Snacko News

Meowllo everyone! How are you? You may have noticed this devlog is a bit late. We were visiting family and have just returned. I thought about writing the devlog while I was away since I did bring my laptop, but recording videos and GIFs on a smaller screen is a bit sus.

So anyways, I figured it’d be worth the wait for me to get back on my work computer to do this.



[h3]Before we begin, here’s a reminder that the Wholesome Direct will be tomorrow!

You should show up. Because I’m telling you to (there’s gonna be Snacko news).[/h3]


Miguel has been helping us implement all the NPC friendship events! There’s a lot…26 NPCs, x3 because there’s 3 friendship events per NPC…



Sometimes, when I complain about the amount of stuff the game needs, I remember that I made it this way, so I shouldn’t complain.

Anyways. Can you imagine testing these all either manually by spam gifting poor Frits to raise his friendship level? Or typing in the console command? Imagine typing.

So, we added a little panel with all the buttons that will run the console command for you. Which means I did have to at least type it once, unfortunately.



It’ll be good in the near future where we’ll have to test everything, though.


Outside of friendship events, we’ve also been implementing other tutorial or onboarding quests and cutscenes. There’s a couple outside of the main storyline that will teach you the basics of farm life, like ranching, fishing, and more!



If you’re already a farming pro, you can skip most of these lectures, but you’ll make Nobu Jr. sad. So really, who wins?


Well, not really. The camera floats. So maybe wings? But it’s a stable camera, don’t worry.

We added camera controls to build mode!

Amongst a bunch of other improvements. Recursive has been turbo-working to improve and streamline the building process. We started the redesign a few months ago, but prioritized wrapping up the main storyline so it fell to the wayside. It looked something like this:



If you’ve been subscribed to our Ko-fi or Patreon, you probably remember us talking about something like this a few months ago in more detail. But the gist of it is combining the old place and edit mode into one, and “auto-triggering” the states depending on the status of your cursor (if you’re holding something, etc.)

It’s easier to see, so I’ve recorded a video:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

If you’re unable to watch, here’s a quick rundown:

• Toggle the inventory tray whenever to easily swap what you’re holding
  
• When your cursor is empty, you can freely select already placed objects to put them away, dye them, or move them. Fences will reconnect!
  
• You can now pan, rotate, and zoom the camera freely
  

Amazing! Hopefully, this will make decorating a lot more fun and easy with the added freedom. This just means a lot more extra bugs…can’t wait……..



With that, that wraps up what we’ve been up to in May. The end of the build mode marks the end of the last major system that needed big changes, which is a pretty big milestone in itself.

We’ll keep you updated as we slog through the mountain of loose ends and terrifyingly random bugs in the near future. You’ll be updated through my tears.

[h3]Thank you for reading! We’ll see you next month 🌼[/h3]

Meowllo everyone! Is the weather changing for you yet? It’s still kind of cold where we are, so it feels like spring hasn’t sprung. Sad.

Anyways, this month, we have quite a lot of fixes, changes, and assets done. It was great! Let’s go over the furniture first…



We used to have our stuff simply labelled “Exterior” and “Interior”. You can see how that becomes a nightmare really, really fast. A table that can be placed outdoors and indoors…which folder does it go in? I dunno.

So, the first task of the month was to have our folders and data follow the new categories we’ve assigned the buildables: in sets.



Softwood, Hardwood, Birch, and so on. My aim with this is to assign each set a different style. That way, when you unlock new furniture crafting sets by exploring new areas, you can also diversify your style. This also helps me organize the different kinds of items in each set. That way, you don’t get excited about unlocking a new kind of lumber, just to realize you can only craft 5 different kinds of chairs.

The Softwood set needed a couple of UI icons and assets that were missing, so I made those up first to call this first set done.



The little stuffed toys and miscellaneous clutter like an open book and ink bottle topped off the set. I was able to use my super powerful pixel texturing skills (see: more polygons) and fit the entire set into one 64x64 pixel texture sheet. I’m pretty proud of that.

This kind of setup also makes it easy for us to add to existing sets or make new furniture sets in the future when we have time to put in more content. Win-win!



Another thing we changed about building is the way that surface building areas worked. The old system had two issues:

1. It was done manually. Well, the new one is also done manually, but hear me out. In the past, each building area was done by making a box in the modelling program, modelling the collision of the border, and so on. It was a bit of a pain to do, and it also made the process slow.
   
2. There were borders. To prevent you from putting something completely off a surface, we made borders in the old system. Not only did this add time to making the areas, it also meant that something like counters that could perfectly snap together wouldn’t allow you to put objects on the seams of them.
   

But now…ta-da!



You can put them wherever, as long as the collision exists. That also means you can technically stack tables on tables, so I had to add a ceiling collision to prevent you from yeeting yourself outside of your home and into the void. Games are hard.

But, our suffering is not in vain :D

Now you can do cool things like placing two tables close together and putting something on them, like this:



We also double checked to make sure all the food items that exist can now be placed in build mode. You can decorate your home with all the dishes you make! They’ll never spoil. You know, magic.





Do you see something beside the house there? The little crate is a placeholder asset, but we added overflow storage. It needs a bit of UI work, but essentially, if you get anything on your adventure and your rucksack is out of space, it’ll get sent to your overflow storage at home.



You can get items out of it, but you can’t place anything into it. No more worries about carrying too much on your trips!



In Snacko, at least.

We added jumping when you’re in your kart. We’ve had issues of being annoyed during testing having to get in and out of the kart. So, the solution is to allow the car to jump (obviously).



I’m not sure what the ramifications of making this decision will be, like speeding headfirst off the side of your farm, but we can all cross that bridge when we get there as a community.
Asides from all that, we’ve also fixed a bunch of small bugs like, “you can get stuck in the Desert Canyon if you jump off this one cliff and your feetsies touch the side”. Asides from that, this is all we have for you for April!

If you have seasonal allergies, we hope you’re hanging in there…

[h2]Thank you for all your support, and see you next month 👋[/h2]

Meowllo everyone! Spring is supposed to be here, but it’s still kind of cold. Sad.

This month, we had a week where we weren’t able to work on anything because we moved! We’re currently in a temporary place before we move to our final destination in a couple of weeks.

It was uh, a lot. Anyways, we were still able to do some work and hit our first big milestone!

[h2]📖 END OF A CHAPTER[/h2]
We finished the main story! Now the cutscenes and text is all complete, along with the camera movements. Ken was able to finish all of it by the end of March, and it was a huge lifesaver.

The cutscenes require a lot of setting up. Every time an NPC emotes something, walks somewhere, triggers a quest, or just says something, it has to be implemented.

With Ken’s work, we were able to quickly wrap up the loose ends and tie it all together. But…this is also Ken’s last month with us! Let’s all thank Ken for all the ameowzing work he’s done for Snacko 👏

There’s still bugs and little quirks to work out, but the story is officially playable from beginning to end! Now, we just have to finish all of the content. Laughs nervously.

[h2]🌳 TREE[/h2]
Speaking of content, the Frozen Tundra and Mushroom Forest were always a bit…naked. I had to put in the foliage for those areas.

The Mushroom Forest took the longest, because it just needed a lot of stuff to make it look like a proper forest. Oh, but not too much stuff. If I put in too much stuff the Switch will just yell at me.

The Frozen Tundra was a little harder. If I put too much stuff, it looked off. Like the desert, part of the vibe was this feeling of isolation and extreme temperature environment.

So it couldn’t be too luscious. Also, the color spots just kinda ruined the tundra views.

I ended up placing mostly smaller bushes and rocks to give it that feel, and limited the trees to small clumps instead of being everywhere.

[h2]🎮 EVERYTHING ELSE[/h2]
Asides from all that, there were a lot of fixes and things missing. Most of it were mistakes in cutscenes or dialogue.

A whole lot of “oh no Mikan is walking away from me why is she leaving come back” in the middle of a cutscene. Some other things include actually adding water levels to the watering can. Up until this week, you had infinite water in your watering can.

Now, you can either interact with a water source like a well on your farm to refill it or…

Jump into water! Recursive calls this the “Mario Sunshine” update.
There’s no pretty indicator bar yet, just a generic progress bar to show your water levels. But don’t worry about it, I’ll fix that. Soon.

That’s pretty much it! The rest of it is mostly all of the NPC dialogue finished (finally) and a lot of other stuff I can’t show you because it’d be spoilers.

Thank you for reading! We hope you’re having a great week, and we’ll see you next month 😺

Meowllo everyone! We’re a little late for February’s devlog because…writing…is hard.



If you follow us on Twitter or joined our Discord, you know I’ve spent the past couple of weeks writing dialogue. I’m still working on that (8 left~) so I’ve been having trouble finding the time and writing brain cells to write the devlog.

OK, less complaining, more devlog!

[h2]📬 Dialogue[/h2]
OK, I’m gonna talk about this first, because I’m drowning in text. There’s just a lot of talking. I mean, that’s technically my fault, because I could make the NPCs talk less, but then I’ll be sad.



Each NPC has hello’s when you talk to them for the first time every day, and those can change depending on the time of day or your relationship level.



Different text may also come up if they have a flag set (like working, or eating) or if you’re friends with them.
In a vacuum, that’s not a huge issue. But, multiply that by 28 NPCs…and well, I’ve been suffering just a little bit.

[h2]📐Cartography[/h2]
Beyond my writer’s tears, we’ve also been working on implementing the maps so you know where you are and where you’re going. Here’s just some of the maps!



You can choose to toggle the mini-map on your HUD on or off and just pull out your big map when you’re lost…or have it on all the time, because you’re lost all the time (me).



There’s still some details to iron out, like NPC icons being big, but hey - it works!

So, um, yeah. Outside of that, and a lot of back-end stuff like making sure features work properly, UI tweaks, being able to close menus (that’s a nice feature, wouldn’t you say?), that’s all we have for this month.

Sorry, There’s not a lot of pretty pictures. There’s only so many Google Docs I can post with Consolas text before I start getting whacked for spoiling the whole game.

Thank you for all the support, we really appreciate it!

Back to writing…
Pulls out a tissue box for my tears

Meowllo! The things we have to do pile up fast, and the days are going by faster 🙀 We covered a lot of ground last month over a variety of things, so we’ll just go over some of them briefly:


We started going through the main story and implementing the dialogue, cutscenes, and quests. We’ve had the pleasure of Ken helping us wrangle all the implementation and all we had to do was play through it and fix any outstanding issues.

On paper, that sounds easy! Right?

Well, Scarecrow disagrees.


This is supposed to say turnips...

Without spoiling anything, there’s a quest where you must give a scarecrow 20 turnips. He then does a little animation. I was but a naive child when I wrote this part out, not knowing the headaches a Simple Spinning Scarecrow could cause.



There is supposed to be one (1) scarecrow. In this screenshot, there are four (4). Why are there four? Why is only one spinning? Why are there four??


How I feel about the scarecrow

We did eventually figure it out, but not after a long day of cursing and confusion.



Luckily, by the end of the Grassy Plains, we got through a lot of growing pains and were able to get through the Desert Canyon section much faster.



Here’s a bonus picture of a bug where we had some camera misconfiguration that resulted in the characters facing the opposite way. But it’s fixed now! I felt so smart 😊




Snacko has a lot of stuff. Just…stuff. Lots of it. This includes recipes, furniture, buildings, NPC data…stuff.

Well, we had to start organizing the stuff so we could take inventory and make sure everything will be actually implemented in the future.



It looks a bit different depending on what sort of information it is, but now that we have everything mapped out, we’ve been going through our internal database and custom tool to make sure all the items are in, which ones need icons, which ones need an item description, etc. It’s not the most glamorous or fun work, but it’s necessary!



Part of that is also going back and realizing we’re still missing some tutorial popups 😳 Popups will occasional happen mid-cutscene during a tutorial given by Nobu or someone else, but you can also read through them at your own pace via any bookshelf. We were missing some for things like ranching and fishing, but now they’re in!

Every time you mash through a tutorial, I cry just a little bit.

And lastly…


We had originally shown our maze-like approach to mines in Snacko, where the layouts are procedurally generated using pieces and parts we’ve made and set up.

The art never got updated, and it finally got the makeover it deserved!



Floors, walls, foliage, and assets are now in line with what you’d expect to fit in with the rest of the game. It’s a big relief knowing we no longer have a big brown box. The top screenshot was taken 9 days prior to the bottom screenshot. The atmosphere now fits Dale’s awesome mines themes much better!



We also had an issue of seeing through the doorways would diminish the feeling of discovery, so we made a shader that fades as you get closer to you - but only once you’ve removed the blocker! We hope you have a lot of fun in the mines 💖


[h2]…And that’s all for this month! Thank you for sticking with us until the end. January had a lot going on, and development will probably keep this pace up until we hit the light at the end of the tunnel!

Thank you so much for your support, and we’ll see you next month~[/h2]