Snacko News

Meowllo! How was your November? We’re getting way too close to the holiday season. I can feel the Mariah Carey creeping into the speakers…

Anyways!

We’re still hard at work because Snacko doesn’t care if it’s time to sing about red-nosed quadrupeds. Luckily for us, a lot of the main breaking bugs (don’t jinx it don’t jinx it) so we’ve been able to take some internal feedback and polish the build for backers.



One thing we wanted to do was to make the town feel more alive. So, that meant two things.



The first was that the town was just too empty. I wanted to give players the freedom to decorate how they wanted, but that meant the empty lots were extremely green.

And then I realized, wait. Snacko Island was abandoned, so it should have some evidence that the place was lived in, you know? Not just...suspiciously empty.



And that’s what I did. There’s broken down versions of some buildables that you’ll need to clear out of the way before you place down objects. This fills out the town during the early days of your adventure without taking away buildable space.

The second…



Was that there was no life. Sure, you can get more villagers and shopkeepers to move to the island. But until then. It’s just you. And an old man. And Mikan, I guess.

We’ve always wanted to implement the tourist feature but kept having to put out fires with bugs. But it’s in!



All of these are Kickstarter backer characters. They’re different from villagers as they show up randomly, walk around the town, and have some little dialogue bits about themselves. Hope you enjoy meeting them!



By launch, I’d like to add some more in to really give you that RNG dice roll so you feel like your town is always bustling with visitors.



One other internal feedback point was how easy it was to get lost. Even with the map, I totally understand this, because I will get lost unless I stare at a map. To try and alleviate this, I’ve put in some landmarks in the maps to hopefully give you a hint as to which direction will lead where.



For example, the lighthouse (which lights up at night!) will always take you to the town. You can see the bamboo and birch trees leading to the Grassy Plains, etc.

Hopefully this will help in addition to the signs and mini-map!

We still have a wee bit of polish to go with the UI and making sure the build is as stable as we can make it before it enters the paws of our backers, but this is the main bulk of what we worked on in November.

[h2]We’ll see you after the main holidays in our next devlog. Thank you for reading till the end! 👋[/h2]

Meowllo! It started snowing here! It’s officially winter! How was your Halloween? This is our 50th devlog, and we’re gonna spend it talking about bugs!

Yay!

Cries into desk


Since we last chatted, we’ve fixed 67 bugs and there are currently 19 fixes waiting to be tested and confirmed. That’s…a lot of bugs. Some of them were small, like Nobu Jr. saying “Nobu Jr.” instead of barn…



Some were major, like ways you can lock yourself in the game or NPCs not spawning at all.

Or spawning twice.



We’ve been super buried in bugs, but we’ve got our fingers and toes crossed we can get the game stable enough to move into some light testing outside of QA.

Speaking of QA, QA are the real angels here.

Snacko has a lot of content to test, and one of the most annoying to debug and fix (in my personal opinion) are NPC schedule issues.



Why aren’t they walking? Wait, where did they go? Huh?? It’s terrible. I just want Riku to show up for work! Stop being lazy!!


We had some dyes that have been in the game since the beginning. We’ve always wanted to come back and make tweaks or add any shades…and we finally did!



Here’s just some of them, modelled by the wonderful Scarecrow.


Sometimes, to lift my spirits from the depths of bug hell. For example, each house now has a little placard or interactable area that has the resident’s name. Depending on their personality, they might’ve included other information there.



Some other things also include signs in the world. This one was vandalized by a certain stinky small boy.



We also added quest markers, so it’s harder to get lost. I hope? It shows up as a lil exclamation mark. It’s even red, to show its aggression.



[h2]And…that’s about it for this month! Thank you for reading through a bug report. Your support and giggles of our bugs on Twitter has been keeping me sane 🐾[/h2]

Oh me oh my, it has come the time for us to be experience the beauties of QA.

Specifically, we’ve been hard at work wrapping up the Kickstarter backer beta build. For the past…I don’t even know how many weeks to be honest, we’ve been solving bugs, fixing soft locks, and tweaking things so it felt like a real game.

You know, sometimes, I still get shocked Snacko is a real game.

Anyways.



Quite literally. The first part of the game was one of the first parts we worked on (duh), so I’ve always felt a bit…sussed by it. It wasn’t terrible, but I didn’t like how it threw you into an endless journey of dialogue for the first 15 minutes.



Now, you start off with a relatively short bit of text and straight into the tutorial where you can walk around and get a feel for the gameplay. Although we kept almost 90% of the content originally made for the intro, I’ve shuffled things around a bit and edited some dialogue to set up the rest of the game (in my humble opinion) better.

As I go through the rest of the game’s text to get ready for localization, I’ve been re-re-re-checking to make sure all of the lore and story flows together properly.

‘Cause, you know, I can’t keep my own lore straight.



Speaking of lore, I’ve also made some small cosmetic changes and swaps to parts of the story. Snacko’s main story has undergone a couple of small changes while keeping pretty close to Mandy’s original plot outline for the game.



These are kind of small things, but they’re really important to me. I hope these small changes and improvements to the story makes the overall experience feel more polished!





Well, OK, now to the actual bulk of what we’ve been up to. Some of these aren’t even “bugs”, more like features that were never truly finished. One of the confusing bits of the minimap has been the player’s cursor’s direction being ambiguous. Well, now there’s an arrow! So I hope you won’t get lost!!



Real bugs aside, there’s small things from the bookshelf UI not being contained to the window properly, causing it to spill out the sides and become unreadable/unusable if your monitor or window wasn’t a perfect 16:9…



…to bigger bugs like…Nobu falling off the map continuously, banished forever to the Shadow Realm.



All in all, we probably squashed a little over 40 bugs of varying sizes and…intensity. Rest assured, Nobu is now safely in his house instead of falling until the end of time.
Sometimes, to make sure we can easily debug issues, we end up with screenshots like this:



The debug default cobblestone texture wall from the depths of game development hell. Lovely.

Looking back, though, the game is in a much better spot. I’m pretty proud of what we’ve accomplished since August! I think I’m starting to get less anxious about Snacko as a real video game that real people (wow) are going to play!

This is how I feel…



Well, that’s all for this month! Hopefully, we can squish the last of the ugly bugs in the upcoming weeks and run the beta. Ahh, I’m so nervous. Imagine that, people actually playing the video game.

[h2]Thanks for reading until the very end! 💌[/h2]

Meowllo everyone! We’re a little late on this month’s devlog due to a certain little stinker having a health scare. Turns out he’s perfectly healthy, just needs to grow more…

But now that all the vet appointments are over, I’m free to write my rambling devlogs! Yay!(?)



I touched on this topic vaguely in the past before, but I love using the Sims as a tool to help me play around with ideas for houses in Snacko. While the scale, materials, and colors don’t end up 1:1, it’s a good starting point that’s faster to iterate on than traditional concept art.



Plus, I get to play the Sims while working…

I wanted the houses to match the personality of their inhabitant, and this bold house with big windows and different style from the regular wooden cabins fits Date’s personality well.



I hope you enjoy getting to know Date and his eccentricities!



All in all, this month, we added 3 new houses for the additional NPCs that will be in the Kickstarter backer build. Everyone else already had houses, but Date, Hanna, and Riku were homeless…until now.

Now, they can enjoy paying property tax like everyone else (there is no property tax).



A little new touch I added to the houses to give them some character is interactable placards. View them to remind yourself of their opening hours, or just what the resident has scribbled on them.



I tried phrasing every one slightly differently to match their personality.



The bulk of last month’s work was on progression design. Remember how we put in all the assets and cutscenes for the main story? That’s cool and all, but…the game needed more meat on its bones.



The way story beats were triggered meant you could pretty much speed run a lot of it. It just felt a little empty and sad. To help pace the game better, we’ve changed from hard-triggers (X happens on day 5, Y happens on day 8), it’s now a cascading series of events and triggers that can cause something else to happen and unlock.



That way, people who want to speedrun the content can, and for those of us who like to chill a little and play at our own pace, you’re not getting cutscenes thrown at you randomly.

We’ve also added a bunch of different changes and quests to how you can obtain rewards like crafting recipes or items… (that I won’t get into but I spent a lot of brain power on)

But our hope is with these new quests and cutscenes, it’ll make your settlement into Snacko life a lot easier and filled with dopamine hits!



And…that’s the bulk of August! There’s somehow more work popping up the more work we do, because of things like the progression where we feel like an aspect of the game still needs some polish. But this is a good sign, right? That means there’s enough of a game there to criticize…right??

Ahh, games are hard. I’m going back to work.

[h2]See you next month, and thank you for reading until the end! 🐾[/h2]

Hello! I have emerged from the other side of July a new person, battered by the onslaught of NPC implementation that I started last month.

I don’t remember if I mentioned we’re working on our first pass for the Kickstarter backer beta yet, but if I didn’t. Yeah.

So, this month, we’re nearing the end of implementing some of the connective tissue to bind some Snacko features together.

[h2]🐐 Why does everyone talk so much?[/h2]

Oh right, I wrote the text, it’s my fault.

Anyways, the bulk of this month for me was continuing to put in NPCs. This entails a couple of things…

Sprites: Stefan did all the animations, but not all of them have been put in as Flipbooks (Unreal’s system for sprite animation)



Portraits: I had the PNGs, but they were just floating around in my PC



Schedules: the bane of my existence, responsible for my deteriorating husk of a person I became. There was more detail on this last month, but essentially, it’s just a lot of careful busywork that needed just enough brain power to wear you down



Dialogue: each NPC has a “dialogue resolver” that tries to determine what dialogue asset to use. For example, a shopkeeper will have a “come back later” set of dialogue when you bother them during store hours, or a specific set of lines about food when they’re eating. It’s essentially just a bunch of true or false checks.



Alongside the resolver are the actual dialogue assets (spaghetti monster). Within these, there are sometimes trees to determine which set of text to use depending on the time of day for hello’s, or the relationship level. As you befriend them, they’ll let you in on a bit more of what makes them tick. I hope you’ll spend some time getting to know everyone and their quirks!

…and that’s the bulk of what I’ve been doing! You can really watch me melt into my skin through my source control commit descriptions:



[h2]📬 Return of the Mailbox[/h2]

Ever since we remade the player house, the mailbox was replaced with a shell of its former self. It no longer had a little flag animation when you stepped outside and had new mail, it no longer had a little floating notification for your new letters…

Truly tragic.

But despair no more! I put it back in.



Also, recursive hooked up the rest of the letter system for inviting NPCs. In the past, we had the UI and framework, but only Mack ever replied. No matter what. You cannot escape Mack.



(Un?)Luckily for you, that system is now in, so you can escape from Mack. For the duration of the beta, we’ll be just giving you the house you need to invite NPCs for free, but in the final game, blueprints for building different kinds of houses and shops are unlocked as you progress for that sweet ✨dopamine✨.

[h2]🪑Don’t Be A Birch About It![/h2]

Also to give some more meat to the build, I added in a select few pieces of buildables from a set you can craft after razing the Grassy Plains of its natural foliage. Here’s a sneak peak at some of the pieces:



The vibe I was going for with the Birch set is a mix between some mid-century modern and Scandinavian vibes. All the white parts are dye-able, like the seat cushion and lamp shade. You can really change up the feel of the pieces by making them bright colors!

[h3]And…that’s all for this month! Thank you for reading until the end 🌼 We’ll see you next month![/h3]