Snacko News

[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]

Fall is officially here! Although it sure doesn’t feel like it, as we’re still clocking in temperatures at about 26C. But that’s OK! This month, we started doing something egg-citing: tying everything together.

Before we start this month's devlog, we just wanted to say meowllo to all the new faces from TGS! Thank you for wishlisting us and checking us out! If you like to see more mini-updates, we're very active on our Twitter and in our Discord...come and say hi!

[h2]🎀 Knot Your Average Problem [/h2]

What does tying everything together mean? So far, Snacko has a staggering amount of stuff. Furniture you can place, objects you can dye, NPCs you can talk to, seeds you can plant…all of it is working, but they all work in sort of a sandbox type way.



This is our debug menu - you can use this to give yourself items, add cows to your barn, or fast-forward your farm tiles to test crop growing. Up until now, we’ve tested and played all of these parts and pieces of Snacko like this.

We’re now hitting that point where we need to start trying to knead everything together to see how it all fits into one another and test the overall game feel instead of just tinkering with it in isolated instances. This proves to be very…time consuming. The simple act of giving you the ability to harvest a turnip is quite long…



To avoid spoiling too much dialogue or story, we’re going to keep all of this stuff hush-hush! So…you won’t be seeing too much in regards to cutscenes and dialogue.



We showed some of the tutorials last month, with some screenshots of the opening cutscene including Nobu’s big lecture on placing buildables and planting crops. This month, we expanded on that by adding some quests that would reward players after teaching them something about the game.



If you’ve seen our old quest board screenshots before you’ll notice the quest card is slightly different! It has been slightly modified to fit in with the rest of the dialogue box changes - more contrast, bigger text, and inline images. Fancy!


[h2]🏡 Home Sweet Home [/h2]

We had to get some interiors of shops and houses put in. Each interior would be dependent on the type and style of building it is, not by the inhabitant. Here’s a look at the first floor of the Suburban Grocer!



We also realized that for Nobu Jr. to come to the island and sell ranching goods and livestock, Nobu’s house will have to expand to accommodate the little furball. We’ve set up an event to trigger the house exterior and interior to change when Junior is set to move in. He even gets his special (extra short) counter for you to shop from!



The upstairs also features Junior’s favorite spot - his little mat with all of his sketchbooks and crayons.



[h2]📍 Finding Your Way [/h2]

Before we added in waypoints, we had our NPCs follow a schedule that was dictated by coordinates. It was sort of like, "at 1PM, walk from X123 Y123 Z123 to…” and so on. It was very hard to work with, as these numbers don’t really mean anything to humans.



To fix this, we’ve changed the number and coordinate system to waypoints. Little dots, shown below, each have an ID attached to them. Now, we can easily create schedules by typing in the waypoint IDs. “NobuKitchen” is much more understandable to humans than a string of numbers making up a specific location in 3D space.



This has made the process so much easier and quicker! This also allows us to use our schedule system to swap out certain waypoints and actions for different sets based on different conditions - like the day of the week or events.



For example, Mikan has a different schedule depending on whether or not you had anything in your shipping container that morning. If there’s nothing to sell, Mikan will stick around town instead of going to Capital City. You can see her walking to your shipping container every morning!



Here’s what the waypoints for that particular route look like in the engine:



[h2]🛒 What Can I Get You? [/h2]

Shops! Every town needs their own shops! We added in updated backgrounds and character art. Shopkeepers will have little dialogue lines when you’re poking around their store. Nobu Jr. will try to guilt-trip you if you decide you don’t want to buy something anymore…



The way we have the shop system set up allows us to change the stock based on different conditions - like the day of the week and how much of the item is in-stock.


[h2]💅 Just a Touch of Polish[/h2]

Something new and small we added this month is little interactable volumes we can place in various spots that will give flavor text. This is something we enjoyed in games we’ve played, so we wanted to incorporate that feeling of discovering a different world’s mundane into Snacko.



Another bit we’ve added that’s a quality-of-life change is the building area material. Instead of showing…absolutely nothing but the borders, a light grid will show up. This way, it’s more clear where you can place objects and where you can’t. Once you take out your objects to place, the area surrounding it, like before, will be a more opaque orange grid.



We also added more functionality to our dialogues! Now we have more control over things like events that can happen through dialogue, or conditions that have to be met to trigger certain dialogue lines. Below is an example of Nobu Jr.’s dialogue when he’s working:



[h3]And…that’s all for September! We have a lot of work ahead of us but it’s slowly coming together. Thank you for reading and for your support 🐾 See you next month![/h3]