Snacktorio News

Hey friends!

Been busy working on Snacktorio for the last month of so, and then some family stuff brought things to a halt - but the new demo (the Apéritif!) is very nearly ready!

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[h3]Tomato Island (Continued)[/h3]
From the last blog, I had started to work on the Tomato Island levels - I'd say by about mid-September I'd finished them all and had spent some time testing each one.



The overworld design got changed a few times, which helped make me feel like changing to the Tiled system for the overworld wasn't a waste of time after all, as all the tweaks I had to do would of taken far longer in the old system.

The levels themselves were relatively straightforward, as I knew what each level was going to be about and what the challenge was, so it was just a case of deciding a recipe then laying everything out. The more I did the quicker they got to do - I'd say at most they'd take a day for some of the bigger ones.



With all the levels done, I also went and added a small 'Sandbox' level. I wanted to have somewhere where the player could go, unrestrained by resources, and just be able to experiment with different layouts and structures.

This was pretty easy too, as I already had a creative mode (complete with NEI-like spawning menu) that I use during development, so I just added a toggle for it and created a small level with a few basics to get people started.



There's also a new 'eraser' tool that lets you completely remove blocks and liquid, so you can setup nodes however you like for testing purposes.

I also added in 'Second Helpings' which is a level mode where you can come back to a finished level and double all the requirements of ALL orders. This means you then need to massively expand all your existing factories to meet the order.

It's not a mode that's required to beat for every single level, but it's there for people who like that sort of 'expand' challenge - there might be an achievement for doing SOME second helpings, but certainly not ALL.



With that added, I was done with Tomato Island! I had some music and sfx to finish off, a basic controls menu, and a few bugs to get through from general testing, but overall I was feeling happy with the shape of the new demo now - it was time to see what other people made of it!

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[h3]Playtesting[/h3]
I put out a call for playtesters mid September, and had probably 50 people submit the form! It took a little while to whittle it down, I wanted a range of people from those who'd never touched factory games to factorio superplayers, vs people who'd never heard of me to apico/mudborne superfans.

I narrowed it down to about 16 people who covered all the main bases and let them loose with the playtest build - and they certainly kept me busy!



It was lovely to finally get some fresh eyes on the game though - the old demo came out in 2023, then Mudborne happened, and then I've just been working in silo on this new version for ages, so you definitely start to second-guess everything.

Overall everyone seemed to have a great time though, and there were some outrageous factories built that were really amazing to see, as it was all stuff I just never would of done!



The playtest carried on for a couple weeks, but it was also the time I had some family stuff happen so I didn't actually get back into things for another few weeks. Around mid-October I took some stock of all the feedback, and bullied all the playtesters into filling out a big form - from there I had some common things suggested that I then added to the new demo.

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[h3]Feeding Back[/h3]
Outside of the seemingly endless torrent of bugs, some minor, some major (like resize the window to zoom through the ground and die), there were a few common things that got brought up.

One was that it'd be nice if direction pipes didn't connect with other pipes unless it was that direction - purely a visual thing but definitely helps to make things clearer.



There was also some requests for having the ability to do stuff like copy/paste existing machines, which would then copy them with their settings (i.e. copy a sorter machine and the filter settings are copied too)

I'd recently re-designed the blueprint tool to add in decorative signs, which are small silly signs you can just place down to decorate your factory with. These combined with the display panels should also give enough flexibility for you to visually organise your factories for some of the bigger levels!



While doing so I was thinking maybe it'd be good to have the ability to favourite a machine for quick-access. I ended up taking this, along with a 'recently used' and combined it with the copy paste to make a new design for the blueprint.



By using the copy tool (top left on left side) (or CTRL+C hovering a machine), you can set a copy target, then paste with the paste button (top right on left side).

The bottom left + right on the left are the recently used, and favourite, favourites being able to be set in the menu or by pressing F while hovering a machine.

I also added a new utility machine, called a Switcher, that allows you to toggle on/off wires. This means that for larger factories, you could setup a fabrication area, let it run until you have enough utilities, then turn off that area with a Switcher and save having to make more power than needed (or dismantling existing power for more limited levels)



I also spent a little bit of time redesigning the book chapters to be more like what I did with Mudborne, where each chapter button is now more of a little widget showing more info or a better visual for that chapter. For example the recipe book shows the large detailed dinner icons, the beast book allows you to see the progress of all orders for all beasts.



There was a lot of other small tweaks, too numerous to list them all, but the main thing really was all the playtesters were having fun and there was nothing too annoying stopping them play. With the last tweaks finished up and one final round of testing, I had a finished 1.0.0 demo ready to order!

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With this new demo ready to drop, I first wanted to try again in getting some potential publisher interest for the game - I don't want to launch the new demo without more of a fanfare made, so I want to try and find someone to work with first that can then help make a bigger fuss of this new demo, and then help on towards the release next year.

My first choice is Future Friends, who worked with me on Mudborne - but they were busy with a few games (including a small game you probably haven't heard of called CloverPit that recently hit 1mil sales), so I did reach out to a few places.

At the time of writing this I've had a couple responses, but nothing concrete - I also have heard back from FF to have a chat, so fingers crossed! Once I have someone onboard, I'll be dropping the new demo publicly so you can all finally get your mitts on it.

~ Ell

Hello chefs!!

I'm looking for a few peeps to help playtest the new snacktorio demo! This will be a private playtest, not for streaming/content creation - if you're interested pls fill in the form below:
https://forms.gle/ZRpKSpnA9tS65ucn7

For everyone else, the new demo will be released SoonishTM so won't be long to wait now!

~ Ell

Hey friends!

Spent the last couple of months working on a few different things, but mostly more Snacktorio! Here's what I've been up to.

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[h2]Tutorial Island[/h2]
After finishing up the tutorial levels and the tutorial 'skip' level, I sent them over to Jamie to start testing them all out. While he was doing that I spent some time playing around with a design for the 'overworld' for the tutorial island.



Around this time I realised that actually I needed some sort of shading on the cubes, because the metal blocks blended too much especially when having the higher layers - wasn't as noticeable with the dirt because of the clear visual 'top' with the grass.



This felt a lot more readable even though it was subtle - however it was a pain having to go and edit all the cubes to see how it looked first as this is still just a static image.

That's when I got seduced by a great scope creep idea - what if I rendered all the cubes in-game? That way I could easily change the maps whenever I wanted, but it'd also mean I could animate the individual cubes for transitions or idle stuff...

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[h2]Making Life Easier[/h2]
Now I'd thought about the idea I couldn't put it back in the box, and thinking about it practically it also made sense because it'd save me so much time in the long-term to have an easy way to tweak the maps for all the islands. Like even just being like oh actually I want this level one block over would be a nightmare with static images.

To get started I made a hardcoded version of the map, each layer represented by a bunch of different codes that would then translate to the block/path/level to be rendered.



Using that nonsense I could then load in the layers, each 'block' of code being represented by a cube in the isometric view (some cubes just being empty, some being the 'top' of the water etc).

Below you can see all the different 'tiles' that would make up the overworld:



When loaded, with a bit of animation, the above set of codes turned into something like this:



This was already so much better, as I could tweak block positions and change decoration immedietely rather than having to redraw anything - however it was still very messy editing the codes to change things so that also wasn't really something I would be able to do long term.

Instead I then moved everything into Tiled, my beloved.



To replace the functionality I had with the 'codes' system, I actually had to make a lot of layers, because something like 'GG-F1-BL-AB' represented a lot:
- GG: Grass cube
- F1: Trees on top
- BL: a 'bottom-left' corner path
- AB: the cube is between the A and B level for visibility

So to get all the same info in Tiled with just tiles I needed to have a block, decor, path and level layer for each of the overall layers (i.e. layer 1 is water, layer 2 is blocks, layer 3 is higher blocks).

By turning the paths and levels into tiled objects I could add more properties which solved some of the limitations I was already running into as well. For paths for example I needed to have info of what levels they were between and for 3 or more direction paths, some flags for which directions are visible based on the levels unlocked.



With everything in Tiled it was so much easier to tweak things, or work on adding in the next island, so I played with the layout of the tutorial island and then added a rough idea for the tomato island.

I didn't need it perfect as this is just for the new demo so I know things will change once I know all the levels needed for the island, but for now I just need enough space for 3 levels so anything was good enough for now.



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[h2]Tomato Island[/h2]
With that setup, it was now easy to make changes to the world and add new levels whereever I wanted - and because of the existing system I made with the 'developer map' last month I could just add levels and they got loaded in automatically if the matching file name existing.

With that I got to work on the first level of Tomato Island. I knew roughly what I wanted for the demo levels and what they needed to introduce or teach you - there's a lot of different concepts in the game but they're staggered over the 3 main islands so we only need to cover a small amount for tomato island in the demo.



The main things I wanted was one to just be a full level, to put what you've learnt into practice in a 'proper' level where you can build anywhere. I then wanted a level to introduce secret ingredients + void manipulators, and then a level to introduce multiple orders/beasts.

For the first level I felt like it'd be good to re-use tomato soup - even though the player just did that in the final tutorial level a lot was already setup for them and they only needed to make 1 soup to finish the level.



This time they'd have to set everything up themselves (apart from some basic fabricators), so having a familiar recipe for the first level felt like it'll help ease players in.

The recipe itself is pretty simple, you harvest tomatos and blend them with mined spice, then add some bayleaf at the end - so pretty minimal process but for the first time you still need to:
- setup harvesters and route both plants into a blender
- setup a fabricator to make fluid pipes and pipe the tomato sauce
- mine the spice and more bayleaf and combine them with the sauce
- route the finished dinner to the beast



I think a lot of early levels will have some pre-existing structures, at least some fabricators because not only does it save you some boilerplate, but also shows you examples of how to do things or lay things out that you can use for the rest of your factories.

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By this point Jamie had tested the tutorial levels so I had a few bits to tweak but overall nothing major! The outstanding stuff now is to design and test the tomato island demo levels, and then just a bunch of polish and bug fixes.

I definitely got a bit sidetracked with the overworld idea, but it's ended up not only looking great but just being so much easier for me that it was absolutely worth being a bit behind schedule for.



I've been working on another game on the side, so if progress doesn't seem to be going that fast it's more because you're only seeing me work on Snacktorio at 'half-speed' - however for the next month I'm going to be just working on Snacktorio to whip the new demo into shape so can expect more updates soon!

I also think I might look for some playtesters around September possibly, so keep an ear out in the Discord or here on Stean for that :D

~ Ell

Hey friends!

Been a little while since my last post - I took some time off and then started to get back into things by opening Snacktorio up for the first time in well over a year!

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[h2]Voice Of The People[/h2]
After the release of Mudborne I spent the rest of March and most of April fixing and patching things - I had already planned to have a holiday at the end of April so I wanted to make sure everything was stable.

Luckily nothing too bad broke when the game went live, so after a string of patches I was able to enjoy some time off without having to check my notifications every 5 minutes. Before I went though I had a catch-up with my brother, Jamie (metakitkat), to chat about Snacktorio.

The first thing we did was go through ALL the demo feedback since the new demo released in October 2023, and there was a lot, I think there was like 300+ submissions (thanks so much to all of you!)



I was a bit worried at first as that's a lot to get through, but as we went through them it ended up narrowing down to the same common gripes and suggestions, and some general game bugs.

Several sheets of paper later we'd got through everything, and I had a nice list of things to change and redesign before we got stuck in with the full game, including stuff like:

- reduced tools, so just hammer for destroying everything with left/right click modes, so that we could remove the pickaxe and the wirecutters, and only have 3 tools for everything needed

- redesigned blueprint menu to categorise all machines into 4 types so make things less cluttered and easier to find the one you need



- make imps less wack and have them teleport if they get stuck or too far from you

- be able to swap out utility blocks (scaffold/platform/ladders) without needing to hammer them

- a new 'Splitter' machine that lets you decide the volume of items in each direction (i.e. 2 up, then 1 left, then 3 down, then back around again)



Once we had got through all the feedback we then started discussing the full-game and the different mechanics we wanted to introduce as the game progressed through the mid to late game.

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[h2]What's New[/h2]
There's some things I won't mention as I think they'll be more fun as a surprise, but some of the mechanics planned include ideas like:

- having certain ingredients 'age' or 'decay' if kept in pipes too long, i.e. eggs going bad, or cheese aging (sometimes good, sometimes bad)

- cross-contamination mechanics and having to manage items to prevent them touching or being in the same pipes

- ingredients that need to be kept cold by keeping the pipes cooled and avoiding heat sources like boiling oil

We already had a solid base, and for the level based system we're designing we had enough to fill the first island just from the demo's content alone, but with the additional mechanics we could plan out how to progress things across the other areas and make things increasingly complex and interesting.



We had decided on a level-based system a while back - it's probably in one of the older devlogs somewhere, but essentially we thought it'd be nicer to have a series of contained challenges rather than one huge world that you keep throughout the game and keep building on.

There's lots of little interesting mechanics or one-off puzzles we think would be fun but are not something you could drag out for a whole game, so having levels lets us do as much or as little as we want for a mechanic or a theme and then move on.

Plus with a level system we can introduce some challenges on top of what you've built when you beat the level initially - like a 'second helping' where the order rates increase and you have to expand what you already have.



I wanted the levels in distinct 'worlds' / 'islands', each with a focus on some base ingredient - we had a lot of options but settled on TOMATO > GARLIC > CHILLI as the main 3 big islands, with a few different seperate islands for some unique levels and recipes.



I didn't really want to have like 'Italian Island' or 'Mexican Island', I wanted the focus to more be on the ingredients used rather than the 'type' of food.

I think having one specific cuisine per island limits what we can do with it, vs say tomatos are used in so many different recipes around the world so we can have a lot of variety on the tomato island while keeping the core set of base ingredients the same.



With our rough plan ready to go, I then went and had my first holiday in over a year and tried not to think about work! (spoilers: I did)

When I came back in mid-May, I opened the code for the game for the first time since 2023 and waded in...

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[h2]I Have No Memory Of This Place[/h2]
Coming back to some old code can be tricky sometimes - you get into a specific headspace for that game while working on it, and know where everything is. Leaving for a couple years meant it took me a bit of time just to remind myself how this stupid game actually worked and where everything was.

Once I settled in the first thing I did was update the TNgine version Snacktorio was using (TNgine is the name for the light 'engine' I made with LÖVE that I make the games in). I originally made this engine for the Snacktorio demo, then used it to make Mudborne during which I made a few modifications. Mostly the changes were syntax based, although a few structures changed too.



Now I knew how the game worked again, and it was all in the same style as I'd been working in for the last year for Mudborne I could actually get started!

First thing I did was work through the main feedback we had from the demo, along with fix some of the bugs that were not specific to the demo and it's tutorial stuff. I then spent some time changing the save system so that each file slot was more linked to general progress, as with the level system we'd need saves per level per slot, rather than one big save per slot.



I then setup a temporary 'dev' world that I could use to quickly load levels. Each of the levels are designed in Tiled, and then exported to a .lua file that the game reads - however for the demo I'd done a few hardcoded things to make my life easier back then (that then made my life harder now).

With that done I could setup a level in Tiled, and if named correctly be able to reload the game and load the level, everything being reset properly. I did some placeholders for all the levels I'd roughly planned out (shown above), but I'm sure the number of levels per area will change as things develop! I just need _something_ as a base to get started.



With the level system working, I could get started on making levels! Honestly I'd say pretty much 80% of the rest of the game development is now making levels, and the rest will be coding in new mechanics and machines as needed.

The first thing we wanted to get designed though was a more in-depth tutorial, to make sure all the mechanics were taught in a fun and practical way.


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[h2]Learning The Ropes[/h2]

In the demo, the tutorial level works really well, and we'd had some lovely feedback from players. We then dump you right into a big order, followed by three MORE orders, which isn't quite the balance we want in the full-game but I think works fine for a demo.


For the full-game I wanted to break down the main parts of the demo tutorial and make them into their own levels to cover all the main mechanics:

- movement and placement / removal of blocks

- wires and power

- pipes and moving items/liquids around

- machines and imps

- making a full dinner



We also wanted a level that allowed players to skip all the tutorials - if they actually know what they're doing. For new players it should be hard enough that you couldn't just stumble across the solution, but for returning players they should be able to whizz through (and if not, back to the tutorial levels you go!)

As I designed the levels there were some little tweaks here and there, but mostly just around my own workflow and making it so I could specify more of the game logic from Tiled rather than have to hardcode a bunch of exceptions.



I actually really enjoyed designing the levels once things were all setup. I love designing the world of Mudborne but it was so big that it got so overwhelming to focus on the thing as a whole, here with distinct levels I could handle things much better.

I ended up with 5 tutorial levels designed, the final one being one that takes you through doing your first order and making you do all the stuff you'd just learned. I think they all do a good job on showing not telling, and make you do a lot of the stuff yourself which is the best way to learn really.



With those done I then designed the 'skip' level, which gives you no guidance and expects you to know what you're doing - along with knowing a few extra mechanics not yet introduced.

This way we can make sure players can't accidentally do this level too early before they even understand what they're doing. For those that do, completing this level marks all tutorial levels completed so you can just jump straight into the first island.



With that final level done the tutorial 'island' was complete, so all thats left is for me to draw a nice little overworld for it and then I can start designing the next island levels.


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At the time of writing I've started to plan out the tomato island levels but nothing really concrete yet - I want to get Jamie testing the new tutorial levels both as a player and a designer so that I can see if we need to tweak anything and if there's anything missing from the Tiled workflow that would make both our lives easier.


My plan is to make an updated demo for October so we can show all the new general changes, the tutorial island, and part of tomato island - I think that will then be a much better representation of the game and where it's going and we can move onto designing the rest of the game's levels!


~ Ell

Hey friends!

It's World Frog Day, which means Mudborne is now officially released!!! :D
It's been a long time in the works since the original gamejam entry, and I'm really happy with how it's all ended up! I can't wait for you to all get your slimy green hands on it
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2355150/Mudborne_Frog_Management_Sim/

There's a 10% release discount for the next two weeks - plus APICO players who own the game on Steam can use this bundle to also get 10% off, as a thank you for all your support over the years.

If you find any nasty tasting bugs, please report them! You can use the Steam forums here, or the feedback form (link is also in the settings menu!)

My number 1, 2, and 3 priorities now are making sure you all have the best possible experience, but there's only one of me - so let me know ASAP if you run into any issues and I can start fixing them immediately!

If you're enjoying the game, pls leave a review! I need 10 reviews before the Steam algorithm will see this is a Cool GameTM and start showing it to other players

If you'd like to chat with other players at the same time to experience the game together, I've setup some new channels in the Discord specifically for Mudborne. Be sure to also check the FAQs for anything else I might have missed here!

Finally - a big THANK YOU to everyone who's been so hyped throughout development, I truly appreciate every single one of you. Now, off to the ponds with you!

~ Ell