Snacktorio News

Hey friends!

August came and went, my first month technically doing gamedev full-time! Both exciting and terrifying :'D

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Unless you’ve been living in a pineapple under the sea, you’ve probably seen that the APICO 3.0 update, aka, What Lies Beeneath has been announced as coming soon! Bee sure to check out the new trailer!

If you’re a content creator or streamer interested in trying out the new content you can also fill in our creator preview form.

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Pleased to say that the lovely Manon (also known as MibyleDraws) will be joining us as our PR & CM!

If you've been enjoying anything posted on socials this last month (like all the new cute tiktoks), then you have Manon to thank for it!

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G.Round is a playtesting platform where you can get your hands on a bunch of different indie games and feedback directly to the developers!

Currently you can playtest both Mudborne and Rift Breach, and give us feedback as well as chat with other players in the G.Round discord!

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Now that we’ve got 4 different games being juggled about, it’s impossible to manage 6 different accounts on each platform (we know, we’ve tried)

We’ve now combined all games into a single TNgineers account on each platform, so be sure to follow to not miss anything! (Tiktok, Twitter, Instagram, Steam)

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So that’s a wrap on August, bee safe and we’ll see you next month!

Love,
Ell & Jamie & Manon

Hey friends!

Been a long old month, with a lot of Jamie's feedback to work through - let's get into it all!

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[h2]Story Time[/h2]
So one thing I started working on while I had some free time was swapping between the boring bug fixes to do some nice drawing for a change!

I'd been thinking about a nice way to introduce some background for the game when starting out, and wanted to do something a bit more detailed than just the postcard APICO uses, and something with a bit more style.

hey guys whats up

I started scribbling in Aseprite to roughly flesh out each of the story frames, and then used the void/beast colours throughout to make it a bit more stylised - only using a bit of green to represent the goblins.

ooh a fresh pie?

I wanted to have it so combined all the frames gave you a rough idea of the story without words - however there would be a couple sentences with each frame just to start building up the lore, I just wanted to make sure that they all worked without text.

All in all I ended up going for 5 different panels that could take us from an "in the beginning, there were beasts" to a "now its your time to do this shit" type flow.



I'm really happy with how they turned out, and it was fun to just have a bit more of a loose approach to drawings vs my normal militant style. Hopefully it should help set some of the tone from the get go and make for a nicer introduction than just a wall of text!

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[h2]Award-Winning Chef[/h2]
Now I'd warmed up the ol' drawing muscles I went ahead and also drew the Witchelin Stars - these would be the little tokens that each beast would give you once you've met and maintained all their orders.



The pun was right there so we had to, but I spent a bunch of time trying to draw something that matched the name and also looked like something that would exist in the real world as a sort of logo / graphic that the chef could show off.



In-game I'd use the magic void filter to replace the hat of the witch star and the signature of the beast so that it had the nice void effect and feel a bit more alive than just a static card.

I could then add these into the game as pickups when you speak to the beast, and finish off the whole "order complete" part of the gameplay to give it a bit more fanfare than just okay you're done with that one NEXT

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[h2]Where Am I[/h2]
With these new graphics done and the intro added in as a glorified slideshow presentation, I worked through a bunch of the bugs and issues that had come up from Jamie's second round of testing.

gettin p. tired of this word

Also yeah fun fact I do little patch notes all the time even when it's internal builds only I or Jamie see! Helps to keep track of where things are at each time I send a new build, and it's also nice for my own personal sense of achievement/progress through the bigger slogs.

Anyway with that done I moved onto adding a map, which I'd been putting off for a while as I was worrying about the size of the world being too large for a map surface.

first pass showing just blocks being rendered on the map

However what I quickly realised is the demo world is reasonably large but it's not that large, and it all fits nicely in a 256x256 map. We'd still need to be able to pan and zoom but the actual original map wouldn't take up much room at all.

please, put me out of my misery...

Panning was easy enough, and a basic zoom was fine, but trying to get the zoom to be based on the mouse position and map offset took me far longer that it should have and several thousand brain cells were lost in the process.

Once I finally worked that out I could then enjoy the horror of working out which exact tile on the map we are hovering over based on the mouse, zoom, AND offset so that we could not only snap the highlight to the tile but use it to show the tooltip as if your mouse was over that thing in the real world to allow for quick checking.

finally my suffering is over

Finally I then made it that we drew a flashing dot for any machines with an error (so you can quickly check for issues), and also a seperate wire layer that you could toggle on and off with shift.

really happy with how this turned out!

Although it's basic enough, with the tooltips letting you hover essentially anything in the world no matter where you are that should be useful enough alone - and then the wire map with your resouces should help plan out even the most absurd factories.

Might be some other layers I add to this but honestly for a demo I feel like this is enough just to help people make their way around the world and their own (literal) spaghetti factories.

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So that was that for Snacktorio in July! A decent chunk of the bigger items ticked off, leaving me now with "just" the tutorial segment, all the fancy particles + SFX, and then the final finishing touches on all the books to make sure it all has the quintessential terrible TNgineer puntastic writing.

Next month I'm going to dig into the tutorial area, as shouldn't need to do too much extra just a lot of planning and writing for the guide character that takes you through it all.

~ Ell

[This post was released early for Supporters]

Hey friends!

Another month flies by, it feels like I was only just writing the June recap! Here's whats been going on.

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The lovely people at Wholesome Games have organised a Steam Sale that’s host to all sorts of cosy games, with some sweet discounts on offer!

As part of the sale, APICO will be 40% off until 7th August, with both OSTs 50% off as well.

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For the redditors among you, you might have heard of a little thing called /r/place - a community canvas where everyone can get involved.

Thanks to the help of the community, we were able to get APICO immortalised in a small section with a bunch of other indies you might know!

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We were lucky enough to have APICO selected for the Itch.io Summer Selects Bundle, a special bundle containing APICO and 5 other cool indies!

Thanks to everyone who bought the bundle and supported us, we hope you enjoy all your new sweet games
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For our console friends, 2.2.3 is now live on Xbox / Playstation. This was a small update but contained some important fixes and means the consoles are now in-line with PC!

Unfortunately Nintendo wasn’t as kind with approval and still won’t let the patch through, however you’re not missing out on anything major!

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So that’s a wrap on July, bee safe and we’ll see you next month!

Love,
Ell & Jamie

Hey friends!

Been a busy month with lots of testing! Jamie's been hard at work checking everything's working properly and lot's of feedback and QoL stuff being discussed and added - starting to feel like a proper game now.

In case you missed it, we had to rename the game from "Feed The Beasts" as it was trademarked - we asked the Factorio team half-jokingly but they said yes, so we're calling it Snacktorio now!

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[h2]No Place Like Home[/h2]
So while Jamie got to work testing, I started on some of the more "boring" systems that games just have to have - like a home screen or a settings screen.

First I sketched out roughly what I would need so I'd have a good idea in my head of what I'd need.

TheRealRatKing is my OC dont steal

With that done I got to work on adding them in the game - I'd already setup a nice dynamic system for "player" menus, i.e. menus that need to stay fixed to the camera rather than move around in the game space, so I added them all using that.

This meant all I had to do was define some buttons and draw some sprites where I needed them, and all the rest was handled automatically.

plenty of sassy home screen messages to enjoy!

I love the whole "show your last file in the homescreen" that APICO has, so I re-used that as I just think it looks nice and makes for a much quicker route to jump back into your last save.

At this point I also finally stopped saving and loading to a hardcoded system and setup a proper file system so that people could have multiple saves, and added a backup system too as right now the game is very unstable.

ah yes, thats me, a plate of spaghetti

I then added some basic settings as well as a control menu - for now there's not any keyremapping yet so I'm just showing a hardcoded image of the controls, but it's still on my list to do before we launch the demo!

I added the same menus back into the game when paused, and then tested everything a bunch for any jank.

cant wait for you to all hear what Moth's been cooking up for the music!

With that done and a bunch of testing we now had all the "boring" stuff setup, but it also helped make it feel a lot more real, which was nice to see!

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[h2]Check The Schematics[/h2]
So one thing I've been doing on the side is slowly working away at all the "HD" drawings - there's 3 different books and they each have a bunch of intro chapters and then information chapters for specific machines/recipes/beasts.

Each one has a different style, recipe book is more sketched, beast book is more runic/cave painting, and then engineer book is very technical drawing-esque.



There's 6 main intro chapters that cover the basics, and given each main machine chapter has the large isometric cutaway of the machine with the imps inside, I thought it'd be fun to carry on the isometric style for the chapter graphics!



I'm actually super happy with how they turned out, and a bit sad that they're only used in the chapter books tbh, I'll have to try and find a way I can use them somewhere else, like maybe in loading screens or something!



Anyway I won't spoil all of them, I just thought they were cute and wanted to show them off.

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[h2]Baby's First Beast[/h2]
So we playtested a bunch and one of the things we found was having just the one beast with 3 different recipes was a LOT, mainly because the first recipe is pretty complex.

i will draw that dish at some point I promise

You have to set up harvesters + blenders to get your tomato sauce, and then a whole bunch of stuff to get pasta - void manipulators for eggs/bones, grind bones, mix eggs, extrude the dough and boil, then combine it all. The game already is chucking a lot at you when you start so for a first recipe it's pretty nuts.

What we decided instead is that first you'll meet a different monster, who only has one recipe - a new one, for tomato soup. Once you meet the requirements for that one beast he'll introduce a second one who wants the other 3 meals.

a tomato soup mini factory

Tomato soup only needs the tomato sauce and some basic spice mining, so compared to the first pasta dish its easily half the complexity - players already have to initially setup their fabricator/resource factories so reducing that initial step should help people get into the groove.

excellent placeholder beast ell

By the time they've met the tomato soup order they should be pretty comfortable with how everything works and can focus on adding in pasta production to their existing factory rather than doing it all from scratch.

Still needs a bit more testing but combined with an tutorial section at the start I think its much better paced now.

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[h2]Inventory Upgrades[/h2]
So as mentioned before we changed how tools work to remove durability because we didn't feel like it added anything. We also removed basic crafting, replacing it with fabricators.

This meant however for all the tool items, you only had one, and while it couldn't break people will definitely lose it, so first up we added a little handy tool replace that gives you a tool if you've lost it!

little ghost imp... spooky

Next up I added a trash bin slot, plus a hotkey to press "Delete" to send items to the trash bin - similar to APICO items build up pretty quickly and while you can toss stuff in oil you don't want to accidentally toss yourself into oil too!

both things APICO should have imho

Finally we decided to add a "free hand" slot - the first slot of the inventory is always empty. While this permanently reduces the hotbar, the amount of stuff you ever need out at once isn't anywhere near the volume APICO has, and it's worth it to prevent yourself accidentally using the various tools.

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[h2]Testing My Patience[/h2]
There was a lot of tweaks and balance to various things - but no point me going into them as there's no real frame of reference. I guessed a bunch of numbers when I first added everything and it's only now we can see whole factories in action to see where the bottlenecks are.

some serious factories being built

To get all three meals done (well 4 now), you need a whole bunch of "minifactories" setup, and have them all connect to each other - so it's a lot to create and manage, and a lot of work to make sure its all working let alone make sure it's rewarding to play!

I dont even know whats going on in this one

It's nice to see the game finally at a point where all the core mechanics are robust enough that we can build these mad factories - I worry about scalability a bit but that's definitely a future problem for the time being!

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Pretty happy with what we got done this month! There's still the whole tutorial/intro section, a whole bunch of PFX + SFX, and a LOT of placeholder art to replace in the books, but in terms of the core gameplay I think we've nearly narrowed it down to something we like thats fun to play.

Next month will be more testing, and I'll be trying to make a stab at the tutorial section to make sure we're onboarding players to the billion different moving parts we want to show off!

~ Ell

[This post was released early for KoFi Supporters]

Hey friends!

We're now halfway through the year, which is a scary thought given all the things I still want to get done in 2023... better get to it!

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So after a very long time, APICO has finally released on Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S.

This is the latest version of the game, and includes all the beeautiful butterfly content! We hope all the new beekeepers enjoy their stay at Port APICO
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Rift Breach got a bunch of new updates, and the demo was re-released for Steam’s Nextfest, which you can still try out!

Unfortunately it didn’t really gather any response or interest, so it’ll be going into cold storage for a bit while we work on the other games.

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Mudborne got nominated for the “Rising Star” award in the 2023 UK Indie Cup!

We didn’t win in the end, but the fact that a little 1 week froggy demo managed to get a nomination is still amazing to see!

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Feed The Beasts is now Snacktorio! We had to change the name for legal reasons and we asked the Factorio team as a joke, but they said yes.

It’s weird having to call it something different after 3 years but here we are - you can find us in all the same places just a different name and logo.

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So that’s a wrap on June, bee safe and we’ll see you next month!

Love,
Ell & Jamie