko team! Zoro joins us and has been spending the past couple of weeks chewing through the bug list. It’s been a huge help. As you know, we have a lot of bugs. Let’s talk about that for a bit…



The other day, there was a comment roughly like, “there’s so many bugs, you guys must’ve scripted a whole bunch of them!”

And well, first of all, yeah.

Second of all, I realized there’s probably confusion as to why bugs exist. If you don’t make bugs, there won’t be bugs, right? Just make your code right the first time!



So, instead of just complaining about bugs this month, I figured it’s worth spending some time communicating with you why there are so many bugs to begin with and using that as a way to also tell you guys about what we’ve done!

[h2]#1 Somebody made a mistake[/h2]

This one is pretty common. The person making said mistake is usually me. These mistakes range from “the character is spawning in the farm when the cutscene is in the town” to “a value was not set to spawn a certain actor”. Or, sometimes, it’s just simply missing data.
This one usually manifests itself in ways like a cutscene not starting, dialogue options not being shown, or a doubling up of NPCs in one spot:



These ones usually happen because there’s just a lot of moving parts in the game. Taking Nobu’s existence as an example, to have him walk around the town during the day, you first have his schedule manager that manages when actions start, end, and where they start and end. It also manages which days or which conditions trigger certain schedules.



The other part of it is the schedule actions itself. Within these, the data for how someone will get from point A to B, if they need a flag set (for dialogue), or if they should be wandering around, standing still, etc.



This is not accounting for the dialogue trees or the dialogue manager that handles the logic for picking the dialogue lines.



Nor is it accounting for the managers or event managers that log and set information regarding an NPCs existence or the events they can trigger.



So, to put it simply, most of these systems simply have a lot of fail points! Mix up one asset or pointer to an asset and the whole thing falls apart!
One bug I fixed after debugging for 30 minutes was the schedule, actions, manager, quest, and invitation for the character was right. But at the very last bit of the schedule manager, the NPC selected was the wrong one…so nothing worked…



Ma’am…this is Pico’s house…

Not to mention it’s a whole job for everyone in QA to catch these in the first place!

[h2]#2 Fixes are creating domino effects[/h2]

This one doesn’t happen too often because we try to account for all the system-level changes we make, but sometimes things can slip through the crack. A while back, we had an issue where you could open the main menu mid-cutscene (some cutscenes give you control to move around) and save. To fix this, we simply disallowed saving and loading during cutscenes. Easy!



No.

In the onboarding section of the game, part of the quest and tutorial day is Nobu showing you the ropes. Part of that sequence requires you to go to sleep and advance to the next day. But…you guessed it…if you can’t save, which sleeping will always auto-save in the auto-save slot…you can’t finish the tutorial cutscene.



In this case, the easiest way was to add a checkbox toggle for cutscenes “Allow Saving” instead of either breaking the tutorial sequence/other story cutscenes or allowing the player to run around and potentially break other events and scripted sequences down the line.

[h2]#3 Unintentional bugs[/h2]

Well, okay, these are all unintentional. We don’t actually want any bugs. But these are ones caused not by error or a fix breaking old code. This is usually due to the code or the engine acting in a way that we did not predict.

I guess you can call that user error but eh 🤷

For example, Zoro found one a few weeks back that went like this:

When you are in the quest that teaches how to invite villagers, there’s a wall blocking you until you send the letter. The wall turns the player around and causes them to walk back if they try to leave, telling them what they need to do. If you jump on the corner of the house roof during this, you will get respawned under the map.

So, it turns out that there’s nothing wrong with the quest, or the cutscene, or the house…
The issue is the code that turns the player around tries to find a point in the world to walk your player back to. If you’re in the air, then it fails this check, because it’s not doing a “full scan”. Failing to find a valid floor point, the game gives up and puts you at 0, 0, 0.



This makes up the majority of the early day bugs we’ve been fixing these past few months. Many of our systems that worked flawlessly in contained, sterile environments didn’t hold up to other variables or changes in game state.



Part of this complexity comes from the way we decided to design Snacko: you get to pick which Grocer you want on your island, you get to pick where they live, etc. etc.

So I hope that clears up why there’s so many bugs and what kind of things we’ve been dealing with!
If you look carefully in the above screenshot, there’s also now a new waypoint helper. When you’re close to someone’s house or the way to a different map, a sign at the top of your screen will remind you where you’re going!

Hopefully this helps the directionally challenged (me, I’m directionally challenged).



We had a lot of the dialogue set, but not the logic. Sure, the decorative assets were made, but they weren’t put together yet. I spent some time in June to make everything nice and pretty. It sure is a lot of fun seeing it come together! I hope you have fun grabbing yourself a bowl of Winter Stew during the Harvestfest!



Well, yeah…it’s in fall…but like, it’s still kinda cold so you can eat Winter Stew…



Another one of these “we had all the assets and data but no one put them together” were the NPC shops. Since there’s no static “this is the grocer NPC”, we have a couple of custom touches depending on which of the grocer NPCs end up being YOUR grocer NPC.



These come in the form of custom text while you’re shopping, their shop portraits and background pictures, and in some cases, their inventory. The shop background feature has been planned for a long time. So long, in fact, that when I opened Mack’s shop background, I had to go and redo it because it, well, looked like…that…



Haha, woops. Looks like a different game.

[h3]We’ve come so far! And it’s thanks to your support. Thank you for reading these devlogs and cheering us on!

Back to bug extermination…[/h3]